SACRED SEX
PIOUS EROS
Spirit that is both liberal and pious
The Color of Pomegranates
by Iona Miller, 2016
PIOUS EROS
Spirit that is both liberal and pious
The Color of Pomegranates
by Iona Miller, 2016
'To practice tantra requires even greater compassion and greater intelligence than are required on the sutra path; thus, though many persons in the degenerate era are interested in tantra, tantra is not for degenerate persons.'
― Dalai Lama XIV, Meditation on Emptiness.
― Dalai Lama XIV, Meditation on Emptiness.
'Tantra is the hot blood of spiritual practice; a thunderbolt path, swift, joyful, and fierce. Tantra is a wild mother tiger- if you approach her with right motivation, right intention, and integrity, she'll suckle you at her breast; but if you come to her in a sloppy way, she'll rip apart your body-mind, eat you for dinner, and shit out what's left.
The Tantric path is complex and can be dangerous. It requires a strong, well integrated sense of self prepared through careful preliminary practice. On the Tantric path, you can start off intending to liberate the tyranny of ordinary appearance into primordial awareness and end up crystallizing the ego into diamond-hard delusion.
With Tantra we are taking the mind and body as cauldron, feeling, ego, elements and world as alchemical ingredients,and imagination informed by divine power as catalyst; and we are accomplishing the great magical task of alchemical transformation. The base metal of dualistic view becomes the infinitely valuable gold of pure and luminous awareness. Tantra is a path of tremendous power. This power is not easy to use without getting burned by it. Yet, at the same time, it is a path of great joy. If you're going to use poison, pleasure, and personality as the path, you have to be careful not to auto-destruct.' - Prem Prayama.
The Tantric path is complex and can be dangerous. It requires a strong, well integrated sense of self prepared through careful preliminary practice. On the Tantric path, you can start off intending to liberate the tyranny of ordinary appearance into primordial awareness and end up crystallizing the ego into diamond-hard delusion.
With Tantra we are taking the mind and body as cauldron, feeling, ego, elements and world as alchemical ingredients,and imagination informed by divine power as catalyst; and we are accomplishing the great magical task of alchemical transformation. The base metal of dualistic view becomes the infinitely valuable gold of pure and luminous awareness. Tantra is a path of tremendous power. This power is not easy to use without getting burned by it. Yet, at the same time, it is a path of great joy. If you're going to use poison, pleasure, and personality as the path, you have to be careful not to auto-destruct.' - Prem Prayama.
The anahata center is the one where judgment begins; and in the fact that one can detach from unconsciousness and from the identity with things, from participation mystique, is the first manifestation of the independent Self.
You see I myself, my consciousness, my life, my body,
all that can be quite unconscious.
Therefore one always should ask whether a human being is with or without that flame, for where that spark is lacking, one knows that person is below the diaphragm, he is in the manipura or svadhisthana center.
Where the spark exists, you know that anahata psychology is reached at least, there is already a recognition of the Purusha.
From that remark in the fantasy we know that this woman has reached, to a certain extent, the stage of the anahata psychology, she has that little flame on her breast.
Mr. Allemann: If she comes down again from anahata, the flame is destroyed.
Dr. Jung: Yes, for the earth mother is muladhara, and if she fetches her down, she naturally slips back into manipura, and from manipura into svadhisthana, and finally lands down at the bottom in muladhara, and then the flame is gone.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 965-966
You see I myself, my consciousness, my life, my body,
all that can be quite unconscious.
Therefore one always should ask whether a human being is with or without that flame, for where that spark is lacking, one knows that person is below the diaphragm, he is in the manipura or svadhisthana center.
Where the spark exists, you know that anahata psychology is reached at least, there is already a recognition of the Purusha.
From that remark in the fantasy we know that this woman has reached, to a certain extent, the stage of the anahata psychology, she has that little flame on her breast.
Mr. Allemann: If she comes down again from anahata, the flame is destroyed.
Dr. Jung: Yes, for the earth mother is muladhara, and if she fetches her down, she naturally slips back into manipura, and from manipura into svadhisthana, and finally lands down at the bottom in muladhara, and then the flame is gone.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 965-966
"In giving and receiving are the forces of life multiplied." -- Denning & Phillips
"The union of man and woman is like the mating of Heaven and Earth.
It is because of their correct mating that Heaven and Earth lust forever.
Humans have lost this secret and have therefore become mortal.
By knowing it the Path to Immortality is opened." - Shang-Ku-San-Tai
"The Lotus-flower, the sex organ of the partner, is an ocean filled with Bliss.
This Lotus-flower is also a transparent place,
where the Thought of Enlightenment can rise up.
When it is united with the Scepter, the male organ,
their mixture is compared to the Elixir
produced from the combination of myrrh and nutmeg.
From their union a pure knowledge arises,
which explains the nature of all things." -- Kalachakra Tantra
"High is the mountain of the spinal column, and at the top of it, there sits the Bliss-bestowing girl in the form of a huntress. She is all covered with peacock feathers, and a beautiful garland of flowers around her gazelle-like neck. 'O exalted hunter! O mad hunter!' So exclaims the girl on the mountain peak. 'I am your dearest mistress; my name is Spontaneous Wave of Bliss!' Many are the trees on the mountain. The huntress-girl, decked with beautiful earrings of lightning and thunder, plays alone in the forest. The bedstead of the Three Essentials of Body, Speech, and Mind is made ready. In expectant Bliss, the hunter spreads the bedclothes. Then the serpent-like hunter and the selfless goddess pass their night in love on that bed." -- Mystic Song of Siddha Saraha
"The union of man and woman is like the mating of Heaven and Earth.
It is because of their correct mating that Heaven and Earth lust forever.
Humans have lost this secret and have therefore become mortal.
By knowing it the Path to Immortality is opened." - Shang-Ku-San-Tai
"The Lotus-flower, the sex organ of the partner, is an ocean filled with Bliss.
This Lotus-flower is also a transparent place,
where the Thought of Enlightenment can rise up.
When it is united with the Scepter, the male organ,
their mixture is compared to the Elixir
produced from the combination of myrrh and nutmeg.
From their union a pure knowledge arises,
which explains the nature of all things." -- Kalachakra Tantra
"High is the mountain of the spinal column, and at the top of it, there sits the Bliss-bestowing girl in the form of a huntress. She is all covered with peacock feathers, and a beautiful garland of flowers around her gazelle-like neck. 'O exalted hunter! O mad hunter!' So exclaims the girl on the mountain peak. 'I am your dearest mistress; my name is Spontaneous Wave of Bliss!' Many are the trees on the mountain. The huntress-girl, decked with beautiful earrings of lightning and thunder, plays alone in the forest. The bedstead of the Three Essentials of Body, Speech, and Mind is made ready. In expectant Bliss, the hunter spreads the bedclothes. Then the serpent-like hunter and the selfless goddess pass their night in love on that bed." -- Mystic Song of Siddha Saraha
THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES
by Iona Miller
"The pomegranate is the mystic fruit of the Eleusinian rites; by eating it, Prosperine bound herself to the realms of Pluto. The fruit here signifies the sensuous life which, once tasted, temporarily deprives man of immortality."
--Manly Palmer Hall, Secret Teachings of All Ages
Womb of Mother Earth
We travel backwards to the Garden of Pomegranates in the Garden of the Well of Living Waters. Many believe it was the true forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden.
Multiple seeds reflect the progeny of a bloodline; red-gold apples can be interchanged with pomegranates with their serrated calyx 'crown.'
It is the badge of The Feminine for Hebrews, Eleusis, Plantagenets, Rosicrucians, royalty, kabbalists, gnostics, freemasons, and other ritual rebirth unions of male and female as a paranormal remedy for longevity, hope and blessing of numerous progeny.
Blood of Life
Pomegranate flowers, seed, and juice are red like blood, denoting the fruit which symbolized the sephirah and the glands of the female body in the sacred chemical wedding in the Garden of Love -- the the pomegranate wine of The Triple Goddess, Demeter/Persephone, Cybele, Ishtar, Mary, and Hera that denotes a lineal descent of living goddesses and their sensual, cyclic sexual, and menstrual symbolism. Rasa, or taste, refers to the Tantric synonyms for semen (serpent-dragons) and mercury.
Womb Blood of the Grail
The pomegranate or Vase is the initiatic center of the mandala -- female genital symbols. Beer mixed with pomegranate juice resembled blood. In the myth of Persephone and the pomegranate, the initiate must enter Hel or the Underworld to draw the wine of the fruit of life from her, which in the Gaelic is called dergflaith, the red beer of the queen of sovereignty -- cosmic conduits of the holy grail, the Tau womb of goddess Nut. The palm-headed Pillars of the Temple are topped with pomegranates, reflecting the spheres of The Tree of Life, as on The High Priestess trump.
Theseus, like Orpheus, must travel through a subterranean realm to find his love and, like the mistletoe bard, at the center of Hades he will win the Chalice of Persephone’s pomegranate wine. Theseus decides to tackle the Minotaur and armed with a sword given him by Ariadne he enters the labyrinth with a golden thread tied about his waist.
Goddess of Easy Delivery, Giver of Children, & Guardian of Children
Ancient Egyptians regarded the pomegranate as a symbol of prosperity and ambition. For the Jews it was a symbol of righteousness and the indissolubility of marriage. In Ancient Greek mythology, the pomegranate was known as the "fruit of the dead," or gift of love and passion. Hera, Goddess of fecundity, renews her uterine fertility in the river at the new moon, revealing Her sacred number 9.
Natural Cycles, Rebirth, and Renewal
In Aryan myth, it is Punica granitum Pomegranate Daalom Gaach, Dadima (this is a term for wise old women in India as well) Punica granatum (Punicaceae) DMT in root cortex. There is a substantial body of mythology in India connecting the pomegranate with various mother goddesses and the hoama drink. Very few plants and trees are named outright in Rig Veda.
Soul Made Visible as Authentic Self
Pomegranate re-emerges and continues to be used in alchemy. Pomegranate carpets express a longing for the mythical original garden -- an experience which can be shared by different generations that creates a bridge, a commonality of feeling and a spiritual affinity. Biting into its fruit means to invoke the eye of intuition, to discern what is true and what is false.
I “A Garden of Pomegranates,” Israel Regardie states of Da’ath (pg. 103): “Some Qabalists postulate a Sephirah named Da’ath, or “Knowledge.” As being the child of Binah and Chokmah, or a sublimation of the Ruach, supposed to appear in the Abyss in the course of man’s evolutions as an evolved faculty. It is a false Sephirah, however, and the Sepher Yetzirah in anticipation, most emphatically warns us that “Ten are the ineffable Sephiroth. Ten and not nine. Ten and not eleven. Understand with Wisdom, and apprehend with care.” It is a non-existent Sephirah because, for one thing, Knowledge when examined contains within itself – as the progeny of Ruach – the same element of contradiction, and being situate in the Abyss, dispersion and so of self-destruction. It is false, because as soon as Knowledge is Critically and Logically Analyzed, it breaks up into the dust and sand of the Abyss. The Unity of the various faculties mentioned, however, comprises the Ruach, which is called the Human Soul.”*
Soul's Cognition
Union on the four planes, including the Neshamah, or glorious body is experience of the true intellect hewn from the source of life - well-spring of intelligence, awe, wisdom, and understanding. This unique life potential is the bridge between human and divine that serves creation that serves life in the world and provides it with substance forming light, creating darkness, and making in the middle.
Love, Judgment & Mercy
The mystic creates this integrated subtle body by concentrating attention at the eye center. The energy normally is flowing outward into the senses or world. It must be withdrawn or made to 'flow backward'. This is the 'death" of the senses. Then comes the eternal moment of enlightenment when thoughts cease. This is the "death of the mind." The aspirant is "reborn" when his attention goes sin and the radiant Light is perceived. They merge with this Light in enlightenment of the causal level. The causal body is formed by the fixation and crystallization of this living Light. --Iona Miller, Holistic Qabala, 1976
Planting an Anar Tree (Pomegranate) in your house alludes to the coniunctio. The most powerful sexual rite, of re-integration, requires intercourse with the female partner when she is menstruating. Her 'red' sexual energy and purely spiritual fecundity is at its peak for the physical/spiritual union achieved during Tantric Yoga -- a symbol of the repetitive cycle of material birth/rebirth.
Secrets & Symbolism of Nature
Perhaps this is the Queen to the King Soma as a goddess that evolved to be called Mahadevi or Kali who are both often iconically associated with dwelling in or holding pomegranates. Pomegranate plays a distinct role in the herbo-metallic Tibetan Tantric Buddhist Jewel pills that at once spiritually empower and heal.
Fertility, Generosity & Rebirth
In art it alludes to the beauty and exuberance of the vagina, vesica, lotus, jewel, or 'boat of heaven', but it specifically represents the ovary and ova cells. The Great Goddess always had snakes entwined around her to represent birth, regeneration, and overall protection. Apples, cherries, and pomegranates symbolized the Virgin Goddess: bearing her sacred blood color and bearing its seed within, like a womb.
On a Mycenaean seal illustrated in Joseph Campbell's Occidental Mythology 1964, figure 19, the seated Goddess of the double-headed axe (the labrys) offers three poppy pods in her right hand and supports her breast with her left. She embodies both aspects of the dual goddess, life-giving and death-dealing at once. The Titan Orion was represented as "marrying" Side, a name that in Boeotia means "pomegranate", thus consecrating the primal hunter to the Goddess. Other Greek dialects call the pomegranate rhoa; its possible connection with the name of the earth goddess Rhea, inexplicable in Greek, proved suggestive for the mythographer Karl Kerenyi, who suggested that the consonance might ultimately derive from a deeper, pre-Indo-European language layer.
Red-Stain Metaphor
The name pomegranate derives from medieval Latin pōmum "apple" and grānātum "seeded". Perhaps stemming from the old French word for the fruit, pomme-grenade, the pomegranate was known in early English as "apple of Grenada"—a term which today survives only in heraldic blazons. This is a folk etymology, confusing Latin granatus with the name of the Spanish city of Granada, which derives from Arabic.
Garnet derives from Old French grenat by metathesis, from Medieval Latin granatum as used in a different meaning "of a dark red color". This derivation may have originated from pomum granatum describing the color of pomegranate pulp or from granum referring to "red dye, cochineal".
The Phoenician priesthood of the Cabiri from Crete claimed the meaning of the pomegranate was "the forbidden secret." Pausanias declared, "About the pomegranate I must say nothing, for its story is somewhat of a holy mystery."
By the sixth century, the pomegranate and its ancient symbolism was absorbed by the Catholic Church. The fruit became a symbol of the resurrection of Christ instead of the goddess, and it was now an emblem of hope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomegranate
The myth of Persephone, the goddess of the underworld, prominently features the pomegranate. In one version of Greek mythology, Persephone was kidnapped by Hades and taken off to live in the underworld as his wife. Her mother, Demeter (goddess of the Harvest), went into mourning for her lost daughter, thus all green things ceased to grow. Zeus, the highest-ranking of the Greek gods, could not allow the Earth to die, so he commanded Hades to return Persephone. It was the rule of the Fates that anyone who consumed food or drink in the underworld was doomed to spend eternity there. Persephone had no food, but Hades tricked her into eating six pomegranate seeds while she was still his prisoner, so she was condemned to spend six months in the underworld every year. During these six months, while Persephone sits on the throne of the underworld beside her husband Hades, her mother Demeter mourns and no longer gives fertility to the earth. This was an ancient Greek explanation for the seasons.[50] Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting Persephona depicts Persephone holding the fatal fruit. The number of seeds Persephone ate varies, depending on which version of the story is told. The number ranges from three to seven, which accounts for just one barren season if it is just three or four seeds, or two barren seasons (half the year) if she ate six or seven seeds.[citation needed]
The pomegranate also evoked the presence of the Aegean Triple Goddess who evolved into the Olympian Hera, who is sometimes represented offering the pomegranate, as in the Polykleitos' cult image of the Argive Heraion (see below).[citation needed] According to Carl A. P. Ruck and Danny Staples, the chambered pomegranate is also a surrogate for the poppy's narcotic capsule, with its comparable shape and chambered interior.[51] On a Mycenaean seal illustrated in Joseph Campbell's Occidental Mythology 1964, figure 19, the seated Goddess of the double-headed axe (the labrys) offers three poppy pods in her right hand and supports her breast with her left. She embodies both aspects of the dual goddess, life-giving and death-dealing at once. The Titan Orion was represented as "marrying" Side, a name that in Boeotia means "pomegranate", thus consecrating the primal hunter to the Goddess. Other Greek dialects call the pomegranate rhoa; its possible connection with the name of the earth goddess Rhea, inexplicable in Greek, proved suggestive for the mythographer Karl Kerenyi, who suggested the consonance might ultimately derive from a deeper, pre-Indo-European language layer.[citation needed]
In the 5th century BC, Polycleitus took ivory and gold to sculpt the seated Argive Hera in her temple. She held a scepter in one hand and offered a pomegranate, like a 'royal orb', in the other.[52] "About the pomegranate I must say nothing," whispered the traveller Pausanias in the 2nd century, "for its story is somewhat of a holy mystery."[52] In the Orion story, Hera cast pomegranate-Side (an ancient city in Antalya) into dim Erebus — "for daring to rival Hera's beauty", which forms the probable point of connection with the older Osiris/Isis story.[citation needed] Since the ancient Egyptians identified the Orion constellation in the sky as Sah the "soul of Osiris", the identification of this section of the myth seems relatively complete.[original research?] Hera wears, not a wreath nor a tiara nor a diadem, but clearly the calyx of the pomegranate that has become her serrated crown.[citation needed] The pomegranate has a calyx shaped like a crown. In Jewish tradition, it has been seen as the original "design" for the proper crown.[53] In some artistic depictions, the pomegranate is found in the hand of Mary, mother of Jesus.[citation needed]
A pomegranate is displayed on coins from the ancient city of Side, Pamphylia.[54]
Within the Heraion at the mouth of the Sele, near Paestum, Magna Graecia, is a chapel devoted to the Madonna del Granato, "Our Lady of the Pomegranate", "who by virtue of her epithet and the attribute of a pomegranate must be the Christian successor of the ancient Greek goddess Hera", observes the excavator of the Heraion of Samos, Helmut Kyrieleis.[55]
Naga Kanya
by Iona Miller
"The pomegranate is the mystic fruit of the Eleusinian rites; by eating it, Prosperine bound herself to the realms of Pluto. The fruit here signifies the sensuous life which, once tasted, temporarily deprives man of immortality."
--Manly Palmer Hall, Secret Teachings of All Ages
Womb of Mother Earth
We travel backwards to the Garden of Pomegranates in the Garden of the Well of Living Waters. Many believe it was the true forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden.
Multiple seeds reflect the progeny of a bloodline; red-gold apples can be interchanged with pomegranates with their serrated calyx 'crown.'
It is the badge of The Feminine for Hebrews, Eleusis, Plantagenets, Rosicrucians, royalty, kabbalists, gnostics, freemasons, and other ritual rebirth unions of male and female as a paranormal remedy for longevity, hope and blessing of numerous progeny.
Blood of Life
Pomegranate flowers, seed, and juice are red like blood, denoting the fruit which symbolized the sephirah and the glands of the female body in the sacred chemical wedding in the Garden of Love -- the the pomegranate wine of The Triple Goddess, Demeter/Persephone, Cybele, Ishtar, Mary, and Hera that denotes a lineal descent of living goddesses and their sensual, cyclic sexual, and menstrual symbolism. Rasa, or taste, refers to the Tantric synonyms for semen (serpent-dragons) and mercury.
Womb Blood of the Grail
The pomegranate or Vase is the initiatic center of the mandala -- female genital symbols. Beer mixed with pomegranate juice resembled blood. In the myth of Persephone and the pomegranate, the initiate must enter Hel or the Underworld to draw the wine of the fruit of life from her, which in the Gaelic is called dergflaith, the red beer of the queen of sovereignty -- cosmic conduits of the holy grail, the Tau womb of goddess Nut. The palm-headed Pillars of the Temple are topped with pomegranates, reflecting the spheres of The Tree of Life, as on The High Priestess trump.
Theseus, like Orpheus, must travel through a subterranean realm to find his love and, like the mistletoe bard, at the center of Hades he will win the Chalice of Persephone’s pomegranate wine. Theseus decides to tackle the Minotaur and armed with a sword given him by Ariadne he enters the labyrinth with a golden thread tied about his waist.
Goddess of Easy Delivery, Giver of Children, & Guardian of Children
Ancient Egyptians regarded the pomegranate as a symbol of prosperity and ambition. For the Jews it was a symbol of righteousness and the indissolubility of marriage. In Ancient Greek mythology, the pomegranate was known as the "fruit of the dead," or gift of love and passion. Hera, Goddess of fecundity, renews her uterine fertility in the river at the new moon, revealing Her sacred number 9.
Natural Cycles, Rebirth, and Renewal
In Aryan myth, it is Punica granitum Pomegranate Daalom Gaach, Dadima (this is a term for wise old women in India as well) Punica granatum (Punicaceae) DMT in root cortex. There is a substantial body of mythology in India connecting the pomegranate with various mother goddesses and the hoama drink. Very few plants and trees are named outright in Rig Veda.
Soul Made Visible as Authentic Self
Pomegranate re-emerges and continues to be used in alchemy. Pomegranate carpets express a longing for the mythical original garden -- an experience which can be shared by different generations that creates a bridge, a commonality of feeling and a spiritual affinity. Biting into its fruit means to invoke the eye of intuition, to discern what is true and what is false.
I “A Garden of Pomegranates,” Israel Regardie states of Da’ath (pg. 103): “Some Qabalists postulate a Sephirah named Da’ath, or “Knowledge.” As being the child of Binah and Chokmah, or a sublimation of the Ruach, supposed to appear in the Abyss in the course of man’s evolutions as an evolved faculty. It is a false Sephirah, however, and the Sepher Yetzirah in anticipation, most emphatically warns us that “Ten are the ineffable Sephiroth. Ten and not nine. Ten and not eleven. Understand with Wisdom, and apprehend with care.” It is a non-existent Sephirah because, for one thing, Knowledge when examined contains within itself – as the progeny of Ruach – the same element of contradiction, and being situate in the Abyss, dispersion and so of self-destruction. It is false, because as soon as Knowledge is Critically and Logically Analyzed, it breaks up into the dust and sand of the Abyss. The Unity of the various faculties mentioned, however, comprises the Ruach, which is called the Human Soul.”*
Soul's Cognition
Union on the four planes, including the Neshamah, or glorious body is experience of the true intellect hewn from the source of life - well-spring of intelligence, awe, wisdom, and understanding. This unique life potential is the bridge between human and divine that serves creation that serves life in the world and provides it with substance forming light, creating darkness, and making in the middle.
Love, Judgment & Mercy
The mystic creates this integrated subtle body by concentrating attention at the eye center. The energy normally is flowing outward into the senses or world. It must be withdrawn or made to 'flow backward'. This is the 'death" of the senses. Then comes the eternal moment of enlightenment when thoughts cease. This is the "death of the mind." The aspirant is "reborn" when his attention goes sin and the radiant Light is perceived. They merge with this Light in enlightenment of the causal level. The causal body is formed by the fixation and crystallization of this living Light. --Iona Miller, Holistic Qabala, 1976
Planting an Anar Tree (Pomegranate) in your house alludes to the coniunctio. The most powerful sexual rite, of re-integration, requires intercourse with the female partner when she is menstruating. Her 'red' sexual energy and purely spiritual fecundity is at its peak for the physical/spiritual union achieved during Tantric Yoga -- a symbol of the repetitive cycle of material birth/rebirth.
Secrets & Symbolism of Nature
Perhaps this is the Queen to the King Soma as a goddess that evolved to be called Mahadevi or Kali who are both often iconically associated with dwelling in or holding pomegranates. Pomegranate plays a distinct role in the herbo-metallic Tibetan Tantric Buddhist Jewel pills that at once spiritually empower and heal.
Fertility, Generosity & Rebirth
In art it alludes to the beauty and exuberance of the vagina, vesica, lotus, jewel, or 'boat of heaven', but it specifically represents the ovary and ova cells. The Great Goddess always had snakes entwined around her to represent birth, regeneration, and overall protection. Apples, cherries, and pomegranates symbolized the Virgin Goddess: bearing her sacred blood color and bearing its seed within, like a womb.
On a Mycenaean seal illustrated in Joseph Campbell's Occidental Mythology 1964, figure 19, the seated Goddess of the double-headed axe (the labrys) offers three poppy pods in her right hand and supports her breast with her left. She embodies both aspects of the dual goddess, life-giving and death-dealing at once. The Titan Orion was represented as "marrying" Side, a name that in Boeotia means "pomegranate", thus consecrating the primal hunter to the Goddess. Other Greek dialects call the pomegranate rhoa; its possible connection with the name of the earth goddess Rhea, inexplicable in Greek, proved suggestive for the mythographer Karl Kerenyi, who suggested that the consonance might ultimately derive from a deeper, pre-Indo-European language layer.
Red-Stain Metaphor
The name pomegranate derives from medieval Latin pōmum "apple" and grānātum "seeded". Perhaps stemming from the old French word for the fruit, pomme-grenade, the pomegranate was known in early English as "apple of Grenada"—a term which today survives only in heraldic blazons. This is a folk etymology, confusing Latin granatus with the name of the Spanish city of Granada, which derives from Arabic.
Garnet derives from Old French grenat by metathesis, from Medieval Latin granatum as used in a different meaning "of a dark red color". This derivation may have originated from pomum granatum describing the color of pomegranate pulp or from granum referring to "red dye, cochineal".
The Phoenician priesthood of the Cabiri from Crete claimed the meaning of the pomegranate was "the forbidden secret." Pausanias declared, "About the pomegranate I must say nothing, for its story is somewhat of a holy mystery."
By the sixth century, the pomegranate and its ancient symbolism was absorbed by the Catholic Church. The fruit became a symbol of the resurrection of Christ instead of the goddess, and it was now an emblem of hope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomegranate
The myth of Persephone, the goddess of the underworld, prominently features the pomegranate. In one version of Greek mythology, Persephone was kidnapped by Hades and taken off to live in the underworld as his wife. Her mother, Demeter (goddess of the Harvest), went into mourning for her lost daughter, thus all green things ceased to grow. Zeus, the highest-ranking of the Greek gods, could not allow the Earth to die, so he commanded Hades to return Persephone. It was the rule of the Fates that anyone who consumed food or drink in the underworld was doomed to spend eternity there. Persephone had no food, but Hades tricked her into eating six pomegranate seeds while she was still his prisoner, so she was condemned to spend six months in the underworld every year. During these six months, while Persephone sits on the throne of the underworld beside her husband Hades, her mother Demeter mourns and no longer gives fertility to the earth. This was an ancient Greek explanation for the seasons.[50] Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting Persephona depicts Persephone holding the fatal fruit. The number of seeds Persephone ate varies, depending on which version of the story is told. The number ranges from three to seven, which accounts for just one barren season if it is just three or four seeds, or two barren seasons (half the year) if she ate six or seven seeds.[citation needed]
The pomegranate also evoked the presence of the Aegean Triple Goddess who evolved into the Olympian Hera, who is sometimes represented offering the pomegranate, as in the Polykleitos' cult image of the Argive Heraion (see below).[citation needed] According to Carl A. P. Ruck and Danny Staples, the chambered pomegranate is also a surrogate for the poppy's narcotic capsule, with its comparable shape and chambered interior.[51] On a Mycenaean seal illustrated in Joseph Campbell's Occidental Mythology 1964, figure 19, the seated Goddess of the double-headed axe (the labrys) offers three poppy pods in her right hand and supports her breast with her left. She embodies both aspects of the dual goddess, life-giving and death-dealing at once. The Titan Orion was represented as "marrying" Side, a name that in Boeotia means "pomegranate", thus consecrating the primal hunter to the Goddess. Other Greek dialects call the pomegranate rhoa; its possible connection with the name of the earth goddess Rhea, inexplicable in Greek, proved suggestive for the mythographer Karl Kerenyi, who suggested the consonance might ultimately derive from a deeper, pre-Indo-European language layer.[citation needed]
In the 5th century BC, Polycleitus took ivory and gold to sculpt the seated Argive Hera in her temple. She held a scepter in one hand and offered a pomegranate, like a 'royal orb', in the other.[52] "About the pomegranate I must say nothing," whispered the traveller Pausanias in the 2nd century, "for its story is somewhat of a holy mystery."[52] In the Orion story, Hera cast pomegranate-Side (an ancient city in Antalya) into dim Erebus — "for daring to rival Hera's beauty", which forms the probable point of connection with the older Osiris/Isis story.[citation needed] Since the ancient Egyptians identified the Orion constellation in the sky as Sah the "soul of Osiris", the identification of this section of the myth seems relatively complete.[original research?] Hera wears, not a wreath nor a tiara nor a diadem, but clearly the calyx of the pomegranate that has become her serrated crown.[citation needed] The pomegranate has a calyx shaped like a crown. In Jewish tradition, it has been seen as the original "design" for the proper crown.[53] In some artistic depictions, the pomegranate is found in the hand of Mary, mother of Jesus.[citation needed]
A pomegranate is displayed on coins from the ancient city of Side, Pamphylia.[54]
Within the Heraion at the mouth of the Sele, near Paestum, Magna Graecia, is a chapel devoted to the Madonna del Granato, "Our Lady of the Pomegranate", "who by virtue of her epithet and the attribute of a pomegranate must be the Christian successor of the ancient Greek goddess Hera", observes the excavator of the Heraion of Samos, Helmut Kyrieleis.[55]
Naga Kanya
SACRED SEX
by Iona Miller, 2016
'Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis. Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for a second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.' - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
If pleasure is united with forethinking, the serpent lies before them.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 190.
Instinctual & Enlightened Sex
In the myth, Psyche is originally bound to Eros in a paradise of uroboric unconsciousness, and when she sees Eros in the light, this original unconscious tie is dissolved. This change represents a shift from the principle of fascinating attraction and the fertility of the species to a genuine love principle of personal development and encounter. Love as encounter is one of the central psychological insights of the myth. "Kama, Eros, Cupid, and Adonis are all active and aimed male principles. Such love is fated, an inescapable destiny in which we lose ourselves in a kind of death that transcends our ego's interests. But Eros transcends erotic passion with 'divine fire,' necessary to the Great Work of self-discovery.
The language of love is of astonishing uniformity, using the well-worn formulas with the utmost devotion and fidelity so that once again the two partners find themselves in a banal collective situation.
Yet they live in the illusion that they are related to one another in a most individual way.
In both its positive and its negative aspects the anima/animus relationship is always full of "animosity," i.e., it is emotional, and hence collective.
Affects lower the level of the relationship and bring it closer to the common instinctual basis, which no
longer has anything individual about it.
Very often the relationship runs its course heedless of its human performers, who afterwards do not know what happened to them. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 15-16
by Iona Miller, 2016
'Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis. Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for a second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.' - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
If pleasure is united with forethinking, the serpent lies before them.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 190.
Instinctual & Enlightened Sex
In the myth, Psyche is originally bound to Eros in a paradise of uroboric unconsciousness, and when she sees Eros in the light, this original unconscious tie is dissolved. This change represents a shift from the principle of fascinating attraction and the fertility of the species to a genuine love principle of personal development and encounter. Love as encounter is one of the central psychological insights of the myth. "Kama, Eros, Cupid, and Adonis are all active and aimed male principles. Such love is fated, an inescapable destiny in which we lose ourselves in a kind of death that transcends our ego's interests. But Eros transcends erotic passion with 'divine fire,' necessary to the Great Work of self-discovery.
The language of love is of astonishing uniformity, using the well-worn formulas with the utmost devotion and fidelity so that once again the two partners find themselves in a banal collective situation.
Yet they live in the illusion that they are related to one another in a most individual way.
In both its positive and its negative aspects the anima/animus relationship is always full of "animosity," i.e., it is emotional, and hence collective.
Affects lower the level of the relationship and bring it closer to the common instinctual basis, which no
longer has anything individual about it.
Very often the relationship runs its course heedless of its human performers, who afterwards do not know what happened to them. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 15-16
New 6/2016: The Wild Hunt Interview:
http://wildhunt.org/2016/06/guest-post-reclaiming-the-sexual-self-through-magic-and-ritual-part-one.html
[The Wild Hunt welcomes back guest journalist Zora Burden, who conducted an in-depth interview with artist, author and hypnotherapist Iona Miller. Burden spoke with Miller specifically on the subject of sacred sexuality and the reclaiming of the body and sexual self – a topic that is rarely addressed publicly within a positive framework and is more likely to be found at the center of controversy. Is there room in our culture for the understanding and acceptance of ritual, sacred and religious sexual practice? If so, how? We present part one of two.]
Iona Miller is a clinical hypnotherapist and multimedia artist whose interest in esoterics began in Ojai with Krishnamurti and the Theosophists, and continued with American pioneers of magick and specializes in extraordinary human potential. Her work and studies fuse esoterics, quantum physics and depth psychology. Miller’s writing includes essays and manifestos for many academic journals and the popular press. Her award winning, prolific work has been recognized as pioneering and innovative in the fields of religious doctrine, science, psychology, and the arts.Miller serves on several Advisory Boards for science journals and established CAM medical programs. She is published in Pagan and pop magazines, like Green Egg, Nexus, and Paranoia. She has worked in intelligence, parapsychology, and media ecology with many experts, bridging the cultural gap between the arts and life-sciences. Her books include: The Modern Alchemist: A Guide To Personal Transformation (1994), The Magical and Ritual Use of Perfume (1990), Shamanism, Ancestors and Transgenerational Integration (2016). She currently enjoys retirement in Southern Oregon on the Rogue River.
- See more at: http://wildhunt.org/author/guest#sthash.SH2gNrWs.dpuf
http://wildhunt.org/2016/06/guest-post-reclaiming-the-sexual-self-through-magic-and-ritual-part-two.html
http://wildhunt.org/2016/06/guest-post-reclaiming-the-sexual-self-through-magic-and-ritual-part-one.html
[The Wild Hunt welcomes back guest journalist Zora Burden, who conducted an in-depth interview with artist, author and hypnotherapist Iona Miller. Burden spoke with Miller specifically on the subject of sacred sexuality and the reclaiming of the body and sexual self – a topic that is rarely addressed publicly within a positive framework and is more likely to be found at the center of controversy. Is there room in our culture for the understanding and acceptance of ritual, sacred and religious sexual practice? If so, how? We present part one of two.]
Iona Miller is a clinical hypnotherapist and multimedia artist whose interest in esoterics began in Ojai with Krishnamurti and the Theosophists, and continued with American pioneers of magick and specializes in extraordinary human potential. Her work and studies fuse esoterics, quantum physics and depth psychology. Miller’s writing includes essays and manifestos for many academic journals and the popular press. Her award winning, prolific work has been recognized as pioneering and innovative in the fields of religious doctrine, science, psychology, and the arts.Miller serves on several Advisory Boards for science journals and established CAM medical programs. She is published in Pagan and pop magazines, like Green Egg, Nexus, and Paranoia. She has worked in intelligence, parapsychology, and media ecology with many experts, bridging the cultural gap between the arts and life-sciences. Her books include: The Modern Alchemist: A Guide To Personal Transformation (1994), The Magical and Ritual Use of Perfume (1990), Shamanism, Ancestors and Transgenerational Integration (2016). She currently enjoys retirement in Southern Oregon on the Rogue River.
- See more at: http://wildhunt.org/author/guest#sthash.SH2gNrWs.dpuf
http://wildhunt.org/2016/06/guest-post-reclaiming-the-sexual-self-through-magic-and-ritual-part-two.html
Body as Temple
All the great religions of the world agree that our very substance, the body -- the psychophysical self -- is holy ground. God has made us in his image, and for that reason our bodies are living spiritual Temples of the Spirit. The body is indissolubly welded to and embedded in Universe. We are a living part of the Cosmos, and that Cosmos is reflected on a smaller scale within everyone of us. The qabalists reflect this notion in the axiom: "As above; so below."
We are linked to the environment only through the filters of our natural senses. Our apertures are portals or doorways to the entire influx of nourishment and phenomenal existence. Only with the body can we see, hear, touch, taste, smell and feel. We can regain the perspective that each of these acts is holy, that each connects us with the Whole, the Source, the Divine. It is through our actions with the bodymind that we create good or bad karmas with their natural consequences. Our course matter is merely the "fallout" or precipitate of forces operating beyond the material dimension. These have been called the astral, causal, and spiritual worlds.
Our body is a realm of pain and sorrow, for ultimately we all die, but it can also be the means of a spiritual redemption, and that is the philosophy of Tantra. Tantra also stresses that we are more than our body, more than our emotions, more than our thoughts. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, rather than the other way around. And the body is our sacred altar, where we make or sacrifices and directly experience our epiphanies.
How can we feel guilty without being guilty? But when it comes to sex, for whatever reason, it sometimes happens. For some, sex is locked in a marriage or religion, for others, in the prisons of their minds and traumas of the body. Yet the instinctual drive remains.
Why is sex sacred at all? Not long ago only a few people even knew about much less engaged in aspirational sexual rites, but it has become part of holistic living, just a natural part of the creation. If love comes with it, it supports our health and happiness.
PSYCHOLOGICAL LOVE TYPES
We perceive through four different modes -- the logical reality of thought-processes and ideas, the feeling reality based on emotions and memories, the concrete reality of direct sensation, and the intuitive reality of visionary anticipation.
Jung classified personalities into four types based of these distinctions, yet felt no one should be "boxed into" a category, since we all exhibit traits of other types. Typology is a tool we can use for gaining insight and improving relations and communication. It harks back to the ancient "doctrine of humors," and the astrological signs.
The most primary is distinction is between introversion and extroversion. Introverts tend to follow their own dictates, while extroverts are very concerned with the reactions of others. The thinking and feeling functions are considered rational or logical processes, while sensation and intuition creates "quantum leaps" in consciousness or impulsive behavior.
The only value of classification of types lies in its application, to gain an understanding of the thought processes, values, and perceptual modes of those who differ from us. Knowing our own type helps us be objective about our style of loving. Jung said we are fairly competent in 2 or 3 of the functions, but the 4th one is unusually weak or inferior due to lack of conscious adaptation in that area. The 4th function is generally the opposite of the primary function. For example, thinking types have trouble with feelings; feelers have trouble with logical thinking. So, the fourth function works unconsciously and causes sabotage or disruption.
Yet complementary opposites attract and even fascinate each other. Many times we play Pygmalion to our lovers. We go to all the bother of finding and bonding with a person totally unlike ourselves -- and then compulsively try to transform that partner into our own image or ideal. Of course, there is no way to do this, but the attempt does the damage. It is a projection of our own desire to change ourselves. Devotion means different things to different types. We generally love the way we want to be loved, rather than meet the needs of our partner for feeling loved in a way they can relate to.
The different types have very different needs for solitude, confrontation, entertainment, novelty, thrill-seeking, exploration, faithfulness, recreation, spirituality, security, stability, touching, romance, intimacy, eroticism, passion, and sexual contact. Some types seem warmer than others, while others are more generous or fun-loving. Each has a different internal blueprint or love map and agenda with a time-scale for love's progression or growth-curve. Compatibility of general lifestyle and sexual rhythms is important.
We must avoid gross over-generalizations since most people are mixtures of types. A dynamic balance is considered ideal. Then we have the option of using all functions or attitudes when appropriate. In the HOLISTIC HEALTH LIFEBOOK, Strephon Kaplan Williams outlines the main traits of these basic personality types:
Sensation Person: One whose main focus is on the details and concreteness of reality. Such a person gives great attention to detail, to getting things just right, ignoring the larger perspective, or the feeling level of a situation. Engineers, rule followers, lawyers, office workers, accountants, and perfectionists fall generally within this type. The present is their predominant orientation. Sensation types are the touchy-feely people who like physical proximity and sensuality; they live for the moment without much regard for consequences.
Intuitives: The intuitive is the opposite of the sensation person. Intuitives cannot be bothered with details, and are concerned only with perceiving the whole, with having great insights, and with unlimited creativity. They will often start projects that never get finished in detail. Sudden insights and creative ideas out of the blue are their forte. Scientists, therapists, and psychics are among the ranks of the intuitives. The intuitive is always focused on the future, in anticipation; the present is never good enough; the past is quickly forgotten. They are inventive lovers with an infinite capacity for novelty.
Thinking Types: The organizers of society, with either facts, ideas, or people. Thinking involves making or discovering links between people or things. Mathematicians, teachers, executives, lawyers and writers are some of the cool and objective thinking types. They may not be as demonstrative, but their loves are as deep and meaningful as any. When they think things are going well in their relationships, right or wrong, they tend to go back to work. They relate the past to the present and future to make decisive choices.
Feeling Types: Feeling is the relational function, the expression of positive and negative energy -- liking this or not liking that. Feeling organizes reality, rather than perceiving it as does intuition. Feeling types are harmonizers and socializers who work well with people. Teachers, therapist, and all kinds of people-helpers are found among this type. Feeling types are great gossipers and dancers, who love body contact. On the other hand, they have the greatest "freakouts," for they live the relational life at double the intensity of most. Feeling types dwell in and on the past, positive or negative.
All the functions of the psyche converge in fantasy, in imagination. We are all equally prone to the seductions of our own inner images, thoughts, emotions, and sensations. For a more extensive description with finer distinctions and mating recommendations, see David Kiersey's PLEASE UNDERSTAND ME, II.
All the great religions of the world agree that our very substance, the body -- the psychophysical self -- is holy ground. God has made us in his image, and for that reason our bodies are living spiritual Temples of the Spirit. The body is indissolubly welded to and embedded in Universe. We are a living part of the Cosmos, and that Cosmos is reflected on a smaller scale within everyone of us. The qabalists reflect this notion in the axiom: "As above; so below."
We are linked to the environment only through the filters of our natural senses. Our apertures are portals or doorways to the entire influx of nourishment and phenomenal existence. Only with the body can we see, hear, touch, taste, smell and feel. We can regain the perspective that each of these acts is holy, that each connects us with the Whole, the Source, the Divine. It is through our actions with the bodymind that we create good or bad karmas with their natural consequences. Our course matter is merely the "fallout" or precipitate of forces operating beyond the material dimension. These have been called the astral, causal, and spiritual worlds.
Our body is a realm of pain and sorrow, for ultimately we all die, but it can also be the means of a spiritual redemption, and that is the philosophy of Tantra. Tantra also stresses that we are more than our body, more than our emotions, more than our thoughts. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, rather than the other way around. And the body is our sacred altar, where we make or sacrifices and directly experience our epiphanies.
How can we feel guilty without being guilty? But when it comes to sex, for whatever reason, it sometimes happens. For some, sex is locked in a marriage or religion, for others, in the prisons of their minds and traumas of the body. Yet the instinctual drive remains.
Why is sex sacred at all? Not long ago only a few people even knew about much less engaged in aspirational sexual rites, but it has become part of holistic living, just a natural part of the creation. If love comes with it, it supports our health and happiness.
PSYCHOLOGICAL LOVE TYPES
We perceive through four different modes -- the logical reality of thought-processes and ideas, the feeling reality based on emotions and memories, the concrete reality of direct sensation, and the intuitive reality of visionary anticipation.
Jung classified personalities into four types based of these distinctions, yet felt no one should be "boxed into" a category, since we all exhibit traits of other types. Typology is a tool we can use for gaining insight and improving relations and communication. It harks back to the ancient "doctrine of humors," and the astrological signs.
The most primary is distinction is between introversion and extroversion. Introverts tend to follow their own dictates, while extroverts are very concerned with the reactions of others. The thinking and feeling functions are considered rational or logical processes, while sensation and intuition creates "quantum leaps" in consciousness or impulsive behavior.
The only value of classification of types lies in its application, to gain an understanding of the thought processes, values, and perceptual modes of those who differ from us. Knowing our own type helps us be objective about our style of loving. Jung said we are fairly competent in 2 or 3 of the functions, but the 4th one is unusually weak or inferior due to lack of conscious adaptation in that area. The 4th function is generally the opposite of the primary function. For example, thinking types have trouble with feelings; feelers have trouble with logical thinking. So, the fourth function works unconsciously and causes sabotage or disruption.
Yet complementary opposites attract and even fascinate each other. Many times we play Pygmalion to our lovers. We go to all the bother of finding and bonding with a person totally unlike ourselves -- and then compulsively try to transform that partner into our own image or ideal. Of course, there is no way to do this, but the attempt does the damage. It is a projection of our own desire to change ourselves. Devotion means different things to different types. We generally love the way we want to be loved, rather than meet the needs of our partner for feeling loved in a way they can relate to.
The different types have very different needs for solitude, confrontation, entertainment, novelty, thrill-seeking, exploration, faithfulness, recreation, spirituality, security, stability, touching, romance, intimacy, eroticism, passion, and sexual contact. Some types seem warmer than others, while others are more generous or fun-loving. Each has a different internal blueprint or love map and agenda with a time-scale for love's progression or growth-curve. Compatibility of general lifestyle and sexual rhythms is important.
We must avoid gross over-generalizations since most people are mixtures of types. A dynamic balance is considered ideal. Then we have the option of using all functions or attitudes when appropriate. In the HOLISTIC HEALTH LIFEBOOK, Strephon Kaplan Williams outlines the main traits of these basic personality types:
Sensation Person: One whose main focus is on the details and concreteness of reality. Such a person gives great attention to detail, to getting things just right, ignoring the larger perspective, or the feeling level of a situation. Engineers, rule followers, lawyers, office workers, accountants, and perfectionists fall generally within this type. The present is their predominant orientation. Sensation types are the touchy-feely people who like physical proximity and sensuality; they live for the moment without much regard for consequences.
Intuitives: The intuitive is the opposite of the sensation person. Intuitives cannot be bothered with details, and are concerned only with perceiving the whole, with having great insights, and with unlimited creativity. They will often start projects that never get finished in detail. Sudden insights and creative ideas out of the blue are their forte. Scientists, therapists, and psychics are among the ranks of the intuitives. The intuitive is always focused on the future, in anticipation; the present is never good enough; the past is quickly forgotten. They are inventive lovers with an infinite capacity for novelty.
Thinking Types: The organizers of society, with either facts, ideas, or people. Thinking involves making or discovering links between people or things. Mathematicians, teachers, executives, lawyers and writers are some of the cool and objective thinking types. They may not be as demonstrative, but their loves are as deep and meaningful as any. When they think things are going well in their relationships, right or wrong, they tend to go back to work. They relate the past to the present and future to make decisive choices.
Feeling Types: Feeling is the relational function, the expression of positive and negative energy -- liking this or not liking that. Feeling organizes reality, rather than perceiving it as does intuition. Feeling types are harmonizers and socializers who work well with people. Teachers, therapist, and all kinds of people-helpers are found among this type. Feeling types are great gossipers and dancers, who love body contact. On the other hand, they have the greatest "freakouts," for they live the relational life at double the intensity of most. Feeling types dwell in and on the past, positive or negative.
All the functions of the psyche converge in fantasy, in imagination. We are all equally prone to the seductions of our own inner images, thoughts, emotions, and sensations. For a more extensive description with finer distinctions and mating recommendations, see David Kiersey's PLEASE UNDERSTAND ME, II.
The symbolic meaning of sex changes over time. Our models of sexuality are in flux. For example, the sexual revolution is now viewed critically in retrospect, having failed to produce the freedom, happiness, and ecstasy it once promised. Instead it made other issues more conscious, including new forms of inhibition, sexual abuse and violence, gender differences, and disease potential. Conflicts are associated with power and control, subordination, desire, arousal, and love.
Such issues, including inequality and aggression, have become a greater concern than sex as a metaphor for happiness. The key dynamics are dissociation and association. New cultural forms are emerging. Even “life” and “death” are subject to recoding and metamorphosis, with cloning, in vitro, and surrogacy. As ever, sex and pluralization of relationship forms and lifestyles remain political and emotional issues. Fear of transgression is widespread.
Jung said that the splitting into opposites makes consciousness possible, but the ‘gender binary’ cannot hold everyone. We share our minds as well as our bodies. Psychic ‘gender’ or identification is beyond physical gender, and such dynamics play out in relationships in couples of all descriptions. Both real and symbolic effects are consequential in the “neosexual revolution” that dismantles and reassembles old patterns of sexuality and diversifies intimate relationships.
The power of Magic is rooted in Eros. When the connection between the erotic and the occult is unconscious, repressed or hidden, the mystery of uniting the esoteric and the erotic becomes the ultimate arcane secret. It penetrates into the depths where all life is one, all boundaries broken down, body and mind fused in one. A deep and abiding awareness of the intimate interrelationship unites the opposites through the realization of imaginal workings. We embody the myth.
As in Tantra, occult ritual involves the transgression of social mores, locating and enacting cultural taboos in order to transcend constrictive boundaries. The erotic and the sexual then become a tool to experience the breaking of mundane bonds and something 'other.'
As a therapist, I would suggest that the interaction is much clearer in practice if a person has done their own personal work on the related issues, rather than playing them out unconsciously in relationships. Naturally, to a greater or lesser extent we continue to project and let others ‘carry’ parts of our own potential. Desire is programmed, and the ‘object’ is merely a (changing) means to an end, and sometimes self-deception. Sex has a shadow that goes by many names, but sex and relationship addictions are among them.
Such issues, including inequality and aggression, have become a greater concern than sex as a metaphor for happiness. The key dynamics are dissociation and association. New cultural forms are emerging. Even “life” and “death” are subject to recoding and metamorphosis, with cloning, in vitro, and surrogacy. As ever, sex and pluralization of relationship forms and lifestyles remain political and emotional issues. Fear of transgression is widespread.
Jung said that the splitting into opposites makes consciousness possible, but the ‘gender binary’ cannot hold everyone. We share our minds as well as our bodies. Psychic ‘gender’ or identification is beyond physical gender, and such dynamics play out in relationships in couples of all descriptions. Both real and symbolic effects are consequential in the “neosexual revolution” that dismantles and reassembles old patterns of sexuality and diversifies intimate relationships.
The power of Magic is rooted in Eros. When the connection between the erotic and the occult is unconscious, repressed or hidden, the mystery of uniting the esoteric and the erotic becomes the ultimate arcane secret. It penetrates into the depths where all life is one, all boundaries broken down, body and mind fused in one. A deep and abiding awareness of the intimate interrelationship unites the opposites through the realization of imaginal workings. We embody the myth.
As in Tantra, occult ritual involves the transgression of social mores, locating and enacting cultural taboos in order to transcend constrictive boundaries. The erotic and the sexual then become a tool to experience the breaking of mundane bonds and something 'other.'
As a therapist, I would suggest that the interaction is much clearer in practice if a person has done their own personal work on the related issues, rather than playing them out unconsciously in relationships. Naturally, to a greater or lesser extent we continue to project and let others ‘carry’ parts of our own potential. Desire is programmed, and the ‘object’ is merely a (changing) means to an end, and sometimes self-deception. Sex has a shadow that goes by many names, but sex and relationship addictions are among them.
There are many techniques for reclaiming the body, including sacred sex, hypnosis, embedded tissue memory work, and kinesthetic arts. Sex can also be enhanced by a variety of aesthetic and therapeutic means, including the 64 sexual arts, described in ancient literature. As ever, sex can be a double-edged sword, hurting, healing, or initiation, and that choice remains ours. It remains a challenge throughout our life-span.
There are many archetypal models of feminine integrity for every psychological type. The most important thing is to remain authentic to your self and your true will. That is the real epiphany. The archetypal lover searches for the Beloved in a spontaneous and meaningful mythic reenactment that aims toward a transfigured state of consciousness.
Everyone has their own love style. We are fundamentally psychophysical beings, and the mind is the biggest sexual organ. Sacred sex is just part of a more integral worldview and a joyous expression of nature in the language of gesture, action, and communication. It is the feeling of eros, the relational function, and the harmony of drama. Eros is the passionate joy not only for another, but for things and animals, not just sexual love. The essential archetype of woman and her autonomy remains intact, in a self-contained, multi-faceted femininity, despite our patriarchal culture.
There is no shortage of workshop instruction in all of the erotic arts. Like all rites of passage it is a matter of crossing the threshold from one state of consciousness to another by encountering the life force and unconscious. Like the French ‘petit mort,’ it involves the death of the old self and symbolic birth or rebirth of the new self-possessed identity.
In ancient Greece, a ‘virgin’ did not mean an intact youth, but someone who was ‘whole’ in themselves. When we separate from the family trauma we begin to live from our authentic selves. But support and mirroring by a female group remains an important aspect of women’s mysteries.
From robbing rituals to disrobing we are preceded by aeons of human sexual practice of presentation and gifting or offering. We should also not lose sight of the fact that a big part of our sexuality takes place in our dreams, from which we can draw inspiration and self-knowledge otherwise hidden. We may even dream of ourselves as ‘prey’ when we are not victims in life. There are many facets of femininity but we don’t have to act them all out. Psychological space is the edge of freedom.
Synchronicity and fate or destiny also play their role in our encounters. Our objective is sensuous – the fill up as many of our senses as possible. For example, essential oils or flowers can represent maidenhood or fecundity, but psychologically represent the flowering of differentiation that gives rise to creativity in inner and outer life.
In the early twentieth century, saffron was used to promote menstrual flow and as an abortifacient, although a dose that was too high could kill the mother as well as the fetus. Depending on the quantities employed, this flower turns from useful remedy to powerful poison, similar to therapeutic systems of a homeopathic kind.
We can reclaim the divinity of our bodies that may have been lost in a profane world that criticizes, abuses, represses, or thwarts our sexual expression. We can heal any shame-based attitudes, romantic assumptions, obsolete programming, and dissociations, or the wounds and trauma inflicted on us by the toxic behaviors of others. We can banish sexual ‘ghosts’ and learn to bring our whole selves into the sexual experience.
Among the sexual arts are traditional Hindu and Buddhist tantra, contemporary ‘fusion’ tantric practice, goal-oriented sex magick or “success magick”, sexual alchemy of Frater and Soror Mystica for transformation, idealized Courtly Love, Kabbalistic practice within marriage, Taoist alchemy for longevity, neo-Gnostic approaches for wisdom and worship of The Feminine, as well as personal eclectic practices of auto-erotic and partnered ‘spiritual sex.’
This is the realm of Blood Mysteries, transformation mysteries, and women’s initiation rites, including offerings, ordeals, and sacrifice.
Language is a lens and we can increase our sexual vocabulary and repertoire to include the symbolic language of the unconscious, which Jung linked to the hieros gamos, mysterium coniunctionis, or union of opposites. Such polarity in sex is not a gender issue, because we all have male and female elements in our psychophysical being.
Some methods require both parties to share the process while others can be done quietly on the inner planes. All depend on establishing rapport and resonance with oneself, the known or unknown partner, and the cosmos. Each method has its own symbolism, practices, and goals. We can awaken and free the potential genius for love that lies within us all. We can develop compassion and empathy for self, others and cosmos.
Possibly one of the most important things for women to bear in mind is that science has now shown that the cells of others can colonize our bodies, eggs, and mind, permanently injecting us with the genetic material of both random and relationally intimate partners. Babies of current partners have been found with the germ plasm of former partners. Male children colonize our minds with their DNA during gestation and never ‘move out.’
What is the difference between sex magick and tantric sexuality?
There are so many eclectic practices, appropriations, and idiosyncratic forms of belief that we need to be more specific. ‘Tantra’ has become a pop buzzword for any new agey exotic sexual experience. It is about feeling connected to and awed by the spiritual essence of the universe. It is merging and emerging. We can experience a rebirth or rejuvenation using a sacred sex approach in which the couple becomes an altar of worship.
But is it tantra? Some of these practices are the opposite of traditional practices. The sexual element of tantra has been over-emphasized and equated to "spiritual sex," with the goal of heightened orgasm and optimal physical pleasure, not spiritual development or spiritual evolutionary process. There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s a misnomer for a variety of practices of the arts of love. Some might consider it cultural appropriation.
Carl Jung said, “It is common for very infantile people to have a mystical, religious feeling, they enjoy this atmosphere in which they can admire their beautiful feelings, but they are simply indulging their auto-eroticism.” (ETH lecture 11 Jan 1935, Page 171.)
There are several varieties of traditional tantra. Hindu or Buddhist, and if the later, which school? Or are we talking about some form of self-styled practice and initiation? Crowley’s knowledge of actual tantric practice was very limited and based on a transgressive approach, so the two bear little resemblance, except in the broadest sense. Taoist alchemy has another approach and goal of longevity, if not immortality.
Orgasm is both practical and eternal, earthy and divine. If you have a spiritual approach to your sex life, then it will be so physically and psychically, here and now. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. It is unlikely anyone is actually authentically recreating any traditional practices of the past.
We have to be satisfied with a middle road that satisfies our own inclinations for best practice. Even so, some sexual experience may be more mundane than exalted. Some will be celebratory, rather than goal-oriented. Most are unlikely to follow any social or ritual script or prescription.
Both practices seek depth and transcendence. Sex magick often has some practical goal, whereas tantra is more about experiencing Gnostic ecstasy. Both practices are concerned with the fusion in unity of archetypal Male and Female energies to transcend the opposites, irrespective of the genders of participants. Both weave together physical, psychological and magical dimensions. Passion and a merger of minds as well as bodies are more important than protocols.
Eclectic sex mysticism may or may not be considered tantra or sex magick, per se. Sexual mysticism doesn’t heighten spirit at the expense of matter, but instinctively includes it. But you don’t need to be a sorcerer or mystic to imagine your partner as a God or Goddess leading toward rapture and union with the divine. Ultimately, you are generating this narrative and imagery within yourself.
The main difference between Tantra and Sex Magick is that Tantra is a form of religion in Sanskrit circles. The power of “Sex” is stored in the body for spiritual magical, power.
Tantra is quite an abstract religion, and does not have a clear definition. It is a spiritual, sexual science that is not static in its definition. Tantra is the science of unravelling the mystery posed by the phenomenon of love and relationships on earth.
Tantra is an ancient spiritual practice that originates from heaven. It is an ancient practice of combining sexual energy and prayer. It is an esoteric practice of antiquity. It is all about understanding yourself and another, healing, completing, harmony and freedom. Tantra is an old healing technique which was formed many centuries ago.
The key to love is selflessness, and the fulfillment it brings. The soul's selflessness is as great as the body's selfishness. Love is the language of the soul that allows us to unleash its unlimited capacity.
It is a poetic and aesthetic act, a celebratory rite, and a marriage of matter and spirit as an experience of wholeness. We don’t need to support that phenomenon with any theory, jargon or interpretation. Sacred sex is inherently healing and promotes well-being. It’s about rapport, reverie, and rebirth.
Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect that lends flow and harmony to the process of balance, rhythm and synthesis of immediate perception. Aesthetics is an artistic philosophy. It makes us permeable to the image, mobilizes us internally and enables imaginative activity through a form of observance. Imagery evokes a perceptual response -- an aesthetic response, a participatory way of knowing, remembering, and reconnecting with soul and identity.
The nature of Beauty is an immediate revelation of things as they are: unity, line, rhythm, tension, elegance -- communion of the soul with the mysteries of inner and outer world -- the naked awareness of divine self-revelation. The felt-sense of form and beauty is instinctual.
When you can fully imagine your lover as God/Goddess, their transcendent embodiment of the essence of male/femaleness, you’re there. It is “knowing” in the “Biblical” sense of direct, undeniable experience -- a gnosis. It is ravishment, beyond rapture; complete transport to the sacred world which is beyond time, beyond decay. It conveys a sense of the eternal, the fated. It fascinates us because transformation is our biological imperative.
But again, my ideas are likely not in harmony with the traditional teaching which suggests sex with sacred strangers, emotional distancing, dissociation or detachment, and motionless sex while raising the kundalini and transmuting that libido to higher expressions.
There are many archetypal models of feminine integrity for every psychological type. The most important thing is to remain authentic to your self and your true will. That is the real epiphany. The archetypal lover searches for the Beloved in a spontaneous and meaningful mythic reenactment that aims toward a transfigured state of consciousness.
Everyone has their own love style. We are fundamentally psychophysical beings, and the mind is the biggest sexual organ. Sacred sex is just part of a more integral worldview and a joyous expression of nature in the language of gesture, action, and communication. It is the feeling of eros, the relational function, and the harmony of drama. Eros is the passionate joy not only for another, but for things and animals, not just sexual love. The essential archetype of woman and her autonomy remains intact, in a self-contained, multi-faceted femininity, despite our patriarchal culture.
There is no shortage of workshop instruction in all of the erotic arts. Like all rites of passage it is a matter of crossing the threshold from one state of consciousness to another by encountering the life force and unconscious. Like the French ‘petit mort,’ it involves the death of the old self and symbolic birth or rebirth of the new self-possessed identity.
In ancient Greece, a ‘virgin’ did not mean an intact youth, but someone who was ‘whole’ in themselves. When we separate from the family trauma we begin to live from our authentic selves. But support and mirroring by a female group remains an important aspect of women’s mysteries.
From robbing rituals to disrobing we are preceded by aeons of human sexual practice of presentation and gifting or offering. We should also not lose sight of the fact that a big part of our sexuality takes place in our dreams, from which we can draw inspiration and self-knowledge otherwise hidden. We may even dream of ourselves as ‘prey’ when we are not victims in life. There are many facets of femininity but we don’t have to act them all out. Psychological space is the edge of freedom.
Synchronicity and fate or destiny also play their role in our encounters. Our objective is sensuous – the fill up as many of our senses as possible. For example, essential oils or flowers can represent maidenhood or fecundity, but psychologically represent the flowering of differentiation that gives rise to creativity in inner and outer life.
In the early twentieth century, saffron was used to promote menstrual flow and as an abortifacient, although a dose that was too high could kill the mother as well as the fetus. Depending on the quantities employed, this flower turns from useful remedy to powerful poison, similar to therapeutic systems of a homeopathic kind.
We can reclaim the divinity of our bodies that may have been lost in a profane world that criticizes, abuses, represses, or thwarts our sexual expression. We can heal any shame-based attitudes, romantic assumptions, obsolete programming, and dissociations, or the wounds and trauma inflicted on us by the toxic behaviors of others. We can banish sexual ‘ghosts’ and learn to bring our whole selves into the sexual experience.
Among the sexual arts are traditional Hindu and Buddhist tantra, contemporary ‘fusion’ tantric practice, goal-oriented sex magick or “success magick”, sexual alchemy of Frater and Soror Mystica for transformation, idealized Courtly Love, Kabbalistic practice within marriage, Taoist alchemy for longevity, neo-Gnostic approaches for wisdom and worship of The Feminine, as well as personal eclectic practices of auto-erotic and partnered ‘spiritual sex.’
This is the realm of Blood Mysteries, transformation mysteries, and women’s initiation rites, including offerings, ordeals, and sacrifice.
Language is a lens and we can increase our sexual vocabulary and repertoire to include the symbolic language of the unconscious, which Jung linked to the hieros gamos, mysterium coniunctionis, or union of opposites. Such polarity in sex is not a gender issue, because we all have male and female elements in our psychophysical being.
Some methods require both parties to share the process while others can be done quietly on the inner planes. All depend on establishing rapport and resonance with oneself, the known or unknown partner, and the cosmos. Each method has its own symbolism, practices, and goals. We can awaken and free the potential genius for love that lies within us all. We can develop compassion and empathy for self, others and cosmos.
Possibly one of the most important things for women to bear in mind is that science has now shown that the cells of others can colonize our bodies, eggs, and mind, permanently injecting us with the genetic material of both random and relationally intimate partners. Babies of current partners have been found with the germ plasm of former partners. Male children colonize our minds with their DNA during gestation and never ‘move out.’
What is the difference between sex magick and tantric sexuality?
There are so many eclectic practices, appropriations, and idiosyncratic forms of belief that we need to be more specific. ‘Tantra’ has become a pop buzzword for any new agey exotic sexual experience. It is about feeling connected to and awed by the spiritual essence of the universe. It is merging and emerging. We can experience a rebirth or rejuvenation using a sacred sex approach in which the couple becomes an altar of worship.
But is it tantra? Some of these practices are the opposite of traditional practices. The sexual element of tantra has been over-emphasized and equated to "spiritual sex," with the goal of heightened orgasm and optimal physical pleasure, not spiritual development or spiritual evolutionary process. There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s a misnomer for a variety of practices of the arts of love. Some might consider it cultural appropriation.
Carl Jung said, “It is common for very infantile people to have a mystical, religious feeling, they enjoy this atmosphere in which they can admire their beautiful feelings, but they are simply indulging their auto-eroticism.” (ETH lecture 11 Jan 1935, Page 171.)
There are several varieties of traditional tantra. Hindu or Buddhist, and if the later, which school? Or are we talking about some form of self-styled practice and initiation? Crowley’s knowledge of actual tantric practice was very limited and based on a transgressive approach, so the two bear little resemblance, except in the broadest sense. Taoist alchemy has another approach and goal of longevity, if not immortality.
Orgasm is both practical and eternal, earthy and divine. If you have a spiritual approach to your sex life, then it will be so physically and psychically, here and now. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. It is unlikely anyone is actually authentically recreating any traditional practices of the past.
We have to be satisfied with a middle road that satisfies our own inclinations for best practice. Even so, some sexual experience may be more mundane than exalted. Some will be celebratory, rather than goal-oriented. Most are unlikely to follow any social or ritual script or prescription.
Both practices seek depth and transcendence. Sex magick often has some practical goal, whereas tantra is more about experiencing Gnostic ecstasy. Both practices are concerned with the fusion in unity of archetypal Male and Female energies to transcend the opposites, irrespective of the genders of participants. Both weave together physical, psychological and magical dimensions. Passion and a merger of minds as well as bodies are more important than protocols.
Eclectic sex mysticism may or may not be considered tantra or sex magick, per se. Sexual mysticism doesn’t heighten spirit at the expense of matter, but instinctively includes it. But you don’t need to be a sorcerer or mystic to imagine your partner as a God or Goddess leading toward rapture and union with the divine. Ultimately, you are generating this narrative and imagery within yourself.
The main difference between Tantra and Sex Magick is that Tantra is a form of religion in Sanskrit circles. The power of “Sex” is stored in the body for spiritual magical, power.
Tantra is quite an abstract religion, and does not have a clear definition. It is a spiritual, sexual science that is not static in its definition. Tantra is the science of unravelling the mystery posed by the phenomenon of love and relationships on earth.
Tantra is an ancient spiritual practice that originates from heaven. It is an ancient practice of combining sexual energy and prayer. It is an esoteric practice of antiquity. It is all about understanding yourself and another, healing, completing, harmony and freedom. Tantra is an old healing technique which was formed many centuries ago.
The key to love is selflessness, and the fulfillment it brings. The soul's selflessness is as great as the body's selfishness. Love is the language of the soul that allows us to unleash its unlimited capacity.
It is a poetic and aesthetic act, a celebratory rite, and a marriage of matter and spirit as an experience of wholeness. We don’t need to support that phenomenon with any theory, jargon or interpretation. Sacred sex is inherently healing and promotes well-being. It’s about rapport, reverie, and rebirth.
Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect that lends flow and harmony to the process of balance, rhythm and synthesis of immediate perception. Aesthetics is an artistic philosophy. It makes us permeable to the image, mobilizes us internally and enables imaginative activity through a form of observance. Imagery evokes a perceptual response -- an aesthetic response, a participatory way of knowing, remembering, and reconnecting with soul and identity.
The nature of Beauty is an immediate revelation of things as they are: unity, line, rhythm, tension, elegance -- communion of the soul with the mysteries of inner and outer world -- the naked awareness of divine self-revelation. The felt-sense of form and beauty is instinctual.
When you can fully imagine your lover as God/Goddess, their transcendent embodiment of the essence of male/femaleness, you’re there. It is “knowing” in the “Biblical” sense of direct, undeniable experience -- a gnosis. It is ravishment, beyond rapture; complete transport to the sacred world which is beyond time, beyond decay. It conveys a sense of the eternal, the fated. It fascinates us because transformation is our biological imperative.
But again, my ideas are likely not in harmony with the traditional teaching which suggests sex with sacred strangers, emotional distancing, dissociation or detachment, and motionless sex while raising the kundalini and transmuting that libido to higher expressions.
ALCHEMY
The distinction between concrete and literal, so important to alchemy, is the essential distinction in ritual. The ritual of theater, of religion, of loving, and of play require concrete actions which are never what they literally seem to be. Ritual offers a primary mode of pathologizing, of deliteralizing events and seeing them as we "perform" them. As we go into a ritual, the soul of our actions "comes out"; or to ritualize a literal action, we "put soul into it."...Ritual brings together action idea into an enactment.
--James Hillman/Re-Visioning Psychology
A ritual or meditation practice that continues over time may partake of all three factors (intensity, duration and novelty). The discipline of daily practice supplies duration; the change of state created by the practice creates novelty; and continued improvement in concentration and technique can increase intensity.
Alchemy has its own approach to sexuality and its spiritual value. The Soror Mystica is considered essential to the Great Work. The sacred marriage, or coniunctio, creates a bond by which opposites are united in an image which transcends both original potentials. The whole art of alchemy is contained within the image of a magical or divine child. This process creates a cellular, alchemical, energetic rebirth into a higher order of being, symbolically called a spiritual androgyne – a symbol of psychological and spiritual wholeness.
Alchemical symbolism sometimes refers to this as the marriage of the Sun (
spirit) and the Moon (soul), solar and lunar ways of knowing. We live, life moves, at the confluence of these polarities of spirit and matter, body and soul have the capacity to hold contradiction and paradox so we can become whole. Such is the Chemical Marriage, Courtly Love and tantric secrets that conceive a magical child.
Jung tells us that the queen symbolizes the body, the king stands for the spirit, and the soul unites the two in the royal marriage. Therefore, our psyche is a half bodily and half spiritual substance. When king and queen (animus/anima) unite, they form a magical hermaphroditic being which is a union of opposite energies. Their union is a hieros gamos, or sacred marriage which results in the manifestation of all things.
In alchemical manuscripts, coniunctio, mystical marriage, is depicted as the union or coitus of King and Queen, of the red man and the white woman, or just by man and wife. The mother is the unconscious, the son is the conscious. It is a ‘regressus ad uterum’ or the return to the uterus of the mother.
Penetration of the female is the same as the penetration of the water or the unconscious. Thus we see that the coniunctio is depicted as the coitus of man and wife, king and queen, but also by the king taking a bath, or drinking water. Sometimes the coitus between man and woman happens in water, in a bath or in a fountain.
In the sacred marriage, such ‘coitus’, refers to the union of our divine spirit with the soul, and finally with the body. As a grand union of opposites, mystic marriage symbolizes the unification of king and queen, man and wife, conscious and unconscious, personality and society, etc. in a royal union called the Marriage of the Sun and Moon in alchemy.
Ordinarily, spirit, soul and body are separated from each other, even while in dynamic interaction. But when the Great Work is complete, the divine spirit is brought ‘down’ to shine through the soul and body and unifies itself with them, so they all form one and the same ‘body’.
Jung used the poetic term syzygy for the union of opposites, wholeness and completion and the divine couple. The pattern repeats endlessly. Pulsating life is the substrate of our existence. The perfect partnership includes physical and psychic compatibility of anima and animus, which fire the quest for love and myths of the soulmate.
The parental pair has many symbols from the medieval West and sacred duos of the East, including yin/yang. The Divine inner marriage—or the syzygy—of the masculine/dynamic and feminine/magnetic yokes the anima, the feminine aspect of the male psyche, and the animus, the male aspect of the female psyche.
The experience of spiritual rebirth via the union of opposites, or the sacred marriage is characterized as the union of the Sun (+) and Moon (-), positive-negative; male-female; god-devil; spirit-matter; father-mother; etc.
The sacred marriage, or coniunctio, creates a bond by which opposites are united in an image which transcends both original potentials. The whole art of alchemy is contained within the image of a magical or divine child. This process creates a cellular, alchemical, energetic rebirth into a higher order of being, symbolically called a spiritual androgyne.
The syzygy has three components: a man's femininity and woman's masculinity; the experience man has of woman and vice versa; and the masculine and feminine archetypal image. Archetypal symbolic pairings are 'yoked together' by this term.
Contrasexual (male-female) pairings occur in dream symbolism. They refer to internal communication between the unconscious and conscious minds of any individual.
“It is a psychological fact that as soon as we touch on these identifications we enter the realm of the syzygies, the paired opposites, where the One is never separated from the Other, its antithesis. It is a field of personal experience which leads directly to the experience of individuation, the attainment of the self. ...In this still very obscure field of psychological experience, where we are in direct contact, so to speak, with the archetype, its psychic power is felt in full force. This realm is so entirely one of immediate experience that it cannot be captured by any formula, but can only be hinted at to one who already knows.” (Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 194)
Female archetypes of earth and sky symbolize the Great Mother, who is both conscious protector, spiritual guide, and nurturer, while at the same time the unconscious forces of birth and death, life and destruction.
The anima lurks in the unconscious, wielding her supernatural power to drive our lives either towards mystical knowledge, consciousness and individuation, or towards oblivion in sensual urges. The sky mothers and animas can transcend the body and ego, but in so many myths, they crave balance through the experience of the underworld, the unconscious drives of the instincts and the non-rational, and through this unity, express a balanced whole.
The union of seemingly separate elements give birth to and reveal a higher form. This is often referred to as the royal marriage. This marriage is of fundamental concern to alchemists because it is a key to transformation. Using an alchemical metaphor, Jung often referred to marriage as the crucible of consciousness.
In Sacred Marriage relationship is Immortality. All our cultural experience and individual conscious existence depends on the fabric of life, the germ line, from the mutual sexual relationship of genders. The female is the sole bearer of cytoplasmic inheritance and the principal investor in time and resources. The male contributes half of the genetic material. Immortality is thus not the domain of one gender but of the relationship between woman and man.
The Philosopher's Stone is equated with the Body of Light, the Resurrection Body, or the Immortal Body. Alchemy strives for spiritual rebirth through the union of opposites, or the sacred marriage. The Philosopher's Stone (lapis) is also a symbol of the embryonic Self. The transcendent function is the product of the sacred marriage, which has been characterized in alchemy as the royal union of the Sun and Moon.
Polarized positions may be symbolized variously as positive-negative, male-female, god-devil, spirit-matter, father-mother, etc. This marriage creates a bond by which opposites are united in an image which transcends both original potentials. The whole art of alchemy is contained within the image of a magical, numinous, or divine child.
Progeny of the divine couple have various alchemical names: the philosopher’s gold, the filius Philosophorum, the infans solaris (sun child), the red tincture, the sun/moon child, etc. Making the Philosopher's Stone is a repetition of the creation myth via imagery.
The transformative imperative is a a mystic marriage or union, symbolized in alchemy by the coniunctio -- conjunction of conscious and unconscious. Individuation is the integration of unconscious contents into consciousness. Potential is embodied as a psychologically whole self-realized or self-actualizing person. The "royal wedding" is the final alchemical synthesis of ego and unconscious, matter and spirit, male and female, that brings forth the Philosopher's Stone (the Self).
Alchemist Gerard Dorn called the unus mundus a unification of the Stone with body, soul, and spirit -- a perfect synthesis of conscious and unconscious. This "one world" is the physical-psychological, transcendental, "third thing" continuum underlying all existence -- the metaphysical equivalent of the collective unconscious. Mercurius or the Dragon's "treasure hard to attain" are images for the archetype of unity -- the self.
We need to be related to another individual, according to Jung, to experience the full depth of our own psyche. From an internal perspective, spiritual marriage is an inner experience which is not projected onto another living individual. In the royal marriage of the soul with the Self, the projections of anima and animus have been returned to their proper level in the personal unconscious.
Our partner no longer carries an essentially religious function for us. The King and Queen are united, or conjoined, synthesizing the opposites. When the opposites to be united are the masculine consciousness (of our day world) and the feminine unconscious (the night world), this royal marriage is a transcendent symbol of the Self, and embodies the psychic totality of personal wholeness.
Clarity is artistic discovery of the universal. There is enchantment in the quality of wholeness. There is beauty in the rhythms of nature and our nature. Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect of alchemy that lends flow and harmony to the process of balance, rhythm and synthesis of immediate perception.
This flow is lyrical, epic and dramatic. Aesthetic signification is one thing, but the deep emotional impact of aesthetic arrest -- being suspended for a thrilling radiant moment in the eternal -- stops us in our tracks in a moment of realization.
Orgasm is both practical and eternal, earthy and divine. If you have a spiritual approach to your sex life, then it will be so physically and psychically, here and now. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. It is unlikely anyone is actually authentically recreating any traditional practices of the past. We have to be satisfied with a middle road that satisfies our own inclinations for best practice. Even so, some sexual experience may be more mundane than exalted. Some will be celebratory, rather than goal-oriented. Most are unlikely to follow any social or ritual script or prescription.
Both practices seek depth and transcendence. Sex magick often has some practical goal, whereas tantra is more about experiencing Gnostic ecstasy. Both practices are concerned with the fusion in unity of archetypal Male and Female energies to transcend the opposites, irrespective of the genders of participants. Both weave together physical, psychological and magical dimensions. Passion and a merger of minds as well as bodies is more important than protocols.
Eclectic sex mysticism may or may not be considered tantra or sex magick, per se. Sexual mysticism doesn’t heighten spirit at the expense of matter, but instinctively includes it. But you don’t need to be a sorcerer or mystic to imagine your partner as a God or Goddess leading toward rapture and union with the divine. Ultimately, you are generating this narrative within yourself.
Which tantra? All tantra is not created equal. Hindu or Buddhist, and if the later, which school? Or are we talking about some form of self-styled practice and initiation? Crowley’s knowledge of actual tantric practice was very limited and based on a transgressive approach, so the two bear little resemblance, except in the broadest sense. Taoist alchemy has another approach and goal of immortality or at least longevity.
The main difference between Tantra and Sex Magick is that Tantra is a form of religion in Sanskrit circles. The power of “Sex” is stored in the body for spiritual magical, power.
Tantra is quite an abstract religion, and does not have a clear definition. It is a spiritual, sexual science that is not static in its definition. Tantra is the science of unraveling the mystery posed by the phenomenon of love and relationships on earth.
Tantra is the beautiful weaving together of all aspects of existence into one whole tapestry of “Pure Love.” It is the weaving of spirit and sex. It is not, as it commonly labelled in the West, as being solely about sex. It is used, in the West, as a general term which relates to sexual practice as a spiritual evolutionary practice. Tantra is basically a philosophy of spiritual practice, and does not have a negative connotation.
Tantra is an ancient spiritual practice that originates from heaven. It is an ancient practice of combining sexual energy and prayer. It is an esoteric practice of antiquity. It is all about understanding yourself and another, this covers healing, completing, harmony and freedom. Tantra is an old healing technique which was formed many centuries ago.
We can assume that tantric is a celebration of the physical dimension, completely life-affirming. It is the key to a life of fulfillment and prosperity. It is about feeling connected to and awed by the spiritual essence of the universe. It is emerging, and one can experience a re-birth when having “sex” with another using Tantra techniques.
The distinction between concrete and literal, so important to alchemy, is the essential distinction in ritual. The ritual of theater, of religion, of loving, and of play require concrete actions which are never what they literally seem to be. Ritual offers a primary mode of pathologizing, of deliteralizing events and seeing them as we "perform" them. As we go into a ritual, the soul of our actions "comes out"; or to ritualize a literal action, we "put soul into it."...Ritual brings together action idea into an enactment.
--James Hillman/Re-Visioning Psychology
A ritual or meditation practice that continues over time may partake of all three factors (intensity, duration and novelty). The discipline of daily practice supplies duration; the change of state created by the practice creates novelty; and continued improvement in concentration and technique can increase intensity.
Alchemy has its own approach to sexuality and its spiritual value. The Soror Mystica is considered essential to the Great Work. The sacred marriage, or coniunctio, creates a bond by which opposites are united in an image which transcends both original potentials. The whole art of alchemy is contained within the image of a magical or divine child. This process creates a cellular, alchemical, energetic rebirth into a higher order of being, symbolically called a spiritual androgyne – a symbol of psychological and spiritual wholeness.
Alchemical symbolism sometimes refers to this as the marriage of the Sun (
spirit) and the Moon (soul), solar and lunar ways of knowing. We live, life moves, at the confluence of these polarities of spirit and matter, body and soul have the capacity to hold contradiction and paradox so we can become whole. Such is the Chemical Marriage, Courtly Love and tantric secrets that conceive a magical child.
Jung tells us that the queen symbolizes the body, the king stands for the spirit, and the soul unites the two in the royal marriage. Therefore, our psyche is a half bodily and half spiritual substance. When king and queen (animus/anima) unite, they form a magical hermaphroditic being which is a union of opposite energies. Their union is a hieros gamos, or sacred marriage which results in the manifestation of all things.
In alchemical manuscripts, coniunctio, mystical marriage, is depicted as the union or coitus of King and Queen, of the red man and the white woman, or just by man and wife. The mother is the unconscious, the son is the conscious. It is a ‘regressus ad uterum’ or the return to the uterus of the mother.
Penetration of the female is the same as the penetration of the water or the unconscious. Thus we see that the coniunctio is depicted as the coitus of man and wife, king and queen, but also by the king taking a bath, or drinking water. Sometimes the coitus between man and woman happens in water, in a bath or in a fountain.
In the sacred marriage, such ‘coitus’, refers to the union of our divine spirit with the soul, and finally with the body. As a grand union of opposites, mystic marriage symbolizes the unification of king and queen, man and wife, conscious and unconscious, personality and society, etc. in a royal union called the Marriage of the Sun and Moon in alchemy.
Ordinarily, spirit, soul and body are separated from each other, even while in dynamic interaction. But when the Great Work is complete, the divine spirit is brought ‘down’ to shine through the soul and body and unifies itself with them, so they all form one and the same ‘body’.
Jung used the poetic term syzygy for the union of opposites, wholeness and completion and the divine couple. The pattern repeats endlessly. Pulsating life is the substrate of our existence. The perfect partnership includes physical and psychic compatibility of anima and animus, which fire the quest for love and myths of the soulmate.
The parental pair has many symbols from the medieval West and sacred duos of the East, including yin/yang. The Divine inner marriage—or the syzygy—of the masculine/dynamic and feminine/magnetic yokes the anima, the feminine aspect of the male psyche, and the animus, the male aspect of the female psyche.
The experience of spiritual rebirth via the union of opposites, or the sacred marriage is characterized as the union of the Sun (+) and Moon (-), positive-negative; male-female; god-devil; spirit-matter; father-mother; etc.
The sacred marriage, or coniunctio, creates a bond by which opposites are united in an image which transcends both original potentials. The whole art of alchemy is contained within the image of a magical or divine child. This process creates a cellular, alchemical, energetic rebirth into a higher order of being, symbolically called a spiritual androgyne.
The syzygy has three components: a man's femininity and woman's masculinity; the experience man has of woman and vice versa; and the masculine and feminine archetypal image. Archetypal symbolic pairings are 'yoked together' by this term.
Contrasexual (male-female) pairings occur in dream symbolism. They refer to internal communication between the unconscious and conscious minds of any individual.
“It is a psychological fact that as soon as we touch on these identifications we enter the realm of the syzygies, the paired opposites, where the One is never separated from the Other, its antithesis. It is a field of personal experience which leads directly to the experience of individuation, the attainment of the self. ...In this still very obscure field of psychological experience, where we are in direct contact, so to speak, with the archetype, its psychic power is felt in full force. This realm is so entirely one of immediate experience that it cannot be captured by any formula, but can only be hinted at to one who already knows.” (Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 194)
Female archetypes of earth and sky symbolize the Great Mother, who is both conscious protector, spiritual guide, and nurturer, while at the same time the unconscious forces of birth and death, life and destruction.
The anima lurks in the unconscious, wielding her supernatural power to drive our lives either towards mystical knowledge, consciousness and individuation, or towards oblivion in sensual urges. The sky mothers and animas can transcend the body and ego, but in so many myths, they crave balance through the experience of the underworld, the unconscious drives of the instincts and the non-rational, and through this unity, express a balanced whole.
The union of seemingly separate elements give birth to and reveal a higher form. This is often referred to as the royal marriage. This marriage is of fundamental concern to alchemists because it is a key to transformation. Using an alchemical metaphor, Jung often referred to marriage as the crucible of consciousness.
In Sacred Marriage relationship is Immortality. All our cultural experience and individual conscious existence depends on the fabric of life, the germ line, from the mutual sexual relationship of genders. The female is the sole bearer of cytoplasmic inheritance and the principal investor in time and resources. The male contributes half of the genetic material. Immortality is thus not the domain of one gender but of the relationship between woman and man.
The Philosopher's Stone is equated with the Body of Light, the Resurrection Body, or the Immortal Body. Alchemy strives for spiritual rebirth through the union of opposites, or the sacred marriage. The Philosopher's Stone (lapis) is also a symbol of the embryonic Self. The transcendent function is the product of the sacred marriage, which has been characterized in alchemy as the royal union of the Sun and Moon.
Polarized positions may be symbolized variously as positive-negative, male-female, god-devil, spirit-matter, father-mother, etc. This marriage creates a bond by which opposites are united in an image which transcends both original potentials. The whole art of alchemy is contained within the image of a magical, numinous, or divine child.
Progeny of the divine couple have various alchemical names: the philosopher’s gold, the filius Philosophorum, the infans solaris (sun child), the red tincture, the sun/moon child, etc. Making the Philosopher's Stone is a repetition of the creation myth via imagery.
The transformative imperative is a a mystic marriage or union, symbolized in alchemy by the coniunctio -- conjunction of conscious and unconscious. Individuation is the integration of unconscious contents into consciousness. Potential is embodied as a psychologically whole self-realized or self-actualizing person. The "royal wedding" is the final alchemical synthesis of ego and unconscious, matter and spirit, male and female, that brings forth the Philosopher's Stone (the Self).
Alchemist Gerard Dorn called the unus mundus a unification of the Stone with body, soul, and spirit -- a perfect synthesis of conscious and unconscious. This "one world" is the physical-psychological, transcendental, "third thing" continuum underlying all existence -- the metaphysical equivalent of the collective unconscious. Mercurius or the Dragon's "treasure hard to attain" are images for the archetype of unity -- the self.
We need to be related to another individual, according to Jung, to experience the full depth of our own psyche. From an internal perspective, spiritual marriage is an inner experience which is not projected onto another living individual. In the royal marriage of the soul with the Self, the projections of anima and animus have been returned to their proper level in the personal unconscious.
Our partner no longer carries an essentially religious function for us. The King and Queen are united, or conjoined, synthesizing the opposites. When the opposites to be united are the masculine consciousness (of our day world) and the feminine unconscious (the night world), this royal marriage is a transcendent symbol of the Self, and embodies the psychic totality of personal wholeness.
Clarity is artistic discovery of the universal. There is enchantment in the quality of wholeness. There is beauty in the rhythms of nature and our nature. Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect of alchemy that lends flow and harmony to the process of balance, rhythm and synthesis of immediate perception.
This flow is lyrical, epic and dramatic. Aesthetic signification is one thing, but the deep emotional impact of aesthetic arrest -- being suspended for a thrilling radiant moment in the eternal -- stops us in our tracks in a moment of realization.
Orgasm is both practical and eternal, earthy and divine. If you have a spiritual approach to your sex life, then it will be so physically and psychically, here and now. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. It is unlikely anyone is actually authentically recreating any traditional practices of the past. We have to be satisfied with a middle road that satisfies our own inclinations for best practice. Even so, some sexual experience may be more mundane than exalted. Some will be celebratory, rather than goal-oriented. Most are unlikely to follow any social or ritual script or prescription.
Both practices seek depth and transcendence. Sex magick often has some practical goal, whereas tantra is more about experiencing Gnostic ecstasy. Both practices are concerned with the fusion in unity of archetypal Male and Female energies to transcend the opposites, irrespective of the genders of participants. Both weave together physical, psychological and magical dimensions. Passion and a merger of minds as well as bodies is more important than protocols.
Eclectic sex mysticism may or may not be considered tantra or sex magick, per se. Sexual mysticism doesn’t heighten spirit at the expense of matter, but instinctively includes it. But you don’t need to be a sorcerer or mystic to imagine your partner as a God or Goddess leading toward rapture and union with the divine. Ultimately, you are generating this narrative within yourself.
Which tantra? All tantra is not created equal. Hindu or Buddhist, and if the later, which school? Or are we talking about some form of self-styled practice and initiation? Crowley’s knowledge of actual tantric practice was very limited and based on a transgressive approach, so the two bear little resemblance, except in the broadest sense. Taoist alchemy has another approach and goal of immortality or at least longevity.
The main difference between Tantra and Sex Magick is that Tantra is a form of religion in Sanskrit circles. The power of “Sex” is stored in the body for spiritual magical, power.
Tantra is quite an abstract religion, and does not have a clear definition. It is a spiritual, sexual science that is not static in its definition. Tantra is the science of unraveling the mystery posed by the phenomenon of love and relationships on earth.
Tantra is the beautiful weaving together of all aspects of existence into one whole tapestry of “Pure Love.” It is the weaving of spirit and sex. It is not, as it commonly labelled in the West, as being solely about sex. It is used, in the West, as a general term which relates to sexual practice as a spiritual evolutionary practice. Tantra is basically a philosophy of spiritual practice, and does not have a negative connotation.
Tantra is an ancient spiritual practice that originates from heaven. It is an ancient practice of combining sexual energy and prayer. It is an esoteric practice of antiquity. It is all about understanding yourself and another, this covers healing, completing, harmony and freedom. Tantra is an old healing technique which was formed many centuries ago.
We can assume that tantric is a celebration of the physical dimension, completely life-affirming. It is the key to a life of fulfillment and prosperity. It is about feeling connected to and awed by the spiritual essence of the universe. It is emerging, and one can experience a re-birth when having “sex” with another using Tantra techniques.
Hypnosis
Rapport is an empathetic or sympathetic relation or connection with another. It is experiencing the world through the same portal as the person you're communicating with. Rapport doesn't require understanding. Sharing rapport is like jumping inside another's nervous system and suddenly understanding the way they make sense of reality. Rapport is the ability to bond instantly with others. In rapport like attracts like. Rapport reverses the axiom that opposites attract.
When the initial challenge of opposite attraction wears off, we're left with someone who thinks, acts and behaves unlike what we consider the norm. Consequently, that means someone who will mostly be out of sync or rapport with us. Look no further for the cause of broken relationships.
If you are involved with someone and a good part of the time you don't understand each other, you are out of rapport. And if you are out of rapport, the chances of your relationship surviving are slim to none. In fact, the duration of your relationship may be a testament to your persistence and grim intention. If you happen to fall in love with a person with whom you have no rapport, you are in a no-win situation, destined for failure.
If you want to love someone who see things differently, or you want to sell yourself or your ideas to those whose maps of the territory are not in alignment with yours, you will have to do something you never consciously did before. That is, create rapport with them by being like them. People have rapport with others because of the reflection of themselves they perceive.
When we "fit" well with someone we are more at ease than with someone who is incongruent with us. We must relearn our communications strategies so that we relate to others in a manner that fits their map of the world. That is what rapport is all about, (Brooks, 1989). Rapport is the foundation of successful, unencumbered communication. It is essential to being an understanding and empathetic partner and an exciting and satisfying lover.
Hypnosis, used consciously or unconsciously is always a process of induction, deepening, and emerging. Eye fixation is one of the simplest inductions. Deepening enhances relaxation, absorption, and visualization, while amplifying the focus of attention and experience.
The key is being hypnotic, rather than doing hypnosis. Suggestions are more to create atmosphere. It has been used knowingly and unknowingly through the centuries to enhance the pleasure of sexual experience and spirituality. Natural trance can be used to facilitate transcendence.
The consciousness altering heightened excitement, herbal refreshments, luxurious baths, oils, sensuous massage, sparkling drinks, flickering candle-light, incense and languid atmosphere of the boudoir setting are all conducive to self-suggestion for greater relaxation, sensual enjoyment, and fantasy experience. By changing your imagery, you can even evoke a more spiritual atmosphere viewing the act as a sexual sacrament.
It is relatively easy to learn the techniques of mutual hypnosis for use with yourself and your lover. Just begin to imagine the creative possibilities of trance-formations for yourself and your complementary loved-one. You can begin using the male and female, left and right sides of your brain for whole-self integration, for an inner unification, mythically called the union of the Sun and Moon.
The deliberate and charismatic use of hypnotic charms in sex has a long history, and created hysterias in past centuries. It is possible to use self-hypnosis or mutual induction to enhance desire, sex and performance.
Self hypnosis is a natural process. Most of us spend our lives in the throes of a variety of automatically programmed trance states, such as driving on auto-pilot, anger trances, love trances, fear trances, trances induced by memories of places, phobia trances, archetypal trances, subpersonality trances, social roles, etc. Reactions are spontaneous trance states when they happen to us. Consciously applying hypnosis to changing old programming and using it for self-enhancement can open new realms of experience and psychic depth.
Self-hypnosis, even outside the bedroom, helps us become more aware of the body, more tuned in to it and our feelings, sensual and otherwise. Self-hypnosis and hypnosis among lovers is a permissive process, rather than authoritarian like the old model of the controlling hypnotist. You simply give yourself and your partner "permission" to enjoy altered states of consciousness, other ways of being. You can change your body image for the positive, as well as change any outworn attitudes about sex. Problems created by the mind can be solved by the mind -- leaving you freer and more passionate about love and life, in general. Self-imposed limitations and constricting boundaries can be dissolved, even eradicated from your belief system.
Sexual trance-formation can be applied to awakening or re-awakening the sensual self, overcoming dysfunctions, fears and anxieties, increasing desire and relaxation, building rapport and mutual resonance with your partner. Hypnosis can facilitate communication (sexual attraction, mirroring, congruency, mood matching), creating sexual suggestions, post-hypnotic suggestions, and response on demand. Hypnosis compares favorably with Viagra some say. When fear of failure, anxiety and embarrassment dissipate, the sex drive returns, testosterone levels increase, erections can be sustained longer.
Rapport is an empathetic or sympathetic relation or connection with another. It is experiencing the world through the same portal as the person you're communicating with. Rapport doesn't require understanding. Sharing rapport is like jumping inside another's nervous system and suddenly understanding the way they make sense of reality. Rapport is the ability to bond instantly with others. In rapport like attracts like. Rapport reverses the axiom that opposites attract.
When the initial challenge of opposite attraction wears off, we're left with someone who thinks, acts and behaves unlike what we consider the norm. Consequently, that means someone who will mostly be out of sync or rapport with us. Look no further for the cause of broken relationships.
If you are involved with someone and a good part of the time you don't understand each other, you are out of rapport. And if you are out of rapport, the chances of your relationship surviving are slim to none. In fact, the duration of your relationship may be a testament to your persistence and grim intention. If you happen to fall in love with a person with whom you have no rapport, you are in a no-win situation, destined for failure.
If you want to love someone who see things differently, or you want to sell yourself or your ideas to those whose maps of the territory are not in alignment with yours, you will have to do something you never consciously did before. That is, create rapport with them by being like them. People have rapport with others because of the reflection of themselves they perceive.
When we "fit" well with someone we are more at ease than with someone who is incongruent with us. We must relearn our communications strategies so that we relate to others in a manner that fits their map of the world. That is what rapport is all about, (Brooks, 1989). Rapport is the foundation of successful, unencumbered communication. It is essential to being an understanding and empathetic partner and an exciting and satisfying lover.
Hypnosis, used consciously or unconsciously is always a process of induction, deepening, and emerging. Eye fixation is one of the simplest inductions. Deepening enhances relaxation, absorption, and visualization, while amplifying the focus of attention and experience.
The key is being hypnotic, rather than doing hypnosis. Suggestions are more to create atmosphere. It has been used knowingly and unknowingly through the centuries to enhance the pleasure of sexual experience and spirituality. Natural trance can be used to facilitate transcendence.
The consciousness altering heightened excitement, herbal refreshments, luxurious baths, oils, sensuous massage, sparkling drinks, flickering candle-light, incense and languid atmosphere of the boudoir setting are all conducive to self-suggestion for greater relaxation, sensual enjoyment, and fantasy experience. By changing your imagery, you can even evoke a more spiritual atmosphere viewing the act as a sexual sacrament.
It is relatively easy to learn the techniques of mutual hypnosis for use with yourself and your lover. Just begin to imagine the creative possibilities of trance-formations for yourself and your complementary loved-one. You can begin using the male and female, left and right sides of your brain for whole-self integration, for an inner unification, mythically called the union of the Sun and Moon.
The deliberate and charismatic use of hypnotic charms in sex has a long history, and created hysterias in past centuries. It is possible to use self-hypnosis or mutual induction to enhance desire, sex and performance.
Self hypnosis is a natural process. Most of us spend our lives in the throes of a variety of automatically programmed trance states, such as driving on auto-pilot, anger trances, love trances, fear trances, trances induced by memories of places, phobia trances, archetypal trances, subpersonality trances, social roles, etc. Reactions are spontaneous trance states when they happen to us. Consciously applying hypnosis to changing old programming and using it for self-enhancement can open new realms of experience and psychic depth.
Self-hypnosis, even outside the bedroom, helps us become more aware of the body, more tuned in to it and our feelings, sensual and otherwise. Self-hypnosis and hypnosis among lovers is a permissive process, rather than authoritarian like the old model of the controlling hypnotist. You simply give yourself and your partner "permission" to enjoy altered states of consciousness, other ways of being. You can change your body image for the positive, as well as change any outworn attitudes about sex. Problems created by the mind can be solved by the mind -- leaving you freer and more passionate about love and life, in general. Self-imposed limitations and constricting boundaries can be dissolved, even eradicated from your belief system.
Sexual trance-formation can be applied to awakening or re-awakening the sensual self, overcoming dysfunctions, fears and anxieties, increasing desire and relaxation, building rapport and mutual resonance with your partner. Hypnosis can facilitate communication (sexual attraction, mirroring, congruency, mood matching), creating sexual suggestions, post-hypnotic suggestions, and response on demand. Hypnosis compares favorably with Viagra some say. When fear of failure, anxiety and embarrassment dissipate, the sex drive returns, testosterone levels increase, erections can be sustained longer.
COURTLY LOVE
Courtly love was originally a literary fiction created to entertain the nobility, but as time passed, these ideas about love changed and attracted a larger audience. In the high Middle Ages a "game of love" developed around these ideas as a set of social practices.
On a psychological level, the Grail legends concerned the sexual wound of the western psyche. The romance tradition of “courtly love” included the troubadours and popular spiritual movements like Catharism. Both deeply emphasized the feminine and radically elevated the spiritual value of women. These secular and spiritual alternatives to the orthodoxy of the day, erupted into a puritanical culture.
"Loving nobly" was considered to be an enriching and improving practice. Courtly love began in the ducal and princely courts of Aquitaine, Provence, Champagne, ducal Burgundy and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily at the end of the eleventh century. In essence, courtly love was an experience between erotic desire and spiritual attainment that now seems contradictory as "a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent."
A point of ongoing controversy about courtly love is to what extent it was sexual. All courtly love was erotic to some degree, and not purely platonic—the troubadours speak of the physical beauty of their ladies and the feelings and desires the ladies arouse in them. However, it is unclear what a poet should do: live a life of perpetual desire channeling his energies to higher ends, or physically consummate. Scholars have seen it both ways.
Denis de Rougemont said that the troubadours were influenced by Cathar doctrines which rejected the pleasures of the flesh and that they were metaphorically addressing the spirit and soul of their ladies. He also said that courtly love subscribed to the code of chivalry, and therefore a knight's loyalty was always to his King before his mistress. Edmund Reiss claimed it was also a spiritual love, but a love that had more in common with Christian love, or caritas. On the other hand, scholars such as Mosché Lazar claim it was adulterous sexual love with physical possession of the lady the desired end.
Many scholars identify courtly love as the "pure love" described
in 1184 by Andreas Capellanus in De amore libri tres:
It is the pure love which binds together the hearts of two lovers with every feeling of delight. This kind consists in the contemplation of the mind and the affection of the heart; it goes as far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace, for that is not permitted for those who wish to love purely.... That is called mixed love which gets its effect from every delight of the flesh and culminates in the final act of Venus.
Within the corpus of troubadour poems there is a wide range of attitudes, even across the works of individual poets. Some poems are physically sensual, even bawdily imagining nude embraces, while others are highly spiritual and border on the platonic.
The lyrical use of the word midons, borrowed from Guilhem de Poitou, allowed troubadours to address multiple listeners - the lords, men, and women of the court alike. A sort of hermaphroditic code word, or senhan, scholar Meg Bogin writes that the multiple meanings behind this term allowed a covert form of flattery.
"By refusing to disclose his lady's name, the troubadour permitted every woman in the audience, notably the patron's wife, to think that it was she; then, besides making her the object of a secret passion - it was always covert romance - by making her his lord he flashed her an aggrandized image of herself: she was more than 'just' a woman; she was a man."
These points of multiple meaning and ambiguity facilitated a "coquetry of class," allowing the male troubadours to use the images of women as a means to gain social status with other men, but simultaneously, Bogin suggests, voiced deeper longings for the audience. "In this way, the sexual expressed the social and the social the sexual; and in the poetry of courtly love the static hierarchy of feudalism was uprooted and transformed to express a world of motion and transformation."
The medieval phenomenon of courtly love in all of its slavish devotion and ambivalence has been suggested by some writers to be a precursor of BDSM.
Real-world practice
A continued point of controversy is whether courtly love was purely literary or was actually practiced in real life. There are no historical records that offer evidence of its presence in reality. Historian John Benton found no documentary evidence in law codes, court cases, chronicles or other historical documents.
However, the existence of the non-fiction genre of courtesy books is perhaps evidence for its practice. For example, according to Christine de Pizan's courtesy book Book of the Three Virtues (c. 1405), which expresses disapproval of courtly love, the convention was being used to justify and cover up illicit love affairs.
Courtly love probably found expression in the real world in customs such as the crowning of Queens of Love and Beauty at tournaments. Philip le Bon, in his Feast of the Pheasant in 1454, relied on parables drawn from courtly love to incite his nobles to swear to participate in an anticipated crusade. Well into the 15th century numerous actual political and social conventions were largely based on the formulas dictated by the "rules" of courtly love.
Courtly love was originally a literary fiction created to entertain the nobility, but as time passed, these ideas about love changed and attracted a larger audience. In the high Middle Ages a "game of love" developed around these ideas as a set of social practices.
On a psychological level, the Grail legends concerned the sexual wound of the western psyche. The romance tradition of “courtly love” included the troubadours and popular spiritual movements like Catharism. Both deeply emphasized the feminine and radically elevated the spiritual value of women. These secular and spiritual alternatives to the orthodoxy of the day, erupted into a puritanical culture.
"Loving nobly" was considered to be an enriching and improving practice. Courtly love began in the ducal and princely courts of Aquitaine, Provence, Champagne, ducal Burgundy and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily at the end of the eleventh century. In essence, courtly love was an experience between erotic desire and spiritual attainment that now seems contradictory as "a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent."
A point of ongoing controversy about courtly love is to what extent it was sexual. All courtly love was erotic to some degree, and not purely platonic—the troubadours speak of the physical beauty of their ladies and the feelings and desires the ladies arouse in them. However, it is unclear what a poet should do: live a life of perpetual desire channeling his energies to higher ends, or physically consummate. Scholars have seen it both ways.
Denis de Rougemont said that the troubadours were influenced by Cathar doctrines which rejected the pleasures of the flesh and that they were metaphorically addressing the spirit and soul of their ladies. He also said that courtly love subscribed to the code of chivalry, and therefore a knight's loyalty was always to his King before his mistress. Edmund Reiss claimed it was also a spiritual love, but a love that had more in common with Christian love, or caritas. On the other hand, scholars such as Mosché Lazar claim it was adulterous sexual love with physical possession of the lady the desired end.
Many scholars identify courtly love as the "pure love" described
in 1184 by Andreas Capellanus in De amore libri tres:
It is the pure love which binds together the hearts of two lovers with every feeling of delight. This kind consists in the contemplation of the mind and the affection of the heart; it goes as far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace, for that is not permitted for those who wish to love purely.... That is called mixed love which gets its effect from every delight of the flesh and culminates in the final act of Venus.
Within the corpus of troubadour poems there is a wide range of attitudes, even across the works of individual poets. Some poems are physically sensual, even bawdily imagining nude embraces, while others are highly spiritual and border on the platonic.
The lyrical use of the word midons, borrowed from Guilhem de Poitou, allowed troubadours to address multiple listeners - the lords, men, and women of the court alike. A sort of hermaphroditic code word, or senhan, scholar Meg Bogin writes that the multiple meanings behind this term allowed a covert form of flattery.
"By refusing to disclose his lady's name, the troubadour permitted every woman in the audience, notably the patron's wife, to think that it was she; then, besides making her the object of a secret passion - it was always covert romance - by making her his lord he flashed her an aggrandized image of herself: she was more than 'just' a woman; she was a man."
These points of multiple meaning and ambiguity facilitated a "coquetry of class," allowing the male troubadours to use the images of women as a means to gain social status with other men, but simultaneously, Bogin suggests, voiced deeper longings for the audience. "In this way, the sexual expressed the social and the social the sexual; and in the poetry of courtly love the static hierarchy of feudalism was uprooted and transformed to express a world of motion and transformation."
The medieval phenomenon of courtly love in all of its slavish devotion and ambivalence has been suggested by some writers to be a precursor of BDSM.
Real-world practice
A continued point of controversy is whether courtly love was purely literary or was actually practiced in real life. There are no historical records that offer evidence of its presence in reality. Historian John Benton found no documentary evidence in law codes, court cases, chronicles or other historical documents.
However, the existence of the non-fiction genre of courtesy books is perhaps evidence for its practice. For example, according to Christine de Pizan's courtesy book Book of the Three Virtues (c. 1405), which expresses disapproval of courtly love, the convention was being used to justify and cover up illicit love affairs.
Courtly love probably found expression in the real world in customs such as the crowning of Queens of Love and Beauty at tournaments. Philip le Bon, in his Feast of the Pheasant in 1454, relied on parables drawn from courtly love to incite his nobles to swear to participate in an anticipated crusade. Well into the 15th century numerous actual political and social conventions were largely based on the formulas dictated by the "rules" of courtly love.
Taoist Alchemy
Taoist magicians believed in the importance of balancing male (yang) and female (yin) elements in the act of love. They felt that if the lovers were in "harmony," it nourished both of the partners, bringing them closer to the spirit of the universe. When the partners were in balance, neither strove for pleasure independently of the other.
We can make use of the Taoist attitude in our encounters today by keeping this principle in mind. This does not mean making a fetish out of simultaneous orgasms. However, the Taoists contended that the "life force" was contained within the byproducts of the orgasms (i.e. semen and vaginal fluids). Therefore, in order to maintain balance, we require the complementary yin or yang energies of our partner. The Taoist system recommends that men and women yield these complementary energies to one another. Then yin and yang blend, nourishing both parties and increasing health and longevity.
For the Taoists, orgasm was only one aspect of the interplay between the sexes. Just as modern psychologists and sex therapists have encouraged to consider the entire sex act as important, the Taoists considered the whole process as symbolic of universal interrelationship. Paradoxically thought, the "selfish" Taoist lover is just the opposite of what we might call selfish in our modern society.
A balanced Taoist magician has an attitude of "equal exchange," while the negative or neurotic Taoist is out for all he can gain personally. He views sex as a struggle or contest. The selfish attitude of using partners to gain immortality consists of inducing one's sex partner to as many orgasms as possible while conserving one's own juices. Western society, on the other hand, considers a lover selfish who values his own orgasms over mutual pleasure.
Taoists practiced sex as a form of meditation which could continue for several days. In order to maintain their vigor, they sought to remain in a state of philosophical calm. By not striving and by remaining detached and cool, they used their concentration to increase sensitivity in every part of the body. This awakened the most subtle sensations in a slowly unfolding process.
Sex with totally awakened consciousness of the "now" can be enjoyed as an end in itself. Since the partner who is first to reach orgasm provides the other with an abundance of life force, sex may be seen as a mock battle in which the "opponents" compete to see who can induce the other to climax. Rather than approaching this as a matter of survival, we could view it as refreshing recreational sex play. Even though it is an arbitrary attitude, in the West orgasm is considered the supreme goal and reward of sex. Aside from certain magical practices, failure to experience sexual release is considered harmful and neurotic. But this attitude contains a cultural bias.
We have become obsessed with "achieving" orgasms, the more the better. We may have lost something by paying little attention to the quality of the experience. An evening of "Taoist lovemaking" might restore some specialness to your relationship. Incorporating some subtle nuances by maximizing body contact with your partner while minimizing leaking of vital fluids. If the partners attempt to complement and harmonize with one another, both will be nourished. When the desire for orgasm is so strong it cannot be resisted, we may submit, and then revive ourselves by sipping some ginseng tea!
Masters of the more advanced Taoist techniques delved into the problem of not wasting their essences, devising ways to prolong pleasure and stave off release. As "physicians" they prescribed herbs and medicine to restore virility. Taoist sages also considered what sexual positions were most effective as cures for specific ailments.
Taoist magicians believed in the importance of balancing male (yang) and female (yin) elements in the act of love. They felt that if the lovers were in "harmony," it nourished both of the partners, bringing them closer to the spirit of the universe. When the partners were in balance, neither strove for pleasure independently of the other.
We can make use of the Taoist attitude in our encounters today by keeping this principle in mind. This does not mean making a fetish out of simultaneous orgasms. However, the Taoists contended that the "life force" was contained within the byproducts of the orgasms (i.e. semen and vaginal fluids). Therefore, in order to maintain balance, we require the complementary yin or yang energies of our partner. The Taoist system recommends that men and women yield these complementary energies to one another. Then yin and yang blend, nourishing both parties and increasing health and longevity.
For the Taoists, orgasm was only one aspect of the interplay between the sexes. Just as modern psychologists and sex therapists have encouraged to consider the entire sex act as important, the Taoists considered the whole process as symbolic of universal interrelationship. Paradoxically thought, the "selfish" Taoist lover is just the opposite of what we might call selfish in our modern society.
A balanced Taoist magician has an attitude of "equal exchange," while the negative or neurotic Taoist is out for all he can gain personally. He views sex as a struggle or contest. The selfish attitude of using partners to gain immortality consists of inducing one's sex partner to as many orgasms as possible while conserving one's own juices. Western society, on the other hand, considers a lover selfish who values his own orgasms over mutual pleasure.
Taoists practiced sex as a form of meditation which could continue for several days. In order to maintain their vigor, they sought to remain in a state of philosophical calm. By not striving and by remaining detached and cool, they used their concentration to increase sensitivity in every part of the body. This awakened the most subtle sensations in a slowly unfolding process.
Sex with totally awakened consciousness of the "now" can be enjoyed as an end in itself. Since the partner who is first to reach orgasm provides the other with an abundance of life force, sex may be seen as a mock battle in which the "opponents" compete to see who can induce the other to climax. Rather than approaching this as a matter of survival, we could view it as refreshing recreational sex play. Even though it is an arbitrary attitude, in the West orgasm is considered the supreme goal and reward of sex. Aside from certain magical practices, failure to experience sexual release is considered harmful and neurotic. But this attitude contains a cultural bias.
We have become obsessed with "achieving" orgasms, the more the better. We may have lost something by paying little attention to the quality of the experience. An evening of "Taoist lovemaking" might restore some specialness to your relationship. Incorporating some subtle nuances by maximizing body contact with your partner while minimizing leaking of vital fluids. If the partners attempt to complement and harmonize with one another, both will be nourished. When the desire for orgasm is so strong it cannot be resisted, we may submit, and then revive ourselves by sipping some ginseng tea!
Masters of the more advanced Taoist techniques delved into the problem of not wasting their essences, devising ways to prolong pleasure and stave off release. As "physicians" they prescribed herbs and medicine to restore virility. Taoist sages also considered what sexual positions were most effective as cures for specific ailments.
Tantra
Pronounced As: tuntr , in both Hinduism and Buddhism, esoteric tradition of ritual and yoga known for elaborate use of mantra, or symbolic speech, and mandala, or symbolic diagrams; the importance of female deities, or Shakti; cremation-ground practices such as meditation on corpses; and, more so in Hindu than in Buddhist tantra, the ritual use of wine, meat, and sexual intercourse. Tantric practices use both ritual and meditation to unify the devotee with the chosen deity.
In Hindu Tantra, practice is graded into three types, corresponding to three classes of devotees: the animal, i.e., those in whom the guna, or quality, of tamas (darkness) predominates; the heroic, those in whom the guna of rajas (activity) predominates; and the divine, those in whom sattva (goodness) predominates (see Hindu philosophy).
The practice of the heroic devotee entails actual use of the five elements, called the five m's: fish (matsya), meat (mamsa), wine (madya), aphrodisiac cereals (mudra), and sexual intercourse (maithuna). The animal devotee, not yet ready for the heroic practice, performs the rituals with material symbols; for the divine devotee the rituals are purely internal and symbolic.
The object of the rituals, attainable only by the divine devotee, is to awaken kundalini energy, which is identified with Shakti, and merge with the Godhead. In Buddhist Tantra, or Vajrayana, in contrast to the Hindu, the female principle of "wisdom (prajna) is seen as static, whereas the male, or "means (upaya), is active. In Buddhism, rituals that appear to break basic moral precepts have for the most part been dropped, but the complex meditation practices have been retained.
The Kama Sutra, the classical Indian treatise on the Art of Love, describes Sixty-four Arts to be practiced along with the Kama Sutra. The number sixty-four reminds of the hexagrams of the I Ching. These arts add to one's graciousness, charm, and desirability.
These arts and sciences include singing, music, dancing, writing, drawing, painting, sewing, reading, recitation, poetry, sculpture, gymnastics, games, flower arranging, cooking, decoration, perfumery, gardening, mimicry, mental exercises, languages, etiquette, carpentry, magic, chemistry, mineralogy, herbology, healing, gambling, architecture, logic, charm-making, religious rites, household management, disguise, physical sports, and martial arts plus many contemporary activities.
The alchemy described by the tantric texts is often obscure and little can be made from the jargon. The secret "door" will not open to the uninitiated without a key. Rather than the transmutations of baser metals into gold, this alchemy actually takes place within the body itself. It is a hermetic distillation from actual bodily fluids, where all the instruments and utensils used by the alchemist are provided by the body itself.
By appropriate ritual movements, the gross substance within oneself can be transformed into the subtle quintessence that can reinvigorate the physical frame. Through a series of rituals, one makes the body "glow"; this activates one's supernatural faculties and puts one in communication with any entity in the universe. This naturally presupposes a complex system of a complex system of subtle anatomy and physiology based on the chakras or plexes of the etheric body.
All power is promised to him who can siphon the lower energy toward the upper, but this is almost impossible for the ordinary man. A tremendous need for discipline is required, discipline that is usually beyond the average capacity. A sympathetic resonance does exist between the chakras. By tantric methods, the kundalini can be made to blaze up through the chakras, igniting each until this stream of flame reaches the crown, or sahasrara.
One rite commonly celebrated in tantric sects is known as chakra-puja, or circle worship. The participants sit in a circle, implying complete mutual equality among those present. They sit in alternate sexes, male to female, with another couple in the center of the circle. A ceremonial meal consisting of wine, meat, fish, and bread is followed by a site of sexual intercourse. These five items represent certain fundamental categories that are equated with the elements and the interior faculties of the body.
The wine symbolizes fire and the subtle draught of immortality that the tantric must learn to distill and drink. The meat symbolizes air and the bodily functions that must be brought under control. Fish represents water and the techniques of sexual occultism. The bread is the earth, or the natural environment, which must be understood and controlled.
Sexual intercourse (maithuna) symbolizes ether, the quintessence of all the elements, and is a means to the final goal of all tantric endeavors. Through it one apprehends the ultimate reality. The sex act in its normal, gross form may occasionally bring a fleeting revelation of eternal truth, but that would be rare, as the smoke of passion usually clouds the mind. Sex as a sacred symbol unclouded by passion can, however, help you to apprehend the ultimate unity. The genuine rite can reveal being, expand consciousness, and confer true bliss.
Practice of Ritual and Ceremony
There are three phases of every ritual process:
1. Separation from profane or daily life.
2. The transition stage, or twilight zone, which lies between,
3. The new order or perception of reality which occurs in the sacred time of the soul.
The in between, or twilight zone, enables a state of receptivity to be established. Ritual acts reawaken deep layers of the psyche and bring the mythological or archetypal ideas back to memory. Magic (by definition) is the transition from passivity to activity in which the will is essential. Realistic action does not follow schizophrenic magic; the fantasy is a substitute for action where the ego should be weak or even absent.
Ritual is often considered as the celebration of a myth. Myth functions as a paradigm, or model. In this school of thought, the construct of a ritual can be seen as the enactment of this myth, as the myth would be represented as the source of all action. Myth is actually a dynamic expression of the motivational power of the archetype at its core.
The main value of ritual is for the poetic soul. Ritual can be defined as an imitation of a numinous element (or godform) in the life of the aspirant. Ritual can be seen as the outward or visible form of contact or as an epiphany with an inward or spiritual grace. It is essentially a metaphorical expression of creative imagination. The symbol always starts on the inside as a form of consciousness and is projected outward. Magical rituals contain basic elements that must appear in approximately the following sequence:
1. Setting up the circle to define a working area;
2. A form of "banishing" too clear the working area and help concentration and focusing;
3. Middle Pillar Exercise to bring in light and build up libido or magical potency. This helps one visual his or her subtle body or body of light.
4. Invocation, or the "calling in," of the desired godform or attribute in an attempt at self-transformation.
5. Charging of a eucharist with the energy of the godform, and its consumption as an epiphany with the god.
6. Meditative period.
7. Banishing to return the aspirant to "normal" consciousness.
8. Closing the temple.
These steps may be expanded to include divination, dance, dramatic scenarios, or sex magic acts. Any appropriate gestures may be added (like massage or mudras) but none of these basics can be omitted without incurring the peril of exposing the soul to random forces.
The purpose of ritual lies in its expression as an art form. Partaking in its performance is an end in itself. The spiritual import lies in the quality with which the ritual is conducted. Ritual, as symbolic action,is the enactment of mythic patterns for the sheer joy of the relationship with the archetypal dimension. Remember, the purpose of ritual is an end in itself. This can leave no rationale behind "lusting for results."
Coniunctio is an alchemical term symbolizing the unification of opposites. When the opposites to be united are the masculine consciousness and feminine unconsciousness, the union is termed the royal marriage. It is a transcendent symbol of the self and embodies psychic totality, or wholeness.
Sex magic is described metaphorically in alchemical terms in Israel Regardie's classic on western magic, The Tree of Life (Chapter 16). He learned of it from his work in the occult group, the Golden Dawn and as colleague of Crowley. O.T.O. rites reflect their ancestry in Tantric Buddhism and contain great power.
Aleister Crowley unpacked his complete formula for sex magic in both Liber Samekh and Liber Aleph, the Book of Wisdom or Folly (p. 86). Restated, in more common terms, it involves the following steps (presupposed are active magical pathworking, an oath, banishing rites, and so on.)
1. Discover your true will. What is the purpose of this magical operation? Is it absolutely necessary and desirable? What are some possible unforeseen consequences? Are you at a psychological impasse? Is your personality stable or unstable? Do not seek to actualize your lower desires with sex magic. Its proper application is personal transformation.
2. Personify your intent by naming it. Concoct an imagined form to express your will by using appropriate symbolism. For example, if your desire is for a balanced personality picture yourself being that nascent form, perhaps superimposed with a balanced scale.
3. Purify and consecrate this entity. Make sure it is a pure archetypal form uncontaminated by your complexes and prejudices. As a "child" it is all potential. This is the phase of generating desire through foreplay while constantly keeping the attention on the purpose of the magical operation.
4. Visualize the image of the magical child upon entry. This visualization might be the actualization of your own potential or a vision of yourself in the future. The union of opposites offers the "child" a vehicle for manifestation once the gestation period is full.
5. Consummate the marriage with a golden ring. This is a euphemism for the climax or orgasm. This moment just before orgasm is a very open, oceanic psychological state and a potential time for reprogramming the subconscious. You can change yourself now, just as habits can be altered with self-hypnosis. Careful control of the attention at this moment is vital to success. Don't let the thoughts wander at this time even in regular sexual relations, as the thought held at this moment tends to manifest!
6. Consume the eucharist (consecrated substance). The power of the sexual act has been transferred to a material body symbolized by the mingled fluids of the partners. Eating the sexual fluids means that one assimilates and digests or integrates, the qualities represented by the "magical Child" as the union of opposites. It is a part of oneself, united with its opposite and made one's self again. It is love reborn.
There are greater and lesser forms of coniunctio in the process of psychological transformation. In the early stage comes the union with the shadow. This signifies the reunion of mind and body. This heals our Cartesian duality, or the cultural mind-body split. Later comes the reunification with the anima/animus, our contrasexual nature), then union with the higher self. This final coniunctio produces spiritual rebirth in an experience of the "one world," where body, soul, and spirit are reunited.
One must be extremely careful in employing sex magic. The criteria for all other rituals of transformation apply including "is this absolutely necessary?" Usually this is not the case, and the impulsive aspirant bites off more than he can chew. Literal practice of sex magic on the physical plane might represent a gross misunderstanding of what should be an internal psychological process. Be careful not to confuse the discrete planes of awareness that include the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual levels of meaning.
Remember that you will get what you ask for, (i.e. the bud-will), but you may get a great deal you had not for in karmic repercussions and unforeseen consequences.
Mass of the Holy Ghost
The first use of sex within the rituals of western traditions of Magick began with the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), an "800-year old Masonic order" in Germany. They had studied the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of tantra and found that the energy contained in those rituals were greater than known technique.
At the turn of the century, Aleister Crowley became their new Outer Head of the Order (O.H.O.) and rewrote those rituals for a more contemporary application. For a clear picture of this technique, it is recommended that the student first read Chapter 16 of The Tree of Life by Israel Regardie. Then read pages 82-86 of Liber Aleph.
The Book of Wisdom or Folly by Crowley, page 86, instructs:
"de Formula Tota on the complete formula:
Here then is thy Schedule for all Operations of Magick. First: thou shalt discover thy True Will, as I have already taught thee, and that Bud therefore which is the Purpose of this Operation.
Next, formulate this Bud-Will as a Person, seeking or constructing it, and naming it, according to thine Holy Qabalah, and its infallible Rule of Truth.
Third: Purify and consecrate this Person, concentrating upon him, and against all else. This Preparation shall continue in all thy daily Life. Mark well: make ready a New Child immediately after every Birth.
Fourth: make an especial and direct Invocation at thy Mass, before the Introit, formulating a visible Image of this Child, and offering the Right of Incarnation.
Fifth: perform the Mass, not omitting the Ipiklesis, and let there be a Golden Wedding Ring at the Marriage of thy Lion with thine Eagle. [Ed-i.e. a coniunctio or Royal Marriage with mutual orgasm].
Sixth: at the Consumption of the Eucharist accept this Child, loosing thy Consciousness in him, until he be well assimilated within thee.
Now then do this continuously, for by Repetition cometh forth both Strength and Skill, and the Effect is cumulative, if thou allow no time for it to dissipate itself."
What Crowley has described is known as the "Mass of the Holy Ghost." I will now describe in simple terms how this formula is applied to sex magick.
Discover your True Will. What is the Purpose of the Operation? Do you need money; is magick really the easiest way to acquire it? Or perhaps you wish to have some event occur, or transform yourself or personality, etc.
"Name it"...as a person, an entity which has its own personality. It could be that you wish to change a habit within yourself. If that is the case, then treat this new proposed change as a new entity, a new person which is not the old you. This is the detail to the purpose.
Purify and consecrate this new person. This is the point where you and your partner generate the Desire...the foreplay with each non-verbally reminding the other continuously of the Purpose of the Operation. This is the Bud-Will.
Formulate an image of this Bud-Will into a child (a Magickal Child). With entry, you both begin to redefine the Child. This is properly called synergy: the co-creation of new information to add and supplement the original conceptual Intent. It is the Invocation. You begin to live what you create -- give it life. For visualization, the Red Lion is the male essence and the White Eagle is the female menstruum.
Form the bond with a gold ring. This is the climax! The Red Lion becomes the White Lion and the White Eagle becomes the Red Eagle. Note: The thought during a sexual climax...happens! (This is the mysterious Masonic "secret").
Consume the eucharist, eat it and know that no other energy is necessary. After the climax, both male and female should eat the conjoined sexual fluids. The eucharist in alchemical terms is the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher's Stone.
Repetition of the thought and act brings Strength and Skill.
Pronounced As: tuntr , in both Hinduism and Buddhism, esoteric tradition of ritual and yoga known for elaborate use of mantra, or symbolic speech, and mandala, or symbolic diagrams; the importance of female deities, or Shakti; cremation-ground practices such as meditation on corpses; and, more so in Hindu than in Buddhist tantra, the ritual use of wine, meat, and sexual intercourse. Tantric practices use both ritual and meditation to unify the devotee with the chosen deity.
In Hindu Tantra, practice is graded into three types, corresponding to three classes of devotees: the animal, i.e., those in whom the guna, or quality, of tamas (darkness) predominates; the heroic, those in whom the guna of rajas (activity) predominates; and the divine, those in whom sattva (goodness) predominates (see Hindu philosophy).
The practice of the heroic devotee entails actual use of the five elements, called the five m's: fish (matsya), meat (mamsa), wine (madya), aphrodisiac cereals (mudra), and sexual intercourse (maithuna). The animal devotee, not yet ready for the heroic practice, performs the rituals with material symbols; for the divine devotee the rituals are purely internal and symbolic.
The object of the rituals, attainable only by the divine devotee, is to awaken kundalini energy, which is identified with Shakti, and merge with the Godhead. In Buddhist Tantra, or Vajrayana, in contrast to the Hindu, the female principle of "wisdom (prajna) is seen as static, whereas the male, or "means (upaya), is active. In Buddhism, rituals that appear to break basic moral precepts have for the most part been dropped, but the complex meditation practices have been retained.
The Kama Sutra, the classical Indian treatise on the Art of Love, describes Sixty-four Arts to be practiced along with the Kama Sutra. The number sixty-four reminds of the hexagrams of the I Ching. These arts add to one's graciousness, charm, and desirability.
These arts and sciences include singing, music, dancing, writing, drawing, painting, sewing, reading, recitation, poetry, sculpture, gymnastics, games, flower arranging, cooking, decoration, perfumery, gardening, mimicry, mental exercises, languages, etiquette, carpentry, magic, chemistry, mineralogy, herbology, healing, gambling, architecture, logic, charm-making, religious rites, household management, disguise, physical sports, and martial arts plus many contemporary activities.
The alchemy described by the tantric texts is often obscure and little can be made from the jargon. The secret "door" will not open to the uninitiated without a key. Rather than the transmutations of baser metals into gold, this alchemy actually takes place within the body itself. It is a hermetic distillation from actual bodily fluids, where all the instruments and utensils used by the alchemist are provided by the body itself.
By appropriate ritual movements, the gross substance within oneself can be transformed into the subtle quintessence that can reinvigorate the physical frame. Through a series of rituals, one makes the body "glow"; this activates one's supernatural faculties and puts one in communication with any entity in the universe. This naturally presupposes a complex system of a complex system of subtle anatomy and physiology based on the chakras or plexes of the etheric body.
All power is promised to him who can siphon the lower energy toward the upper, but this is almost impossible for the ordinary man. A tremendous need for discipline is required, discipline that is usually beyond the average capacity. A sympathetic resonance does exist between the chakras. By tantric methods, the kundalini can be made to blaze up through the chakras, igniting each until this stream of flame reaches the crown, or sahasrara.
One rite commonly celebrated in tantric sects is known as chakra-puja, or circle worship. The participants sit in a circle, implying complete mutual equality among those present. They sit in alternate sexes, male to female, with another couple in the center of the circle. A ceremonial meal consisting of wine, meat, fish, and bread is followed by a site of sexual intercourse. These five items represent certain fundamental categories that are equated with the elements and the interior faculties of the body.
The wine symbolizes fire and the subtle draught of immortality that the tantric must learn to distill and drink. The meat symbolizes air and the bodily functions that must be brought under control. Fish represents water and the techniques of sexual occultism. The bread is the earth, or the natural environment, which must be understood and controlled.
Sexual intercourse (maithuna) symbolizes ether, the quintessence of all the elements, and is a means to the final goal of all tantric endeavors. Through it one apprehends the ultimate reality. The sex act in its normal, gross form may occasionally bring a fleeting revelation of eternal truth, but that would be rare, as the smoke of passion usually clouds the mind. Sex as a sacred symbol unclouded by passion can, however, help you to apprehend the ultimate unity. The genuine rite can reveal being, expand consciousness, and confer true bliss.
Practice of Ritual and Ceremony
There are three phases of every ritual process:
1. Separation from profane or daily life.
2. The transition stage, or twilight zone, which lies between,
3. The new order or perception of reality which occurs in the sacred time of the soul.
The in between, or twilight zone, enables a state of receptivity to be established. Ritual acts reawaken deep layers of the psyche and bring the mythological or archetypal ideas back to memory. Magic (by definition) is the transition from passivity to activity in which the will is essential. Realistic action does not follow schizophrenic magic; the fantasy is a substitute for action where the ego should be weak or even absent.
Ritual is often considered as the celebration of a myth. Myth functions as a paradigm, or model. In this school of thought, the construct of a ritual can be seen as the enactment of this myth, as the myth would be represented as the source of all action. Myth is actually a dynamic expression of the motivational power of the archetype at its core.
The main value of ritual is for the poetic soul. Ritual can be defined as an imitation of a numinous element (or godform) in the life of the aspirant. Ritual can be seen as the outward or visible form of contact or as an epiphany with an inward or spiritual grace. It is essentially a metaphorical expression of creative imagination. The symbol always starts on the inside as a form of consciousness and is projected outward. Magical rituals contain basic elements that must appear in approximately the following sequence:
1. Setting up the circle to define a working area;
2. A form of "banishing" too clear the working area and help concentration and focusing;
3. Middle Pillar Exercise to bring in light and build up libido or magical potency. This helps one visual his or her subtle body or body of light.
4. Invocation, or the "calling in," of the desired godform or attribute in an attempt at self-transformation.
5. Charging of a eucharist with the energy of the godform, and its consumption as an epiphany with the god.
6. Meditative period.
7. Banishing to return the aspirant to "normal" consciousness.
8. Closing the temple.
These steps may be expanded to include divination, dance, dramatic scenarios, or sex magic acts. Any appropriate gestures may be added (like massage or mudras) but none of these basics can be omitted without incurring the peril of exposing the soul to random forces.
The purpose of ritual lies in its expression as an art form. Partaking in its performance is an end in itself. The spiritual import lies in the quality with which the ritual is conducted. Ritual, as symbolic action,is the enactment of mythic patterns for the sheer joy of the relationship with the archetypal dimension. Remember, the purpose of ritual is an end in itself. This can leave no rationale behind "lusting for results."
Coniunctio is an alchemical term symbolizing the unification of opposites. When the opposites to be united are the masculine consciousness and feminine unconsciousness, the union is termed the royal marriage. It is a transcendent symbol of the self and embodies psychic totality, or wholeness.
Sex magic is described metaphorically in alchemical terms in Israel Regardie's classic on western magic, The Tree of Life (Chapter 16). He learned of it from his work in the occult group, the Golden Dawn and as colleague of Crowley. O.T.O. rites reflect their ancestry in Tantric Buddhism and contain great power.
Aleister Crowley unpacked his complete formula for sex magic in both Liber Samekh and Liber Aleph, the Book of Wisdom or Folly (p. 86). Restated, in more common terms, it involves the following steps (presupposed are active magical pathworking, an oath, banishing rites, and so on.)
1. Discover your true will. What is the purpose of this magical operation? Is it absolutely necessary and desirable? What are some possible unforeseen consequences? Are you at a psychological impasse? Is your personality stable or unstable? Do not seek to actualize your lower desires with sex magic. Its proper application is personal transformation.
2. Personify your intent by naming it. Concoct an imagined form to express your will by using appropriate symbolism. For example, if your desire is for a balanced personality picture yourself being that nascent form, perhaps superimposed with a balanced scale.
3. Purify and consecrate this entity. Make sure it is a pure archetypal form uncontaminated by your complexes and prejudices. As a "child" it is all potential. This is the phase of generating desire through foreplay while constantly keeping the attention on the purpose of the magical operation.
4. Visualize the image of the magical child upon entry. This visualization might be the actualization of your own potential or a vision of yourself in the future. The union of opposites offers the "child" a vehicle for manifestation once the gestation period is full.
5. Consummate the marriage with a golden ring. This is a euphemism for the climax or orgasm. This moment just before orgasm is a very open, oceanic psychological state and a potential time for reprogramming the subconscious. You can change yourself now, just as habits can be altered with self-hypnosis. Careful control of the attention at this moment is vital to success. Don't let the thoughts wander at this time even in regular sexual relations, as the thought held at this moment tends to manifest!
6. Consume the eucharist (consecrated substance). The power of the sexual act has been transferred to a material body symbolized by the mingled fluids of the partners. Eating the sexual fluids means that one assimilates and digests or integrates, the qualities represented by the "magical Child" as the union of opposites. It is a part of oneself, united with its opposite and made one's self again. It is love reborn.
There are greater and lesser forms of coniunctio in the process of psychological transformation. In the early stage comes the union with the shadow. This signifies the reunion of mind and body. This heals our Cartesian duality, or the cultural mind-body split. Later comes the reunification with the anima/animus, our contrasexual nature), then union with the higher self. This final coniunctio produces spiritual rebirth in an experience of the "one world," where body, soul, and spirit are reunited.
One must be extremely careful in employing sex magic. The criteria for all other rituals of transformation apply including "is this absolutely necessary?" Usually this is not the case, and the impulsive aspirant bites off more than he can chew. Literal practice of sex magic on the physical plane might represent a gross misunderstanding of what should be an internal psychological process. Be careful not to confuse the discrete planes of awareness that include the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual levels of meaning.
Remember that you will get what you ask for, (i.e. the bud-will), but you may get a great deal you had not for in karmic repercussions and unforeseen consequences.
Mass of the Holy Ghost
The first use of sex within the rituals of western traditions of Magick began with the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), an "800-year old Masonic order" in Germany. They had studied the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of tantra and found that the energy contained in those rituals were greater than known technique.
At the turn of the century, Aleister Crowley became their new Outer Head of the Order (O.H.O.) and rewrote those rituals for a more contemporary application. For a clear picture of this technique, it is recommended that the student first read Chapter 16 of The Tree of Life by Israel Regardie. Then read pages 82-86 of Liber Aleph.
The Book of Wisdom or Folly by Crowley, page 86, instructs:
"de Formula Tota on the complete formula:
Here then is thy Schedule for all Operations of Magick. First: thou shalt discover thy True Will, as I have already taught thee, and that Bud therefore which is the Purpose of this Operation.
Next, formulate this Bud-Will as a Person, seeking or constructing it, and naming it, according to thine Holy Qabalah, and its infallible Rule of Truth.
Third: Purify and consecrate this Person, concentrating upon him, and against all else. This Preparation shall continue in all thy daily Life. Mark well: make ready a New Child immediately after every Birth.
Fourth: make an especial and direct Invocation at thy Mass, before the Introit, formulating a visible Image of this Child, and offering the Right of Incarnation.
Fifth: perform the Mass, not omitting the Ipiklesis, and let there be a Golden Wedding Ring at the Marriage of thy Lion with thine Eagle. [Ed-i.e. a coniunctio or Royal Marriage with mutual orgasm].
Sixth: at the Consumption of the Eucharist accept this Child, loosing thy Consciousness in him, until he be well assimilated within thee.
Now then do this continuously, for by Repetition cometh forth both Strength and Skill, and the Effect is cumulative, if thou allow no time for it to dissipate itself."
What Crowley has described is known as the "Mass of the Holy Ghost." I will now describe in simple terms how this formula is applied to sex magick.
Discover your True Will. What is the Purpose of the Operation? Do you need money; is magick really the easiest way to acquire it? Or perhaps you wish to have some event occur, or transform yourself or personality, etc.
"Name it"...as a person, an entity which has its own personality. It could be that you wish to change a habit within yourself. If that is the case, then treat this new proposed change as a new entity, a new person which is not the old you. This is the detail to the purpose.
Purify and consecrate this new person. This is the point where you and your partner generate the Desire...the foreplay with each non-verbally reminding the other continuously of the Purpose of the Operation. This is the Bud-Will.
Formulate an image of this Bud-Will into a child (a Magickal Child). With entry, you both begin to redefine the Child. This is properly called synergy: the co-creation of new information to add and supplement the original conceptual Intent. It is the Invocation. You begin to live what you create -- give it life. For visualization, the Red Lion is the male essence and the White Eagle is the female menstruum.
Form the bond with a gold ring. This is the climax! The Red Lion becomes the White Lion and the White Eagle becomes the Red Eagle. Note: The thought during a sexual climax...happens! (This is the mysterious Masonic "secret").
Consume the eucharist, eat it and know that no other energy is necessary. After the climax, both male and female should eat the conjoined sexual fluids. The eucharist in alchemical terms is the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher's Stone.
Repetition of the thought and act brings Strength and Skill.
Scent
It has been said that is only with scent and silk and artifices that we raise love from an instinct to a passion.
No matter how much we clean ourselves, we all emit a unique odor that is individual. We all affect one another with the chemical codes which we emit. We communicate through a silent, invisible, virtually subliminal smell language whether at work, in the dining room, or in the bedroom. Smell is mediated by olfactory receptors which are directly connected to a portion of the brain called the olfactory bulb.
This "nose brain" is an exposed portion of the brain that samples the external world. This nose-brain deals with the regulation of motor activities and the primary drives of sex, hunger, and thirst. Stimulation of the olfactory bulb also shoots electrical signals to an almond-shaped area of the limbic system, called the amygdala, the emotional part of the brain, concerned with visceral, sensory and behavioral mechanisms. This is why odors produce such strong emotional reactions and bring up memories. The alchemy of scent deals with the ability of aromas to evoke psychological and sensory responses.
From time immemorial perfumes and sweet-smelling herbs have played an important part in both religion and sex magic. Exotic scents have charmed and lured both men and women and are part of the broader aspect known as the alchemy of scent. Perfumes are actually love potions.
A truly "magical" scent works on the subconscious mind, as well as the conscious, to elicit a specific predetermined response. Scents can also be used to stimulate the sexual centers directly, and to help us "anchor" positive feelings, thoughts, and states. Then by smelling the scent alone, we can re-evoke the gestalt of those peak experiences. To excite is to set in motion.
Certain scents are so uplifting in their divine essence they seems to carry us to transcendent realms, to a momentary state of rapture. Specific formulae not only to enhance desirability and call forth predictable responses, they can also condition our consciousness through association. They can be stimulating, soothing, activate our psychic qualities, or be healing. They stimulate us at all levels -- physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Tapping this potential, we can use scents as a language for communicating with and evoking our sub- and superconscious energies, our creativity.
Early cultures recognized the mysterious effects exerted over them y fragrant substances -- their trade promoted the formation of regular trade routes. The ancients extended their delight at these scents and supposed that their gods likewise enjoyed them. They burned fabulous incense to the gods regularly. They deduced that heaven must surely be filled with luxurious olfactory delights.
Today's commercial perfumes come in three main classes: "asexual or virginal scents" found mostly in soaps and household products which imply cleanliness and purity --citrons, mints, lavender, raspberry, strawberry, and cinnamon; "masculine scents" which rely on spicey and woodsy combinations of clove, coumarin, pine, civet, bitter orange, and patchouli; "feminine scents" include sensual, powerful exotic oils and florals such as rose and jasmine, and the favorities of history's courtesans, such as musk, ambergris, and sandalwood. If a woman wears musk or ambergris, she generally means business. Likewise a man who wears cologne with civet, patchouli, or vetivert.
The ancients had astrological correspondences for each planet and the herbal, resinous and floral fragrances. This doctrine of signatures had its own emotional logic for the attributes. We can still experiment with them for fun and to increase our aesthetic enjoyment of their properties. We can enhance our bedrooms with sachets, potpourris, incense and perfume extracts.
Royal Essence is one of the most deliciously fragrant of all homemade perfume blends. To combine as a perfume oil mix 25 parts ambergris oil or tincture (now only synthetic is available as whales were the original source), 12 parts musk oil or tincture, 5 parts civet, 2 parts rose oil, 3 parts cinnamon oil, 2 parts rhodium, 2 parts neroli oil. Cut with alcohol for cologne, or distilled water for toilet water.
Resins and gums such as frankincense, myrrh, galbanum and storax were blended with other exotic ingredients for temple incense, and can still be employed with good effect. The ancient Egyptian Kyphi was welcomed by all the gods. An ancient papyrus lists its ingredients as resin, wine, galangal root, juniper berries, aromatic rush root, broom, mastic gum, myrrh gum, grapes and honey. It was also considered a medicine and sometimes added to food.
A lovely Tibetan incense is made of 2 parts white sandalwood, 2 parts ground cinnamon, 3 parts powdered cypress, juniper or cedar leaves and wood, 1 part gum benzoin, 1/2 part saltpeter to keep it burning, a few drops of musk oil, and gum arabic, diluted as required.
It has been said that is only with scent and silk and artifices that we raise love from an instinct to a passion.
No matter how much we clean ourselves, we all emit a unique odor that is individual. We all affect one another with the chemical codes which we emit. We communicate through a silent, invisible, virtually subliminal smell language whether at work, in the dining room, or in the bedroom. Smell is mediated by olfactory receptors which are directly connected to a portion of the brain called the olfactory bulb.
This "nose brain" is an exposed portion of the brain that samples the external world. This nose-brain deals with the regulation of motor activities and the primary drives of sex, hunger, and thirst. Stimulation of the olfactory bulb also shoots electrical signals to an almond-shaped area of the limbic system, called the amygdala, the emotional part of the brain, concerned with visceral, sensory and behavioral mechanisms. This is why odors produce such strong emotional reactions and bring up memories. The alchemy of scent deals with the ability of aromas to evoke psychological and sensory responses.
From time immemorial perfumes and sweet-smelling herbs have played an important part in both religion and sex magic. Exotic scents have charmed and lured both men and women and are part of the broader aspect known as the alchemy of scent. Perfumes are actually love potions.
A truly "magical" scent works on the subconscious mind, as well as the conscious, to elicit a specific predetermined response. Scents can also be used to stimulate the sexual centers directly, and to help us "anchor" positive feelings, thoughts, and states. Then by smelling the scent alone, we can re-evoke the gestalt of those peak experiences. To excite is to set in motion.
Certain scents are so uplifting in their divine essence they seems to carry us to transcendent realms, to a momentary state of rapture. Specific formulae not only to enhance desirability and call forth predictable responses, they can also condition our consciousness through association. They can be stimulating, soothing, activate our psychic qualities, or be healing. They stimulate us at all levels -- physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Tapping this potential, we can use scents as a language for communicating with and evoking our sub- and superconscious energies, our creativity.
Early cultures recognized the mysterious effects exerted over them y fragrant substances -- their trade promoted the formation of regular trade routes. The ancients extended their delight at these scents and supposed that their gods likewise enjoyed them. They burned fabulous incense to the gods regularly. They deduced that heaven must surely be filled with luxurious olfactory delights.
Today's commercial perfumes come in three main classes: "asexual or virginal scents" found mostly in soaps and household products which imply cleanliness and purity --citrons, mints, lavender, raspberry, strawberry, and cinnamon; "masculine scents" which rely on spicey and woodsy combinations of clove, coumarin, pine, civet, bitter orange, and patchouli; "feminine scents" include sensual, powerful exotic oils and florals such as rose and jasmine, and the favorities of history's courtesans, such as musk, ambergris, and sandalwood. If a woman wears musk or ambergris, she generally means business. Likewise a man who wears cologne with civet, patchouli, or vetivert.
The ancients had astrological correspondences for each planet and the herbal, resinous and floral fragrances. This doctrine of signatures had its own emotional logic for the attributes. We can still experiment with them for fun and to increase our aesthetic enjoyment of their properties. We can enhance our bedrooms with sachets, potpourris, incense and perfume extracts.
Royal Essence is one of the most deliciously fragrant of all homemade perfume blends. To combine as a perfume oil mix 25 parts ambergris oil or tincture (now only synthetic is available as whales were the original source), 12 parts musk oil or tincture, 5 parts civet, 2 parts rose oil, 3 parts cinnamon oil, 2 parts rhodium, 2 parts neroli oil. Cut with alcohol for cologne, or distilled water for toilet water.
Resins and gums such as frankincense, myrrh, galbanum and storax were blended with other exotic ingredients for temple incense, and can still be employed with good effect. The ancient Egyptian Kyphi was welcomed by all the gods. An ancient papyrus lists its ingredients as resin, wine, galangal root, juniper berries, aromatic rush root, broom, mastic gum, myrrh gum, grapes and honey. It was also considered a medicine and sometimes added to food.
A lovely Tibetan incense is made of 2 parts white sandalwood, 2 parts ground cinnamon, 3 parts powdered cypress, juniper or cedar leaves and wood, 1 part gum benzoin, 1/2 part saltpeter to keep it burning, a few drops of musk oil, and gum arabic, diluted as required.
Mythic Dimension
Shiva and Shakti;
Krishna and Radha
God and Sophia; God and Shekinah
Joseph Campbell called myth "a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs."
The significance of Shiva is that he is the reconciliation of all opposites. He is both creator and destroyer of all form. He is terrible and mild, good and evil, eternal rest and ceaseless activity.
His consort really is only a part of himself - his 'power' by which he creates, sustains, and destroys. In the Shakti cults of power, the 'power' itself is worshipped to the exclusion of Shiva himself. This power is the active, committed side of his nature. Shakti is the essence of bliss, love-power.
In the full figure of Shiva, male and female principles are united. Or, he is shown as half male and half female. His primary symbol of worship is the lingam, or phallus, which is always erect. Lingam and yoni together represent the totally of Nature and all created existence. The lingam is a natural symbol of supreme creative power. The Tantras teach there is a lingam within each yoni, reminding of our inherent androgyny.
In Sexual Secrets, Douglas and Slinger say, "Knowledge of Shiva, the Transcendental, permits passage through the doorway to other worlds. Identify with the vital mind energy of Shiva during tantric love-making. This will eventually cause an experience of transcendence beyond your normal worldly role or limitations. Shiva is experienced as a penetration into the depths of space, as being pulled out into the universe, beyond all knowable things and events." Those who experience this are described as heroic, enterprising, skillful, persevering, talented, contented and firm-minded.
Through the intimate union of Shiva and Shakti in ecstatic delight, the Jiva, the individual soul, becomes freed from the bondage of past lives. Then the couple can truly soar to the heights of liberation. This is symbolized as the serpent power kundalini, or in the west by the caduceus. The twin serpents twine together and open the center way, which kindles a mind-expanding then transcending influx of power in the top chakras, the Third Eye and the Crown.
Krishna, the eastern Dionysus, also embodies the same ecstatic mind-expanding state of spiritual liberation. He is eternally entwined with his consort Radha in blissful union. A western equivalent is the Gnostic myth of God and his mystic Sophia, divine Wisdom; also in the qabalistic version, God and Shekinah, the Bride who bring Kether or the Holy Spirit into Malkuth, or embodiment. Thus, are married Jews advised to make love every Friday night and bring Shekinah into the household by sharing their marital bliss.
Normally, our attention is attracted to the world through the mind and the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Once all the senses have been completely sated, there is a paradoxical shift toward the Void state. In order to realize our true self, we have to invert our attention and enter the inner realms. To do so, our attention must be collected at a point from where the soul can enter the regions beyond. This point is the seat of the soul in the body, located between and behind the two eyebrows.
Anima/Animus - the Syzygy
In the creation myths of many cultures, Primordial Wholeness divides into polarized aspects. The Syzygy indicates this archetypal coupling that is echoed in Tantric Rites, where one aspect is never separated from the other. In the "impersonal" aspect of lunar experience, the Great Goddess is never separated from her masculine Son-Lover. One implies the other for wholeness. They exemplify the soul-spirit relationship.
On the "personal" level of lunar experience we find the tandem of anima/animus. They are the contrasexual component each human carries within. These soul figures embody our latent capacities for expression and realization of the traits normally reserved for the opposite sex. Thus, the animus leads a woman to the outer world and promotes her ability in focused, rational thinking; the anima guides a man through the inner worlds of relationship, according to Jung. This is the level of psychological "complex" where there is a blending of archetypal realities and individual experience.
Thus, the imagery of anima/us is based in archetypal symbolism and in childhood memories of "significant others" of the opposite sex. This includes parental attitudes and behavior, grandparent's influence, sibling, first-love, and cultural expectations and norms -- all those things that go into our own unique "love map." It take the elements of fate and destiny and combines them in a personal formula.
Anima/us represents the balancing of masculine and feminine traits in the individual. This balancing is a form of coniunctio, or sacred marriage, a union which produces the magical child which is the higher self.
The animus is the masculine personification of the soul. He carries both a transcendent spiritual aspect and a personal aspect. He is shown in the magickal symbolism of Yesod: a beautiful, naked, muscular man. One the archetypal level anima/us is equivalent to the Taoist Yin-Yang concept, a system which embraces a non-combative play of opposites, a circulation of soul.
Anima and Animus are potential guides to the depths of the Unconscious, which is why they are acted out and emulated in Tantric Rites. They form a bridge between the divine and daily life. They are factors which transcend consciousness, so in a relationship which seems to have everything going for it, there can be friction (or "animosity") produced by unconscious forces operating below the surface.
Most of these troubles stem from projecting the anima/us image onto our love ones and maneuvering them into fulfilling our expectations -- or trying to. Internal conflicts come from the split nature of anima/us we experience in modern life. This revolves mainly around the gulf between the Spiritual and Sensual aspects of the inner figure. A man experiences the split between holy Mother and the erotic goddess of his dreams.
For example, the spiritual animus might be projected onto the figure of a wise old man, a ghostly lover to whom a woman goes in fantasy, or an idealized brother/sister relationship devoid of sexual options. The sensual animus might be imaged by darker gods of impersonal sexuality, phallic or obscene -- more practically onto "bad boys.". In any event, the animus represents the woman's need for creative expression. The more fully she can manifest this trait, the better her inner relationship to the animus becomes. He provides her with inner light, not inspiration which is a function of her anima nature, core of her Self.
Anima/us excite those feelings of longing, awe, fear of the unknown, and incomprehensibility. The transparent power of love can appear as a possession by another, against which rational thought has no protection. It is the emotional-sexual level and its projections coupled with the libido generator of tantric rites that fuels sacred sexuality -- the quest for the Beloved, in its myriad forms.
Shiva and Shakti;
Krishna and Radha
God and Sophia; God and Shekinah
Joseph Campbell called myth "a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs."
The significance of Shiva is that he is the reconciliation of all opposites. He is both creator and destroyer of all form. He is terrible and mild, good and evil, eternal rest and ceaseless activity.
His consort really is only a part of himself - his 'power' by which he creates, sustains, and destroys. In the Shakti cults of power, the 'power' itself is worshipped to the exclusion of Shiva himself. This power is the active, committed side of his nature. Shakti is the essence of bliss, love-power.
In the full figure of Shiva, male and female principles are united. Or, he is shown as half male and half female. His primary symbol of worship is the lingam, or phallus, which is always erect. Lingam and yoni together represent the totally of Nature and all created existence. The lingam is a natural symbol of supreme creative power. The Tantras teach there is a lingam within each yoni, reminding of our inherent androgyny.
In Sexual Secrets, Douglas and Slinger say, "Knowledge of Shiva, the Transcendental, permits passage through the doorway to other worlds. Identify with the vital mind energy of Shiva during tantric love-making. This will eventually cause an experience of transcendence beyond your normal worldly role or limitations. Shiva is experienced as a penetration into the depths of space, as being pulled out into the universe, beyond all knowable things and events." Those who experience this are described as heroic, enterprising, skillful, persevering, talented, contented and firm-minded.
Through the intimate union of Shiva and Shakti in ecstatic delight, the Jiva, the individual soul, becomes freed from the bondage of past lives. Then the couple can truly soar to the heights of liberation. This is symbolized as the serpent power kundalini, or in the west by the caduceus. The twin serpents twine together and open the center way, which kindles a mind-expanding then transcending influx of power in the top chakras, the Third Eye and the Crown.
Krishna, the eastern Dionysus, also embodies the same ecstatic mind-expanding state of spiritual liberation. He is eternally entwined with his consort Radha in blissful union. A western equivalent is the Gnostic myth of God and his mystic Sophia, divine Wisdom; also in the qabalistic version, God and Shekinah, the Bride who bring Kether or the Holy Spirit into Malkuth, or embodiment. Thus, are married Jews advised to make love every Friday night and bring Shekinah into the household by sharing their marital bliss.
Normally, our attention is attracted to the world through the mind and the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Once all the senses have been completely sated, there is a paradoxical shift toward the Void state. In order to realize our true self, we have to invert our attention and enter the inner realms. To do so, our attention must be collected at a point from where the soul can enter the regions beyond. This point is the seat of the soul in the body, located between and behind the two eyebrows.
Anima/Animus - the Syzygy
In the creation myths of many cultures, Primordial Wholeness divides into polarized aspects. The Syzygy indicates this archetypal coupling that is echoed in Tantric Rites, where one aspect is never separated from the other. In the "impersonal" aspect of lunar experience, the Great Goddess is never separated from her masculine Son-Lover. One implies the other for wholeness. They exemplify the soul-spirit relationship.
On the "personal" level of lunar experience we find the tandem of anima/animus. They are the contrasexual component each human carries within. These soul figures embody our latent capacities for expression and realization of the traits normally reserved for the opposite sex. Thus, the animus leads a woman to the outer world and promotes her ability in focused, rational thinking; the anima guides a man through the inner worlds of relationship, according to Jung. This is the level of psychological "complex" where there is a blending of archetypal realities and individual experience.
Thus, the imagery of anima/us is based in archetypal symbolism and in childhood memories of "significant others" of the opposite sex. This includes parental attitudes and behavior, grandparent's influence, sibling, first-love, and cultural expectations and norms -- all those things that go into our own unique "love map." It take the elements of fate and destiny and combines them in a personal formula.
Anima/us represents the balancing of masculine and feminine traits in the individual. This balancing is a form of coniunctio, or sacred marriage, a union which produces the magical child which is the higher self.
The animus is the masculine personification of the soul. He carries both a transcendent spiritual aspect and a personal aspect. He is shown in the magickal symbolism of Yesod: a beautiful, naked, muscular man. One the archetypal level anima/us is equivalent to the Taoist Yin-Yang concept, a system which embraces a non-combative play of opposites, a circulation of soul.
Anima and Animus are potential guides to the depths of the Unconscious, which is why they are acted out and emulated in Tantric Rites. They form a bridge between the divine and daily life. They are factors which transcend consciousness, so in a relationship which seems to have everything going for it, there can be friction (or "animosity") produced by unconscious forces operating below the surface.
Most of these troubles stem from projecting the anima/us image onto our love ones and maneuvering them into fulfilling our expectations -- or trying to. Internal conflicts come from the split nature of anima/us we experience in modern life. This revolves mainly around the gulf between the Spiritual and Sensual aspects of the inner figure. A man experiences the split between holy Mother and the erotic goddess of his dreams.
For example, the spiritual animus might be projected onto the figure of a wise old man, a ghostly lover to whom a woman goes in fantasy, or an idealized brother/sister relationship devoid of sexual options. The sensual animus might be imaged by darker gods of impersonal sexuality, phallic or obscene -- more practically onto "bad boys.". In any event, the animus represents the woman's need for creative expression. The more fully she can manifest this trait, the better her inner relationship to the animus becomes. He provides her with inner light, not inspiration which is a function of her anima nature, core of her Self.
Anima/us excite those feelings of longing, awe, fear of the unknown, and incomprehensibility. The transparent power of love can appear as a possession by another, against which rational thought has no protection. It is the emotional-sexual level and its projections coupled with the libido generator of tantric rites that fuels sacred sexuality -- the quest for the Beloved, in its myriad forms.
INTRO
There are many techniques for reclaiming the body, including sacred sex, hypnosis, embedded tissue memory work, and kinesthetic arts. Sex can also be enhanced by a variety of aesthetic and therapeutic means, including the 64 sexual arts, described in ancient literature. We are fundamentally psychophysical beings, and the mind is the biggest sexual organ. Sacred sex is just part of a more integral worldview.
We can reclaim the divinity of our bodies that may have been lost in a profane world that criticizes, abuses, represses, or thwarts our sexual expression. We can heal any shame-based attitudes, romantic assumptions, obsolete programming, and dissociations, or the wounds and trauma inflicted on us by the toxic behaviors of others. We can banish sexual ‘ghosts’ and learn to bring our whole selves into the sexual experience.
Among the sexual arts are traditional Hindu and Buddhist tantra, contemporary ‘fusion’ tantric practice, goal-oriented sex magick, sexual alchemy of Frater and Soror Mystica for transformation, kabbalistic practice within marriage, Taoist alchemy for longevity, as well as personal eclectic practices of auto-erotic and partnered ‘spiritual sex.’
Language is a lens and we can increase our sexual vocabulary and repertoire to include the symbolic language of the unconscious, which Jung linked to the hieros gamos, mysterium coniunctionis, or union of opposites. Such polarity in sex is not a gender issue, because we all have male and female elements in our psychophysical being.
Some methods require both parties to share the process while others can be done quietly on the inner planes. All depend on establishing rapport and resonance with oneself, the known or unknown partner, and the cosmos. Each method has its own symbolism, practices, and goals. We can awaken and free the potential genius for love that lies within us all. We can develop compassion and empathy for self, others and cosmos.
Possibly one of the most important things for women to bear in mind is that science has now shown is that the cells of others can colonize our bodies, eggs, and mind, permanently injecting us with the genetic material of both random and relationally intimate partners. Babies of current partners have been found with the germ plasm of former partners. Male children colonize our minds with their DNA during gestation and never ‘move out.’
What is the difference between sex magick and tantric sexuality?
There are so many eclectic practices, appropriations, and idiosyncratic forms of belief that we need to be more specific. ‘Tantra’ has become a pop buzzword for any new agey exotic sexual experience. It is about feeling connected to and awed by the spiritual essence of the universe. It is merging and emerging. We can experience a rebirth or rejuvenation using a sacred sex approach.
But is it tantra? Some of these practices are the opposite of traditional practices. The sexual element of tantra has been over-emphasized and equated to "spiritual sex," with the goal of heightened orgasm and optimal physical pleasure, not spiritual development or spiritual evolutionary process. There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s a misnomer for a variety of practices of the arts of love.
Carl Jung said, “It is common for very infantile people to have a mystical, religious feeling, they enjoy this atmosphere in which they can admire their beautiful feelings, but they are simply indulging their auto-eroticism.” (ETH lecture 11 Jan 1935, Page 171.)
There are several varieties of traditional tantra. Hindu or Buddhist, and if the later, which school? Or are we talking about some form of self-styled practice and initiation? Crowley’s knowledge of actual tantric practice was very limited and based on a transgressive approach, so the two bear little resemblance, except in the broadest sense. Taoist alchemy has another approach and goal of longevity, if not immortality.
Orgasm is both practical and eternal, earthy and divine. If you have a spiritual approach to your sex life, then it will be so physically and psychically, here and now. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. It is unlikely anyone is actually authentically recreating any traditional practices of the past.
We have to be satisfied with a middle road that satisfies our own inclinations for best practice. Even so, some sexual experience may be more mundane than exalted. Some will be celebratory, rather than goal-oriented. Most are unlikely to follow any social or ritual script or prescription.
Both practices seek depth and transcendence. Sex magick often has some practical goal, whereas tantra is more about experiencing Gnostic ecstasy. Both practices are concerned with the fusion in unity of archetypal Male and Female energies to transcend the opposites, irrespective of the genders of participants. Both weave together physical, psychological and magical dimensions. Passion and a merger of minds as well as bodies are more important than protocols.
Eclectic sex mysticism may or may not be considered tantra or sex magick, per se. Sexual mysticism doesn’t heighten spirit at the expense of matter, but instinctively includes it. But you don’t need to be a sorcerer or mystic to imagine your partner as a God or Goddess leading toward rapture and union with the divine. Ultimately, you are generating this narrative and imagery within yourself.
The main difference between Tantra and Sex Magick is that Tantra is a form of religion in Sanskrit circles. The power of “Sex” is stored in the body for spiritual magical, power.
Tantra is quite an abstract religion, and does not have a clear definition. It is a spiritual, sexual science that is not static in its definition. Tantra is the science of unravelling the mystery posed by the phenomenon of love and relationships on earth.
Tantra is an ancient spiritual practice that originates from heaven. It is an ancient practice of combining sexual energy and prayer. It is an esoteric practice of antiquity. It is all about understanding yourself and another, healing, completing, harmony and freedom. Tantra is an old healing technique which was formed many centuries ago.
Manifesting the Impossible, Ti Campblell-Allen
There are many techniques for reclaiming the body, including sacred sex, hypnosis, embedded tissue memory work, and kinesthetic arts. Sex can also be enhanced by a variety of aesthetic and therapeutic means, including the 64 sexual arts, described in ancient literature. We are fundamentally psychophysical beings, and the mind is the biggest sexual organ. Sacred sex is just part of a more integral worldview.
We can reclaim the divinity of our bodies that may have been lost in a profane world that criticizes, abuses, represses, or thwarts our sexual expression. We can heal any shame-based attitudes, romantic assumptions, obsolete programming, and dissociations, or the wounds and trauma inflicted on us by the toxic behaviors of others. We can banish sexual ‘ghosts’ and learn to bring our whole selves into the sexual experience.
Among the sexual arts are traditional Hindu and Buddhist tantra, contemporary ‘fusion’ tantric practice, goal-oriented sex magick, sexual alchemy of Frater and Soror Mystica for transformation, kabbalistic practice within marriage, Taoist alchemy for longevity, as well as personal eclectic practices of auto-erotic and partnered ‘spiritual sex.’
Language is a lens and we can increase our sexual vocabulary and repertoire to include the symbolic language of the unconscious, which Jung linked to the hieros gamos, mysterium coniunctionis, or union of opposites. Such polarity in sex is not a gender issue, because we all have male and female elements in our psychophysical being.
Some methods require both parties to share the process while others can be done quietly on the inner planes. All depend on establishing rapport and resonance with oneself, the known or unknown partner, and the cosmos. Each method has its own symbolism, practices, and goals. We can awaken and free the potential genius for love that lies within us all. We can develop compassion and empathy for self, others and cosmos.
Possibly one of the most important things for women to bear in mind is that science has now shown is that the cells of others can colonize our bodies, eggs, and mind, permanently injecting us with the genetic material of both random and relationally intimate partners. Babies of current partners have been found with the germ plasm of former partners. Male children colonize our minds with their DNA during gestation and never ‘move out.’
What is the difference between sex magick and tantric sexuality?
There are so many eclectic practices, appropriations, and idiosyncratic forms of belief that we need to be more specific. ‘Tantra’ has become a pop buzzword for any new agey exotic sexual experience. It is about feeling connected to and awed by the spiritual essence of the universe. It is merging and emerging. We can experience a rebirth or rejuvenation using a sacred sex approach.
But is it tantra? Some of these practices are the opposite of traditional practices. The sexual element of tantra has been over-emphasized and equated to "spiritual sex," with the goal of heightened orgasm and optimal physical pleasure, not spiritual development or spiritual evolutionary process. There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s a misnomer for a variety of practices of the arts of love.
Carl Jung said, “It is common for very infantile people to have a mystical, religious feeling, they enjoy this atmosphere in which they can admire their beautiful feelings, but they are simply indulging their auto-eroticism.” (ETH lecture 11 Jan 1935, Page 171.)
There are several varieties of traditional tantra. Hindu or Buddhist, and if the later, which school? Or are we talking about some form of self-styled practice and initiation? Crowley’s knowledge of actual tantric practice was very limited and based on a transgressive approach, so the two bear little resemblance, except in the broadest sense. Taoist alchemy has another approach and goal of longevity, if not immortality.
Orgasm is both practical and eternal, earthy and divine. If you have a spiritual approach to your sex life, then it will be so physically and psychically, here and now. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. It is unlikely anyone is actually authentically recreating any traditional practices of the past.
We have to be satisfied with a middle road that satisfies our own inclinations for best practice. Even so, some sexual experience may be more mundane than exalted. Some will be celebratory, rather than goal-oriented. Most are unlikely to follow any social or ritual script or prescription.
Both practices seek depth and transcendence. Sex magick often has some practical goal, whereas tantra is more about experiencing Gnostic ecstasy. Both practices are concerned with the fusion in unity of archetypal Male and Female energies to transcend the opposites, irrespective of the genders of participants. Both weave together physical, psychological and magical dimensions. Passion and a merger of minds as well as bodies are more important than protocols.
Eclectic sex mysticism may or may not be considered tantra or sex magick, per se. Sexual mysticism doesn’t heighten spirit at the expense of matter, but instinctively includes it. But you don’t need to be a sorcerer or mystic to imagine your partner as a God or Goddess leading toward rapture and union with the divine. Ultimately, you are generating this narrative and imagery within yourself.
The main difference between Tantra and Sex Magick is that Tantra is a form of religion in Sanskrit circles. The power of “Sex” is stored in the body for spiritual magical, power.
Tantra is quite an abstract religion, and does not have a clear definition. It is a spiritual, sexual science that is not static in its definition. Tantra is the science of unravelling the mystery posed by the phenomenon of love and relationships on earth.
Tantra is an ancient spiritual practice that originates from heaven. It is an ancient practice of combining sexual energy and prayer. It is an esoteric practice of antiquity. It is all about understanding yourself and another, healing, completing, harmony and freedom. Tantra is an old healing technique which was formed many centuries ago.
Manifesting the Impossible, Ti Campblell-Allen
Spiritual Sex
Iona Miller, 1980
The overwhelming nature of sexual passion has caused it to be deified or divinized or alternatively feared as evil and demonic. It may seem odd that the same physiological act can raise us to the heights of spiritual exaltation or plunge us into guilt-ridden misery.
The awe-inspiring force of desire and sex has played a role in religion, magic, mysticism, occultism, symbolism, and the whole spectrum of human psychobiological interaction with the transpersonal. Creation myths are often about divine couplings, and cyclic fertility rites dramatically reenact this original creative act.In magical theory the opposites which exist at the universal level also exist in us as microcosms or miniature copies of the universe.
Each of us as human beings contains all the opposites, symbolized as male and female, sun and moon, conscious and unconscious.
In balancing and reconciling these opposites we achieve a higher unity. In marked contrast to the general religious suppression of Eros, tantra does this by glorifying our erotic and sexual nature.Sexuality is a sacred ritual of union through the sensual and ecstatic celebration of differences. It is the life force. Through the sexual act we seemingly transcend our isolation and physical boundaries, share in a greater reality. We discover, if only momentarily, that the Other seems to become part of oneself. Hence, the erotic language of mystics describing the apprehension of ultimate Unity, the promised reward God offers the righteous.
If this search for the Beloved is the major sexual goal, and if it can be gained only partially and fleetingly with a human partner, then it is quite natural to think of the lasting and blissful union of the soul with God in sexual terms, as many mystics have done.
This concept of the soul's union with God as a sexual union is paralleled in the romantic ideal of love with a human partner as an act of worship. The overwhelming nature of desire leads us to experience it as a supernatural force. The soul abides in the heart of the flesh. In the ecstasy of sexual union we rise to the supernatural level, are possessed by a male or female deity, and mingle with the divine. Orgasm corresponds to the soul's ecstasy possessed by God.
Virtual Tantra
Rather than falling in love, Tantra is rising in love. *Virtual Tantra* covers all the bases of theory and practice of sacred sex, from the practical to the aesthetic, to the spiritual in the quest for ultimate fulfillment through the psychosexual self. This site is a "Ten Talents Cookbook" for the silken pillows of the aspiring Dakini and Tantrika, focusing on the alchemy of sex. The VIRTUE-alities of Tantra and Sex Magick are outlined frankly, as well as hypnotic, poetic and metaphorical aspects. Tantra is a path of maximally arousing or filling up the senses creating a true voluptuousness through poetry, imagination, eroticism, sexuality, trance, hallucination and exaltation.
By honoring the sensual self, the metaphysical nature of surrender to the erotic impulse is experientially revealed.*Virtual Tantra* includes even medical and scientific perspectives on sexuality, ultimately viewing lovers as EmBEDed Holograms, two bioholographic fields melded into one. Psychological erotic education and emotional pitfalls are also covered. Why would you be pursuing an ideal or idealized love in a zealous manner -- searching for the Holy Grail, so to speak? Does the desire spring from personal or transpersonal sources? How can we escape from the prison of self-obsession?
Real love is quite different from desire, infatuation, lust, or concepts of romance. Real love means self-transcendence through mutuality and reciprocation, service to self, others, and world.Ultimately, the refinement of sacred sexuality practices is an artistic expression, a form of creativity, even private performance art. It is a celebration of life and an end in itself.
You might think the practice of Tantra requires a lot of preparation and props, but ultimately it only requires you to bring your naked authenticity to the process and be spontaneous. Enjoy the virtual experience of being Shiva/Shakti. Learn the virtues of erotic education, of sacred sexuality and how to create that atmosphere and inner focus. Are you done when you are finished? Not if you remain true to the never-failing ardor of the passionate tantric spirit; maybe you continue transforming into homo spiritus, even homo lumens.
Eastern and Western Traditions
There are both Eastern (Tantra, Taoism, Persian) and Western (Goddess worship, Alchemy, Courtly Love, Sex Magick) traditions around sacred sexuality. Eastern enlightenment comes in many varieties of spiritual experience and practice. They all express the pursuit of the One, or the One through the infinitely Many forms of existence, which are actually only different forms of sacred Emptiness. Tantra presents the ultimate Nondual reality as the sexual embrace of God and Goddess, of Shiva and Shakti, of Emptiness and Form.
To Go Up or Down is the Same
Neither Ascent (Transcendence) nor Descent (Immanence) is final, ultimate or priveledged: like yin and yang, dominance and submission, they generate and depend on each other. They find their own true being by dying into the other, only to awaken together, conjoined in Bliss. Lovers become the entire Cosmos, finding that eternity is wildly in love with the production of time. The non-dual Heart is radiating as all creation, and blessing all creation, and singing this embrace through eternity. When we experience this in our own awareness, this union is the Nondual vision. God and Goddess, Emptiness and Form, Wisdom and Compassion, Agape and Eros, Ascent and Descent -- perfectly and blissfully united.
The God of the Ascenders is otherworldly, usually monastic, ascetic, seeking to flee the Many and find the One. It is purely transcendental, and pessimistic about finding happiness in this world, shunning time in favor of eternity. Ascension is generally a via negativa, dampening the senses and strictly channeling internal perceptions through emptying, devotion, or concentration.
In the other approach practioners of Descending find the divine embrace through the Many. It is in love with the visible, sensible God, and sometimes Goddess. It is a God of pure embodiment, of pure immanence, fascinated with diversity, and finds its glory in the celebration of diversity. Great variety is the goal of this God. It celebrates the senses, and the body, and sexuality, and earth. It is creation-centered spirituality where All is divine. Emptiness and form are not-two. Emptiness is the immanent ground of all Form.
Union of Opposites
Tantra is perhaps the oldest form of Eastern alchemy. According to tantric philosophy the whole universe is built up of and pervaded by basic forces which are in intimate and intricate union. These forces, named Shiva and Shakti, are personified as male and female deities. Of this divine pair, Shiva is the subordinate one, for it is the Female Principle that ultimately underlies all manifestation. There is a tantric saying, "Shiva without Shakti is a corpse."The core experience of Tantra is revelation of its sexual secrets. Sexual union symbolizes the quintessence of the elements.
Sacred sex reveals eternal truth and transcendence. It is a way of redemption -- union of the personal self with the transpersonal Self. The Diamond Body is the crystallization or stabilization of the archetype of the universal Self as a permanent part of the individual psyche.Tantra is a philosophy, a science, an art, and a way of life in which sexual energy is consciously and creatively utilized.
The hidden potency of the sexual act is the blueprint or seed of all creatvity. When we understand the practical teachings of Tantra, a whole new perspective and experience of life opens. Tantra is a process that fosters the holistic harmonization of the male and female elements of our psychobiological self, ameliorating the war of the sexes. Through rapport and empathy we come to understand the Other.
Empathy needs a face! Devotion needs a face.Psychologically, there is a harmonization of the inner-mate archetypes of Anima and Animus, soul-figures which function as guides to deeper regions of the psyche. They lead to wholeness, integration, self-actualization. In Jungian psychology a man's inner feminine self is termed anima or soul; a woman's masculine component is called animus or spirit. Their merging creates a psychological and spiritual androgyny, another expression of wholeness.Western forms of Tantra include a series of Sex Magick rituals designed to bring the individual to self-realization.
The central aim of Western magic is to attain or stabilize the emergence of Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, or the daemon, one's true spiritual identity. This implies drawing closer to the consciousness of one's authentic individuality, in contradistinction to the active conscious personality. We can achieve a form of sacred marriage with the inner mate, known in alchemy as the coniunctio. This union produces a Magickal Child that symbolizes our potential for realization of the Higher Self, self-actualization.
These western alchemical goals and procedures paralleled Eastern alchemy, with its concern for the elixer of immortality and the extraction of spirit from matter and its liberation through meditation. Chinese alchemy is a mixture of alchemy, kundalini and tantric yoga. Its secret is the great creation of a golden fetus which represents the seed of enlightenment.
The Chinese view is that every individual possesses a central core that is an aspect of the universal Tao. In the Tao, the principles of opposites yin and yang are united. Spirit and soul together make up the personality and vie for supremacy. The goal of Chinese alchemy is to free the spirit from its entanglements with instinctive drives and emotions by providing a place in the human body where the primal spirit may crystallize and gestate. The beginning of creativity is called prenatal, (undivided yin-yang).
Personal spirit is joined with transpersonal spirit and soul then reunited. The product of this union is called the Golden Flower or the Elixer of Life, literally Golden Ball or Golden Pill, which ensures the survival of the individual after the death of the body. "Circulation of the Light" refers to repetitive cyclical mixing of spirit (psychic) and soul (physical) energies, of the the positive and negative principles, to create the "yellow bud" or "mysterious pearl."
Through a coniunctio, inner copulation of positive and negative "crystallization" occurs as the appearance of inner light, white like moonlight. In the next step, the resulting light is reddish yellow. The union of the two lights produces the immortal seed. Golden light within the white light between the eyebrows means primal spirit is forming the immortal fetus and the Elixer of Immortality. The primal spirit emerges from the fetus and leaps into the "great emptiness" through the gate at the top of the head, forming an indestructible Diamond Body.
In sex magick, the same is known as the Babe in the Abyss (of the Transcendent Immagination).Inner AlchemyIn magical theory a sexual working will not succeed if the aspirant is swept away in the thundering surf of desire and orgasm. When partners are in balance, neither strives for pleasure independently of the other. Mastering the force we have aroused, we can direct it at an objective, such as enhacing integrity, clarity, and wisdom. The element of pleasure is secondary; any idea of shame is banished. It is a means to the goal -- sacramental significance, not the goal itself.In Virtual Tantra, there's no Reality, only perceptions of flowing process-- and refined perceptions can enhance the ecstatic state for unique expressions of self-fulfillment and spiritual experience.
All attitudes and thoughts are psychobiological events, and a shift to the tantric perspective allows you to enter the virtual realm of sacred sexuality, to break down barriers between the ordinary and the extraordinary, to embrace the Divine.The acts of the lovers mirror the primordial creation and subsequent fecundity. In desiring his opposite, the Supreme Being impregnates Nature. The attraction of the two principles for each other engenders all life. Neither asleep nor awake the spirit is set free by perfect exhaustion of the body. Through tantric sex a twilight state is produced. Then there is a dramatic paradoxical shift from sympathetic arousal to the afterglow of parasympathetic tranquility. This "calmed violence" is the essence of the Real.
Coniunctio is an alchemical term symbolizing the unification of opposites, like yin and yang unite in the Tao. When the opposites to be united are the masculine consciousness and the feminine unconsciousness, embodied symbolically as lovers, the union is termed the Royal Marriage. This royal marriage of the Alchemist and his Soror Mystica, the King and Queen, sun and moon energies is a transcendent symbol of the self and embodies psychic totality, or wholeness. Caresses are a way to wisdom.
Serpent Power
This psychosexual energy is the principle element behind contemporary magic. It is known as kundalini, or the serpent power. Sex is the single strongest intensive, euphoric, even hallucinatory natural emotion alterant available, channeling the sexual energy into a mystical process of self-development. It is the foundation of Tantra.The spectrum of tantric practices includes not only sexual trance, but physical culture, breath control, superconcentration, mental and spiritual discipline, and the mystic arts. Much like Western magic, tantra employs candles, incense, bells, magical wands and chalices, spells, magic circles or mandalas, bodily postures, occult gestures, symbolical designs, and words of power. These are employed to enhance and bring bodily functions under the control of the will and exert a subtle inner alchemy. There is a hermetic distillation of a quintessence from the bodily fluids which reinvigorates the physical body.Tantra presupposes a complex system of subtle anatomy and physiology, based on the chakras, or plexes of the etheric body. The seven chakras are situated along an axis that passes from tail-bone to skull. A sympathetic resonance exists between the chakras. By tantric method the kundalini can be made to blaze up and kindle successively higher chakras, streaming up finally to the Crown.Thus, the way through bhukti (pleasure) can lead to mukti (redemption). This mystical belief is the tantric secret that sex can be a Way of salvation. The ecstasy of sexual union is a state in which we rise to a virtually supernatural level -- a peak experience. We link ourselves with the great forces of nature and the underlying rhythms of the Universe -- and experience atonement.Arousal and Transcendence in Tantra and Sacred Sex
The mystical effects of Tantric Sex are the result of spiritual and sexual technologies which manipulate the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems of arousal in the psychosexual body. The interaction and paradoxical union of these two systems of arousal is implicated in tantric bliss states. One system, ergotrophic, energizes us; the other, trophotropic, tranquilizes us. The E-system is Yang, while the T-system is Yin. The orchestration of these systems during the sexual sacrament is the essence of tantra. "Maxing" out your system physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually with Tantra can lead through ego death to cosmic consciousness. As in the case of trance-induced transcendence by overwhelming the senses, at tantric full-body orgasm there is a paradoxical switch from maximal arousal to a profound state of emptiness and deep calm which can be lengthened or deepened even further in post-coital meditation into a direct perception of the mystic Void.
As a metaphor of this process, imagine the fabulously beautiful and infinitely detailed structure of the fractals produced by the Mandelbrot set. When this form is generated all numbers of the equation either fall into the black void at the center of the figure because they are decreasing; or if they are increasing they wind up as part of the infinitely dynamic fractal set that forms the beautiful filigree around the voids. Our consciousness does much the same in the flow state of psychosexual expression. When aroused we expand our sense of self even to the cosmic scale even as our focus narrows (cosmic consciousness). After orgasm, our focus is free to expand infinitely while our sense of the body and our personal orientation can virtually vanish (the mystic Void).
Tantra works within the natural cycle of ergotropic and trophotropic processes, governed by the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. They mediate cycles of arousal and calm, and are therefore implicated in a variety of mystical experiences and also disorders which display states of hyperarousal and hypoarousal. They are mediated by the neurotransmiters noradrenalin and serotonin. The interhemispheric balancing mediates the harmonization of the left and right hemispheres of the brainmind. They mediate fight-flight responses, and pain-pleasure cycles. They can be chemically related to cycles of inflation, desire, acting out, guilt, remorse, high wellbeing, self-acceptance, and self-esteem. At their extremes, meditative and exalted states reflect as psychological and physiological paradox.
Tantra and Trance
Hypnosis has been used knowingly and unknowingly through the centuries to enhance the pleasure of sexual experience and spirituality. Natural trance can be used to facilitate transcendence. The consciousness altering heightened excitement, herbal refreshments, luxurious baths, oils, sensuous massage, sparkling drinks, flickering candle-light, incense and languid atmosphere of the boudoir setting are all conducive to self-suggestion for greater relaxation, sensual enjoyment, and fantasy experience. By changing your imagery, you can even evoke a more spiritual atmosphere viewing the act as a sexual sacrament.
It is relatively easy to learn the techniques of mutual hypnosis for use with yourself and your lover. Just begin to imagine the creative possibilities of trance-formations for yourself and your complementary loved-one. You can begin using the male and female, left and right sides of your brain for whole-self integration, for an inner unification, mythically called the union of the Sun and Moon.
Self-hypnosis can help you create a virtual experience to add another dimension to your sexual life. When that dimension is spiritual in content, that is VIRTUAL TANTRA. It helps open the inner eye to a whole new world. In relation to tantric sex, hypnosis can serve a variety of purposes, from building rapport to enhancing experiences of an influx of Divinity, subtle energies, time distortion, of the Void at the climactic moment, or alternatively of fullness or Cosmic Unity Experience.
VIRTUAL TANTRA reintroduces the safety, nurturing and fulfillment of the original Core Dyad, and allows us to return to the blissful "garden" which we inhabited prior to our sense of separation. Our empathic experience of another depends on our 'coupling' or 'pairing' with the other. It is enhanced by sensitivity to psychophysical cues from the other -- a rudimentary form of mind-reading. To be empathic implies intersubjective openness. This is the nature of empathy -- a dynamic feedback loop. We experience another person as a unfied whole through empathy...and the more whole we are within ourselves the more that perception is amplified. We transpose ourselves to the place of the Other.
This downward causation of spiritual experience, or incarnating energy works from global-to-local and is the basis of our personalized transcendent experience. It is the alchemical discovery of the Godhead in matter, through the union of opposites. It heals our cultural mind/body split in a unified experience of shared embodied minds. From birth our senses are linked to each other by an intra- and inter-personal body schema, or love map, which suggests the possibilities of action at the supramodal level -- cosmic consciousness.
An even deeper, more therapeutic level of rapport available to lovers is a shamanic state we can call co-consciousness. Through it, you can blend your sacred energies, your soul energies, by mixing your energy fields in the sexual sacrament. We've seen how hypnotic realities -- spontaneous and induced -- influence us consciously and unconsciously at the physical, emotional and mental or mythic level. Now we will look at the mystical experiential phenomenon of co-consciousness.
"...in trance I can feel both "here" and "there", connected with you and disconnected from you, "a part of" and "apart from" an experience. This... gives rise to a nonconceptual and nonverbal experiential state of unity. It is a more primary,inclusive way of relating than the separating, "either/or" logic characterizing analytical, conscious process. In other words, trance processes tend to unify relations ("this" with "that"), while conscious processes tend to differentiate relation ("this" vs. "that")...[These features of trance] suggest trance as a state of deep experiential absorption where a person can operate independently from the constraints of regulatory, error-oriented consciousness process." --S. Gilligan, Therapeutic Trances
In the holographic model of consciousness, the processing of mental forms occurs within the context of a part/whole relationship, where the identified part exists within the code of the whole. This paradigm can be applied to the tantric hypnotic relationship. The hypnotic process is thus an undulation of form and transitional states that helps us understand the healing and renewing properties of tantric trance.
Co-consciousness, the shared virtuality of the journey process, is a telepathic rapport wherein both participant’s alpha and theta brainwaves become synchronized or entrained, in essence, into a single holographic biofield. Co-consciousness might be measured via the observation of spontaneously shared, matching or resonating brainwave frequencies. It is very likely to be present in lovers after mutually satisfying sexual experience, in the "afterglow" or reverie period.
The mind is not embodied in our head, but in our whole organism embedded in its environment. This embodiment is an emergent and self-organized process that spans and interconnects the brain, the body, the environment, and in tantra, another special person. The tantric experience thus emerges through the common intentionality and dynamic co-determination of self and other. Self-other co-determination and co-creation is the foundation of tantra. Even seeing is a way of acting -- a visually guided exploration of the world. Inner representations also generate experiences which can guide us and show us a Way.
Western, Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist alchemy have made extensive use of the sexual act as a means of personal transformation, culminating in a celebratory Royal Marriage with the Cosmos. Like the Taoists, Western alchemists have always worked with a female partner, the Soror Mystica, mystical sister or wife, who is the living embodiment of the Feminine. The Great Work can not be done without her.
"Sexual union is an auspicious Yoga which, though involving enjoyment of all the sexual pleasures, gives release. It is a Path to Liberation." -- Kaularahasya
"Lust, the primal seed and germ of the spirits, existed first...The seers, looking into their hearts, discovered the kinship of the existent and the nonexistent."
-- Rg Veda 10.129.4 (455)
"Desire, which is known as Kama, or "love", is dangerous when it is considered as the end. In truth, Kama is only the beginning. When the mind is satisfied with the culture of Kama, then only can the right knowledge of love arise."
-- Rasakadamvakalika
"In possessing his beloved, man forgets the entire world, at once that which is within him and that which is without. In the same way, for he who possesses the Me, nothing more exists, neither within, nor without." --Brihad Aranyaka
"Woman is the fire, her matrix the fuel, the call to man the smoke. The door is the flame, the pleasure the spark. In this fire the gods form the offering. From this offering springs the [magical] child." -- Tchandogya V, 8, 1-2
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Iona Miller, 1980
The overwhelming nature of sexual passion has caused it to be deified or divinized or alternatively feared as evil and demonic. It may seem odd that the same physiological act can raise us to the heights of spiritual exaltation or plunge us into guilt-ridden misery.
The awe-inspiring force of desire and sex has played a role in religion, magic, mysticism, occultism, symbolism, and the whole spectrum of human psychobiological interaction with the transpersonal. Creation myths are often about divine couplings, and cyclic fertility rites dramatically reenact this original creative act.In magical theory the opposites which exist at the universal level also exist in us as microcosms or miniature copies of the universe.
Each of us as human beings contains all the opposites, symbolized as male and female, sun and moon, conscious and unconscious.
In balancing and reconciling these opposites we achieve a higher unity. In marked contrast to the general religious suppression of Eros, tantra does this by glorifying our erotic and sexual nature.Sexuality is a sacred ritual of union through the sensual and ecstatic celebration of differences. It is the life force. Through the sexual act we seemingly transcend our isolation and physical boundaries, share in a greater reality. We discover, if only momentarily, that the Other seems to become part of oneself. Hence, the erotic language of mystics describing the apprehension of ultimate Unity, the promised reward God offers the righteous.
If this search for the Beloved is the major sexual goal, and if it can be gained only partially and fleetingly with a human partner, then it is quite natural to think of the lasting and blissful union of the soul with God in sexual terms, as many mystics have done.
This concept of the soul's union with God as a sexual union is paralleled in the romantic ideal of love with a human partner as an act of worship. The overwhelming nature of desire leads us to experience it as a supernatural force. The soul abides in the heart of the flesh. In the ecstasy of sexual union we rise to the supernatural level, are possessed by a male or female deity, and mingle with the divine. Orgasm corresponds to the soul's ecstasy possessed by God.
Virtual Tantra
Rather than falling in love, Tantra is rising in love. *Virtual Tantra* covers all the bases of theory and practice of sacred sex, from the practical to the aesthetic, to the spiritual in the quest for ultimate fulfillment through the psychosexual self. This site is a "Ten Talents Cookbook" for the silken pillows of the aspiring Dakini and Tantrika, focusing on the alchemy of sex. The VIRTUE-alities of Tantra and Sex Magick are outlined frankly, as well as hypnotic, poetic and metaphorical aspects. Tantra is a path of maximally arousing or filling up the senses creating a true voluptuousness through poetry, imagination, eroticism, sexuality, trance, hallucination and exaltation.
By honoring the sensual self, the metaphysical nature of surrender to the erotic impulse is experientially revealed.*Virtual Tantra* includes even medical and scientific perspectives on sexuality, ultimately viewing lovers as EmBEDed Holograms, two bioholographic fields melded into one. Psychological erotic education and emotional pitfalls are also covered. Why would you be pursuing an ideal or idealized love in a zealous manner -- searching for the Holy Grail, so to speak? Does the desire spring from personal or transpersonal sources? How can we escape from the prison of self-obsession?
Real love is quite different from desire, infatuation, lust, or concepts of romance. Real love means self-transcendence through mutuality and reciprocation, service to self, others, and world.Ultimately, the refinement of sacred sexuality practices is an artistic expression, a form of creativity, even private performance art. It is a celebration of life and an end in itself.
You might think the practice of Tantra requires a lot of preparation and props, but ultimately it only requires you to bring your naked authenticity to the process and be spontaneous. Enjoy the virtual experience of being Shiva/Shakti. Learn the virtues of erotic education, of sacred sexuality and how to create that atmosphere and inner focus. Are you done when you are finished? Not if you remain true to the never-failing ardor of the passionate tantric spirit; maybe you continue transforming into homo spiritus, even homo lumens.
Eastern and Western Traditions
There are both Eastern (Tantra, Taoism, Persian) and Western (Goddess worship, Alchemy, Courtly Love, Sex Magick) traditions around sacred sexuality. Eastern enlightenment comes in many varieties of spiritual experience and practice. They all express the pursuit of the One, or the One through the infinitely Many forms of existence, which are actually only different forms of sacred Emptiness. Tantra presents the ultimate Nondual reality as the sexual embrace of God and Goddess, of Shiva and Shakti, of Emptiness and Form.
To Go Up or Down is the Same
Neither Ascent (Transcendence) nor Descent (Immanence) is final, ultimate or priveledged: like yin and yang, dominance and submission, they generate and depend on each other. They find their own true being by dying into the other, only to awaken together, conjoined in Bliss. Lovers become the entire Cosmos, finding that eternity is wildly in love with the production of time. The non-dual Heart is radiating as all creation, and blessing all creation, and singing this embrace through eternity. When we experience this in our own awareness, this union is the Nondual vision. God and Goddess, Emptiness and Form, Wisdom and Compassion, Agape and Eros, Ascent and Descent -- perfectly and blissfully united.
The God of the Ascenders is otherworldly, usually monastic, ascetic, seeking to flee the Many and find the One. It is purely transcendental, and pessimistic about finding happiness in this world, shunning time in favor of eternity. Ascension is generally a via negativa, dampening the senses and strictly channeling internal perceptions through emptying, devotion, or concentration.
In the other approach practioners of Descending find the divine embrace through the Many. It is in love with the visible, sensible God, and sometimes Goddess. It is a God of pure embodiment, of pure immanence, fascinated with diversity, and finds its glory in the celebration of diversity. Great variety is the goal of this God. It celebrates the senses, and the body, and sexuality, and earth. It is creation-centered spirituality where All is divine. Emptiness and form are not-two. Emptiness is the immanent ground of all Form.
Union of Opposites
Tantra is perhaps the oldest form of Eastern alchemy. According to tantric philosophy the whole universe is built up of and pervaded by basic forces which are in intimate and intricate union. These forces, named Shiva and Shakti, are personified as male and female deities. Of this divine pair, Shiva is the subordinate one, for it is the Female Principle that ultimately underlies all manifestation. There is a tantric saying, "Shiva without Shakti is a corpse."The core experience of Tantra is revelation of its sexual secrets. Sexual union symbolizes the quintessence of the elements.
Sacred sex reveals eternal truth and transcendence. It is a way of redemption -- union of the personal self with the transpersonal Self. The Diamond Body is the crystallization or stabilization of the archetype of the universal Self as a permanent part of the individual psyche.Tantra is a philosophy, a science, an art, and a way of life in which sexual energy is consciously and creatively utilized.
The hidden potency of the sexual act is the blueprint or seed of all creatvity. When we understand the practical teachings of Tantra, a whole new perspective and experience of life opens. Tantra is a process that fosters the holistic harmonization of the male and female elements of our psychobiological self, ameliorating the war of the sexes. Through rapport and empathy we come to understand the Other.
Empathy needs a face! Devotion needs a face.Psychologically, there is a harmonization of the inner-mate archetypes of Anima and Animus, soul-figures which function as guides to deeper regions of the psyche. They lead to wholeness, integration, self-actualization. In Jungian psychology a man's inner feminine self is termed anima or soul; a woman's masculine component is called animus or spirit. Their merging creates a psychological and spiritual androgyny, another expression of wholeness.Western forms of Tantra include a series of Sex Magick rituals designed to bring the individual to self-realization.
The central aim of Western magic is to attain or stabilize the emergence of Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, or the daemon, one's true spiritual identity. This implies drawing closer to the consciousness of one's authentic individuality, in contradistinction to the active conscious personality. We can achieve a form of sacred marriage with the inner mate, known in alchemy as the coniunctio. This union produces a Magickal Child that symbolizes our potential for realization of the Higher Self, self-actualization.
These western alchemical goals and procedures paralleled Eastern alchemy, with its concern for the elixer of immortality and the extraction of spirit from matter and its liberation through meditation. Chinese alchemy is a mixture of alchemy, kundalini and tantric yoga. Its secret is the great creation of a golden fetus which represents the seed of enlightenment.
The Chinese view is that every individual possesses a central core that is an aspect of the universal Tao. In the Tao, the principles of opposites yin and yang are united. Spirit and soul together make up the personality and vie for supremacy. The goal of Chinese alchemy is to free the spirit from its entanglements with instinctive drives and emotions by providing a place in the human body where the primal spirit may crystallize and gestate. The beginning of creativity is called prenatal, (undivided yin-yang).
Personal spirit is joined with transpersonal spirit and soul then reunited. The product of this union is called the Golden Flower or the Elixer of Life, literally Golden Ball or Golden Pill, which ensures the survival of the individual after the death of the body. "Circulation of the Light" refers to repetitive cyclical mixing of spirit (psychic) and soul (physical) energies, of the the positive and negative principles, to create the "yellow bud" or "mysterious pearl."
Through a coniunctio, inner copulation of positive and negative "crystallization" occurs as the appearance of inner light, white like moonlight. In the next step, the resulting light is reddish yellow. The union of the two lights produces the immortal seed. Golden light within the white light between the eyebrows means primal spirit is forming the immortal fetus and the Elixer of Immortality. The primal spirit emerges from the fetus and leaps into the "great emptiness" through the gate at the top of the head, forming an indestructible Diamond Body.
In sex magick, the same is known as the Babe in the Abyss (of the Transcendent Immagination).Inner AlchemyIn magical theory a sexual working will not succeed if the aspirant is swept away in the thundering surf of desire and orgasm. When partners are in balance, neither strives for pleasure independently of the other. Mastering the force we have aroused, we can direct it at an objective, such as enhacing integrity, clarity, and wisdom. The element of pleasure is secondary; any idea of shame is banished. It is a means to the goal -- sacramental significance, not the goal itself.In Virtual Tantra, there's no Reality, only perceptions of flowing process-- and refined perceptions can enhance the ecstatic state for unique expressions of self-fulfillment and spiritual experience.
All attitudes and thoughts are psychobiological events, and a shift to the tantric perspective allows you to enter the virtual realm of sacred sexuality, to break down barriers between the ordinary and the extraordinary, to embrace the Divine.The acts of the lovers mirror the primordial creation and subsequent fecundity. In desiring his opposite, the Supreme Being impregnates Nature. The attraction of the two principles for each other engenders all life. Neither asleep nor awake the spirit is set free by perfect exhaustion of the body. Through tantric sex a twilight state is produced. Then there is a dramatic paradoxical shift from sympathetic arousal to the afterglow of parasympathetic tranquility. This "calmed violence" is the essence of the Real.
Coniunctio is an alchemical term symbolizing the unification of opposites, like yin and yang unite in the Tao. When the opposites to be united are the masculine consciousness and the feminine unconsciousness, embodied symbolically as lovers, the union is termed the Royal Marriage. This royal marriage of the Alchemist and his Soror Mystica, the King and Queen, sun and moon energies is a transcendent symbol of the self and embodies psychic totality, or wholeness. Caresses are a way to wisdom.
Serpent Power
This psychosexual energy is the principle element behind contemporary magic. It is known as kundalini, or the serpent power. Sex is the single strongest intensive, euphoric, even hallucinatory natural emotion alterant available, channeling the sexual energy into a mystical process of self-development. It is the foundation of Tantra.The spectrum of tantric practices includes not only sexual trance, but physical culture, breath control, superconcentration, mental and spiritual discipline, and the mystic arts. Much like Western magic, tantra employs candles, incense, bells, magical wands and chalices, spells, magic circles or mandalas, bodily postures, occult gestures, symbolical designs, and words of power. These are employed to enhance and bring bodily functions under the control of the will and exert a subtle inner alchemy. There is a hermetic distillation of a quintessence from the bodily fluids which reinvigorates the physical body.Tantra presupposes a complex system of subtle anatomy and physiology, based on the chakras, or plexes of the etheric body. The seven chakras are situated along an axis that passes from tail-bone to skull. A sympathetic resonance exists between the chakras. By tantric method the kundalini can be made to blaze up and kindle successively higher chakras, streaming up finally to the Crown.Thus, the way through bhukti (pleasure) can lead to mukti (redemption). This mystical belief is the tantric secret that sex can be a Way of salvation. The ecstasy of sexual union is a state in which we rise to a virtually supernatural level -- a peak experience. We link ourselves with the great forces of nature and the underlying rhythms of the Universe -- and experience atonement.Arousal and Transcendence in Tantra and Sacred Sex
The mystical effects of Tantric Sex are the result of spiritual and sexual technologies which manipulate the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems of arousal in the psychosexual body. The interaction and paradoxical union of these two systems of arousal is implicated in tantric bliss states. One system, ergotrophic, energizes us; the other, trophotropic, tranquilizes us. The E-system is Yang, while the T-system is Yin. The orchestration of these systems during the sexual sacrament is the essence of tantra. "Maxing" out your system physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually with Tantra can lead through ego death to cosmic consciousness. As in the case of trance-induced transcendence by overwhelming the senses, at tantric full-body orgasm there is a paradoxical switch from maximal arousal to a profound state of emptiness and deep calm which can be lengthened or deepened even further in post-coital meditation into a direct perception of the mystic Void.
As a metaphor of this process, imagine the fabulously beautiful and infinitely detailed structure of the fractals produced by the Mandelbrot set. When this form is generated all numbers of the equation either fall into the black void at the center of the figure because they are decreasing; or if they are increasing they wind up as part of the infinitely dynamic fractal set that forms the beautiful filigree around the voids. Our consciousness does much the same in the flow state of psychosexual expression. When aroused we expand our sense of self even to the cosmic scale even as our focus narrows (cosmic consciousness). After orgasm, our focus is free to expand infinitely while our sense of the body and our personal orientation can virtually vanish (the mystic Void).
Tantra works within the natural cycle of ergotropic and trophotropic processes, governed by the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. They mediate cycles of arousal and calm, and are therefore implicated in a variety of mystical experiences and also disorders which display states of hyperarousal and hypoarousal. They are mediated by the neurotransmiters noradrenalin and serotonin. The interhemispheric balancing mediates the harmonization of the left and right hemispheres of the brainmind. They mediate fight-flight responses, and pain-pleasure cycles. They can be chemically related to cycles of inflation, desire, acting out, guilt, remorse, high wellbeing, self-acceptance, and self-esteem. At their extremes, meditative and exalted states reflect as psychological and physiological paradox.
Tantra and Trance
Hypnosis has been used knowingly and unknowingly through the centuries to enhance the pleasure of sexual experience and spirituality. Natural trance can be used to facilitate transcendence. The consciousness altering heightened excitement, herbal refreshments, luxurious baths, oils, sensuous massage, sparkling drinks, flickering candle-light, incense and languid atmosphere of the boudoir setting are all conducive to self-suggestion for greater relaxation, sensual enjoyment, and fantasy experience. By changing your imagery, you can even evoke a more spiritual atmosphere viewing the act as a sexual sacrament.
It is relatively easy to learn the techniques of mutual hypnosis for use with yourself and your lover. Just begin to imagine the creative possibilities of trance-formations for yourself and your complementary loved-one. You can begin using the male and female, left and right sides of your brain for whole-self integration, for an inner unification, mythically called the union of the Sun and Moon.
Self-hypnosis can help you create a virtual experience to add another dimension to your sexual life. When that dimension is spiritual in content, that is VIRTUAL TANTRA. It helps open the inner eye to a whole new world. In relation to tantric sex, hypnosis can serve a variety of purposes, from building rapport to enhancing experiences of an influx of Divinity, subtle energies, time distortion, of the Void at the climactic moment, or alternatively of fullness or Cosmic Unity Experience.
VIRTUAL TANTRA reintroduces the safety, nurturing and fulfillment of the original Core Dyad, and allows us to return to the blissful "garden" which we inhabited prior to our sense of separation. Our empathic experience of another depends on our 'coupling' or 'pairing' with the other. It is enhanced by sensitivity to psychophysical cues from the other -- a rudimentary form of mind-reading. To be empathic implies intersubjective openness. This is the nature of empathy -- a dynamic feedback loop. We experience another person as a unfied whole through empathy...and the more whole we are within ourselves the more that perception is amplified. We transpose ourselves to the place of the Other.
This downward causation of spiritual experience, or incarnating energy works from global-to-local and is the basis of our personalized transcendent experience. It is the alchemical discovery of the Godhead in matter, through the union of opposites. It heals our cultural mind/body split in a unified experience of shared embodied minds. From birth our senses are linked to each other by an intra- and inter-personal body schema, or love map, which suggests the possibilities of action at the supramodal level -- cosmic consciousness.
An even deeper, more therapeutic level of rapport available to lovers is a shamanic state we can call co-consciousness. Through it, you can blend your sacred energies, your soul energies, by mixing your energy fields in the sexual sacrament. We've seen how hypnotic realities -- spontaneous and induced -- influence us consciously and unconsciously at the physical, emotional and mental or mythic level. Now we will look at the mystical experiential phenomenon of co-consciousness.
"...in trance I can feel both "here" and "there", connected with you and disconnected from you, "a part of" and "apart from" an experience. This... gives rise to a nonconceptual and nonverbal experiential state of unity. It is a more primary,inclusive way of relating than the separating, "either/or" logic characterizing analytical, conscious process. In other words, trance processes tend to unify relations ("this" with "that"), while conscious processes tend to differentiate relation ("this" vs. "that")...[These features of trance] suggest trance as a state of deep experiential absorption where a person can operate independently from the constraints of regulatory, error-oriented consciousness process." --S. Gilligan, Therapeutic Trances
In the holographic model of consciousness, the processing of mental forms occurs within the context of a part/whole relationship, where the identified part exists within the code of the whole. This paradigm can be applied to the tantric hypnotic relationship. The hypnotic process is thus an undulation of form and transitional states that helps us understand the healing and renewing properties of tantric trance.
Co-consciousness, the shared virtuality of the journey process, is a telepathic rapport wherein both participant’s alpha and theta brainwaves become synchronized or entrained, in essence, into a single holographic biofield. Co-consciousness might be measured via the observation of spontaneously shared, matching or resonating brainwave frequencies. It is very likely to be present in lovers after mutually satisfying sexual experience, in the "afterglow" or reverie period.
The mind is not embodied in our head, but in our whole organism embedded in its environment. This embodiment is an emergent and self-organized process that spans and interconnects the brain, the body, the environment, and in tantra, another special person. The tantric experience thus emerges through the common intentionality and dynamic co-determination of self and other. Self-other co-determination and co-creation is the foundation of tantra. Even seeing is a way of acting -- a visually guided exploration of the world. Inner representations also generate experiences which can guide us and show us a Way.
Western, Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist alchemy have made extensive use of the sexual act as a means of personal transformation, culminating in a celebratory Royal Marriage with the Cosmos. Like the Taoists, Western alchemists have always worked with a female partner, the Soror Mystica, mystical sister or wife, who is the living embodiment of the Feminine. The Great Work can not be done without her.
"Sexual union is an auspicious Yoga which, though involving enjoyment of all the sexual pleasures, gives release. It is a Path to Liberation." -- Kaularahasya
"Lust, the primal seed and germ of the spirits, existed first...The seers, looking into their hearts, discovered the kinship of the existent and the nonexistent."
-- Rg Veda 10.129.4 (455)
"Desire, which is known as Kama, or "love", is dangerous when it is considered as the end. In truth, Kama is only the beginning. When the mind is satisfied with the culture of Kama, then only can the right knowledge of love arise."
-- Rasakadamvakalika
"In possessing his beloved, man forgets the entire world, at once that which is within him and that which is without. In the same way, for he who possesses the Me, nothing more exists, neither within, nor without." --Brihad Aranyaka
"Woman is the fire, her matrix the fuel, the call to man the smoke. The door is the flame, the pleasure the spark. In this fire the gods form the offering. From this offering springs the [magical] child." -- Tchandogya V, 8, 1-2
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http://www.istanbul-yes-istanbul.co.uk/alchemy/Rosariumfinal.htm
The alchemical notion of "the chymical wedding" returns marriage to its spiritual side as a participating factor in personal transformation. Karen-Claire Voss Uses imagery from the Rosarium Philosophorum to illustrate this. Both the texts and the iconography of the alchemical tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are filled with allusions to ‘the chymical marriage,’ and some of the most beautiful and compelling images in the texts depict the conjunction of opposites as a royal marriage. These descriptions and images occur with sufficient frequency to warrant comparison with the hierosgamos (sacred marriage), as understood in the discipline of history of religions. We encounter the idea of the hierosgamos even before we embark on a hermeneutical discussion of the images that the work contains in the History of Religions.
The term hierosgamos is used generally to refer to the union between two divinities, or between a human being and a god or goddess, or between two human beings (under certain special conditions); more particularly, it is used to refer to the ritualized, public sexual union between the king and a hierodule (‘sacred prostitute’) in ancient Mesopotamia. This union was accompanied by the belief that the human partners became divine by virtue of their participation in it. It was thought, for example, that the priestess who took part in this ritual became the goddess Inanna in the same way as ordinary bread and wine are thought to become the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Roman Catholic celebration of the Eucharist. Both ritual forms entail regeneration and transformation; in Mesopotamia, the hierosgamos was thought to insure the well-being of the king, the prosperity of the people, and the continued fertility of the land.
The belief that human beings could participate in the ontological condition of divinity through sexual union, through the body, is exceedingly ancient, but the hierosgamos is not merely an important element in an archaic religious tradition. It is also exceedingly persistent And, in my view, its persistence indicates more than a merely superficial connection between its manifestations in the ancient Near East and in the West; it has become associated with a spectrum of symbolic meanings so rich and compelling that they continue to reassert themselves over and over again. Although the hierosgamos did not find its way into the official teachings of Christianity, for example, it is present nonetheless in the symbolism of Mary as the Bride of Christ.
The major difference between the significance of the hierosgamos in the ancient Near East and the Christian West is that its expression in the former context was bound up with an explicit, embodied praxis that necessitated ritual sexual union. This gives rise to certain hermeneutical difficulties. Scholars of religion sometimes deny or ignore the presence of the hierosgamos idea, or pronounce its use as a conceptual category invalid. Even those who do recognize its presence may yield to the prevailing wisdom that encourages the substitution of a part for the whole, and thus interpret the hierosgamos according to an allegedly higher, spiritualized ideal, having nothing to do with the body. Analogous interpretations are offered for the hierosgamos theme in alchemical texts. Yet, many of the alchemists appear to have undergone a complex experience involving mutual reciprocity between the events in the laboratory and within themselves of a kind that harkens back to, and carries forward, the imprint of a religious tradition that combined physical and spiritual levels of transformation.
A core of meanings associated with the hierosgamos that have persisted cross-culturally. If anything, the symbolism became enriched by the addition of Christian doctrines, especially that of the Incarnation, which signified the union of human and divine. Many alchemical texts like the Rosarium insist on the interrelatedness of body and spirit. In seeking the ‘conjunction of opposites’ the alchemists were attempting to overturn the conventional conceptual dichotomization between spirit and body, and to offer in its place models that reflected their intuitions of ontological wholeness. Therefore, when interpreting the hierosgamos theme in the context of the alchemical tradition we should keep in mind the fact that it is generally meant to include the body; it signifies not only idealiter but also realiter. An adequate hermeneutics of alchemical iconography can do justice to the multivalence of the hierosgamos images in texts like the Rosarium only by seeking to encompass the totality of their symbolic meanings.
The Rosarium Philosophorum contains twenty-one images, fifteen exhibit the hierosgamos in more or less explcit form; three others contain it implicitly.
Figure 1 shows a fountain fitted with three spigots. The waters are the key to unlocking the meaning of this image, for the text explains that the waters flowing from each are really a single water --‘of which and with which our magistery is effected.' The three waters evoke a hierogamy described in the Enuma Elish?, a Mesopotamian creation myth from around 1900 b.c.e., which relates how the primordial waters of Tiamat, ‘she who bore them all,’ and Apsu, ‘their begetter . . . commingle as a single body,’ and thus become the sole matrix from which everything emerges. The verse accompanying the figure heightens the correspondence between the alchemical fountain and the hierogamy that produced all life: ‘We (waters) are the metal’s first nature and only source; the highest tincture of the Art is made through us.’
In Figure 2 we see a king and queen dressed in elaborate robes. Each holds a stalk ending in two flowers. He stands upon the sun, she on the crescent moon. Although their separateness is symbolically emphasized, they clasp hands as if to prefigure the ‘chymical marriage.’ A dove -- at once a mediating symbol as well as a further link with the hierosgamos, since it was associated both with Eros and with the powerful female divinities of the ancient Near East --is shown hovering above them, holding its own stalk which perfectly intersects the cross formed by those held by the king and queen. In Figure 3 the pair is naked; but, still wearing separate crowns, they proffer to one another a flower on a long stalk. The banner over the king's head reads: 'O Luna, let me be thy husband'; the one over the queen's reads: 'O Sol, I must submit to thee.' Once more, the dove appears between them, a flower in its beak.
In Figure 5, we see the king and queen in sexual embrace. Figures 6-9 show the king and queen in hermaphroditic form, indicating successively deepening levels of conjunction, and depict them lying in a sepulcher. Their bodies are joined; they have two heads, but now wear a single crown. Figure 11 is explicitly sexual. The king and queen, each winged, wear two crowns, and are submerged in water. Their limbs are entwined; her hand grasps his phallus; his left hand fondles the nipple of her breast; his right is under her neck, supporting her. Figure 17 depicts the product of the union between the alchemical opposites in the form of the Hermetic androgyne. This offspring is not simply the end result of the marriage of opposites. Figure 18 shows the lion eating the sun. It is itself an implicit hierogamy because it is not fully differentiated from its parents, and continues to participate in its hierogamic beginnings.
Figure 19 provides an excellent example of the occasional coalescence of alchemical symbols and Christian symbols. Mary is in the center, flanked by the Father and the Son who are about to crown her. The Holy Spirit--in the form of a dove--hovers above. In the background appear the words Tria and Unum. This image clearly contains a rich variety of hierogamic themes. First, there is the symbolic similarity between the three waters of the alchemical foundation we saw in Figure 1 and the Trinity. Second, the Incarnation of God the Son was made possible by a hierogamy between Mary and the third person of the Trinity. Third, the Incarnation of the Son entails an ontological condition of simultaneous humanity and divinity--a profound manifestation of hierogamy.
Like the marriage between the alchemical opposites, all these unions require mediation. In the alchemical marriage, this function is often performed by Mercurius, whom Jung calls a ‘mediating symbol par excellence’; in the Rosarium, however, we have already seen the dove in the role of mediator. In this figure we see it in that role too, poised above the crown that the Father and Son are about to place on Mary's head; it is now associated with the third person of the Trinity. The fact that the dove was a symbolic attribute of the female divinities of the ancient near east underscores the conclusion that Figure 19 is also a hierogamic image, albeit in Christianized form.
Figure 20, the last image in the series, depicts the risen Christ. In his left hand, he holds a banner marked with a cross; his right gestures toward the now empty sepulchre. That sepulchre unmistakably indicates that the completed alchemical process has involved the transformation, not the transcendence, of the body. For if the alchemical work necessitated the transcendence of the body, one would not expect to find an empty tomb, but a tomb filled with the putrefying remains of the king and queen. Instead, we see the risen Christ, the embodiment of the hierogamic union between human and divine. In the view of the alchemist who wrote the Rosarium Philosophorum, the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body signified, not the suppression, or even the transcendence, of the physical body, but its glorification and perfection.
It is not surprising that the author of the Rosarium Philosophorum chose images of the hierosgamos to help convey something of the exquisitely subtle reciprocity invoked in the alchemical coniunctio. The hierosgamos images of alchemy are profoundly eloquent expressions of the experience of the true adepts as they moved through the later stages of the work. For those alchemists, all the elements of ordinary experience were sacralized. The Philosopher’s Stone could be found everywhere; it was ‘walked on, children play with it’; it is familiar to all (people) both young and old, is found in the country, in the village, in the town.
Perhaps we are still capable of learning from the alchemists that what transforms common substance, that which is familiar to all, is no more – and no less – than a deeper apprehension of the significance of the Hermetic motto: ‘What is above is just as what is below.’ This motto, so often quoted and equally often misunderstood, requires that we understand the radical implications of a ‘whole from which nothing is excluded.’ (Voss http://www.trinity.edu/mgarriso/Myth/MythSyllabus.html#top ).
(c)2015-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
