The Profound Linkage: Sexuality and Religion

February 1981
Lakeland

The past is in us. Sexual relationships have been such a poignant, deep, inevitable part of human life that it has always been impossible to keep sexuality out of religion. It is doubtful if our genes and hormones have been substantially altered since the appearance of the first men and women we would name human. Or, for that matter, their immediate predecessors in the evolutionary chain of change, other than the important female change from the estrous cycle to the menstrual cycle.

This month in the Fellowship there have been workshops, a program, a play, and speakers on human sexuality. Harold Cole has spoken to you on “Sex and Death.” My purpose is to describe the linkage of human sexuality with religion in several cultures. This linkage has been tied to both interpretation of the mysterious processes of Creation and varied religious rituals, symbols, and practices. Following the references to several cultures, there will be opportunity for raising questions about sexuality today which many of us presume to be a time of sexual openness. But it is also a time when many would place a condemning label of promiscuity or immorality on what some of us call sexual freedom.

The times called pre-historic, that is, before writing developed, do not present clear evidence. But most scholars of the subject of human sexuality believe that the earliest gods worshiped were female. The woman’s role in creation was obvious. Man did not connect his physical role in sexual intercourse with conception, pregnancy, and birth.

Although there are few artifacts uncovered by archaeologists that would throw light on social structures and female religious deities in pre-historic times [CJW note: except burial rites], the myths handed down orally through ritual story-telling eventually become recorded by priests and poets and provide clues to more ancient ways.

The ancient Sumerians, who made perhaps the earliest written records scribed on their clay tablets, tell about the mother goddess Nammu (also known as Tiamat), who was said to have created the universe “by giving birth apparently unaided, to heaven and earth.” Nammu can be translated as “the sea.”

With the transformation of hunting, nomadic pre-historic peoples to farmers in villages, there came a turnabout both in the deities who were worshiped and the social role of women. Men became aware that both male sperm and female ova were necessary for conception. Perhaps they had concluded this from watching the animals they had domesticated, or other reasons which can be speculated.

This agrarian time was also the time when men became the masters of women. As one scholar put it, the male wanted to be able to say, “MY son.” Thus the male exerted exclusive right on a female or females. It has taken thousands of years since to begin to change that male ownership of women.

In Sumeria, for example, the myth of Nammu was revised, as countless myths have been revised. Instead of the female Nammu giving birth to heaven and earth unaided, a male god, Apsu, “the sweet water ocean, united with her to give birth to the gods.”

Not that women became unimportant in religion. In the time of Hammurabi (1750 BCE), the Babylonian temples, in addition to priests, [had] temple prostitutes who acted as congenial intermediaries between man and deity. Sacred prostitution may have had its origin in fertility rituals to provide for more abundant crops. Fertility rituals of sexual intercourse seemed characteristic of early agricultural civilizations. Many would term the fertility rites orgiastic, but then that is looking backwards – we weren’t there. Nobody living can know the intense religious feelings which must have been inseparable from such sexual activities and the powerful influence of a thorough belief in magic. As Lewis Browne put it (THIS BELIEVING WORLD, p. 46), “The [men and women] imagined that the spirits brought forth crops much as they did bring forth children. And for fear that the spirits might have forgotten, or be too bashful to initiate it, men/women went out in the fields and showed the way. What later ‘civilized persons’ called sexual license was therefore religious virtue and necessary rite at most of the seasonal festivals. Either all the men and women went into the open and lay together under the heavens, or in more advanced communities the priest and one or more virgins went into the temple and lay together before the idols.”

When we look at China and India there seems to have been some similarities, but in a more sophisticated philosophical mode.

In ancient China the religion of the Tao, “The Way,” dominated the religious and philosophical attitudes. The Tao was a religion of nature too. But whereas the Western world formulated doctrines based on “was” - that is, a salvation scheme for all eternity formulated in the beginning, the Tao was a continuous “becoming,” not a “was.”

Tannehill attempts an analogy (p. 165) to explain: “[visualize] the Chinese concept of creation as a kind of multi-dimensional weather map, with constantly varying channels of atmospheric pressure, air currents flowing, colliding, and recoiling, clouds, thunderheads. And weaving an erratic vapor trail through them all, ... the force known as ch’i – the vital essence, the breath of life – whose path is the Supreme Path – the Tao....

“All is movement, unevenness, undulation. All the elements are in a constant state of advance or retreat.

“There is no active without a passive, no positive without a compensating negative.”

The passive force is Yin, the active, Yang. “The interaction of one Yin and one Yang is called Tao.”

This interpretation of the Cosmos became a sexual parallel. But Yin and Yang were not separately female and male. There was recognition that there was an element of Yang even in the passive woman and Yin in the most positive man. Therefore sexual intercourse was the human equivalent of the cosmic Yin and Yang.

Because this represented cosmic religion, the Chinese of the period were not reticent about sexuality. They produced the earliest and most detailed sex handbooks so that sexual harmony could be achieved. For sex was the human reflection of the mating of earth and heaven, when clouds rose mistily from the land to meet the rain descending from the sky. “Clouds and Rain” became the standard literary expression for the act of sexual intercourse.

India, too, had a complex system of sexual behavior and instruction found notably in the Kamasutra. The temples of India are abundant with statues in explicit sexual positions.

But more to today’s theme, for the Hindu, “the sexual embrace” symbolizes the eternal union of the male and female principles in the godhead Shiva Shakti. A mystic identify with Shiva and Shakti is experienced in which the world of objects and ego disappears. Can not most of us have some understanding of that? Some Western writer refers to the sexual climax as “the little death.” The usual world, the usual ego, usual memories, usual cares, just aren’t there.

Tantrism (in India), sometimes called Tantric Yoga, although difficult to understand, seems to have had (or has) followers in both Hinduism and Buddhism. In some ways it was a counter-culture with some likenesses to the 60s [in the West]. Drugs, food, wine, sexual intercourse were the sequence in the ritual. The goal when all the rituals were followed was to become part of the void, the nothingness – a nothingness which was the dual-sexed cosmos.

The experience, the technique, and the discipline has, to me, an outsider, some of the characteristics of the mystical experience in that what happens cannot be communicated by words.

When we look at Christianity, however, there is a turn-about in attitude and dogma. Sexual intercourse and sexuality were neither to be enjoyed nor was sex a means of communicating with the Deity.

The denigrating of sexuality began with Paul. Paul’s missionary labors were in the Greek-Roman-Asian cities of the Roman Empire. He probably encountered instances of wide-spread sexual licentiousness and sexual exploitation. The practices of Asian-Greek religions were shocking to Paul and others of the early apostles. Corinth was one of the cities we would call “wide-open.” He wrote chidingly, admonishing them not to be joined to prostitutes.

He believed celibacy was [a] “more Christian condition since it imposed no worldly conditions that might interfere with devotion to the Lord.” (Tannehill) He did concede that it is better to marry than burn with desire.

But early Church fathers churned this attitude into a virulent anti-sex attitude, and found a theology to support it. (One can devise a theology to support any idea, no matter how wrong-headed that idea might be).

Although a literal reading of the Genesis story does not disclose that sexual intercourse was the “original sin,” that was how the teachings of the church came to describe and dogmatize it.

In the early centuries, Eve cam to be blamed more than Adam, perhaps because she was the one who listened to the serpent – and early church document called sex “an experiment of the devil” and marriage, “a foul and polluted way of life.”

Joseph Campbell (THE MYTHIC IMAGE, p. 58) quotes a hymn of the church to Mary:

“Hail, bright star of the ocean,
God’s own mother blest,
Ever sinless virgin,
Gate of heavenly rest.

“Taking that sweet Ave
Which from Gabriel came,
Peace confirm within us,
Changing Eva’s name.”

Campbell comments, “through Eve the gates of the Garden were closed, and the very beauty of the female became ‘Devil’s Door.’ To which catastrophe the answer was given in Mary, whose virginity became God’s door and whose Motherhood ‘Heaven’s Gate.’”

Augustine, the Church’s most influential theologian, found reasons (rationalizations) and Christian morality, “thus propagated, was to have an effect not possible to measure on all generations since” – particularly in feelings of stress and guilt. But as one writer commented, “What was clear right from the start, however that if it was sinful to find enjoyment in sex, then the great majority of ordinary people were sinners.”

But the teaching continued and continues today in the words of the Jesuit teaching, “the use of sex therefore for personal gratification of the individual exclusively is a perversion of the essential relationship of sex to race” - that is, sex not for individual good but for the good of the race.

The relationship of sexuality and religion has been widely studied and reported. This has just been a touching down here and there.

In this latter part of the 20th century, much has been changing in Western culture. Many of the old stigmas and condemnations have faded. Most of us are quite accepting that others adopt the sexual code or practices believed correct and fulfilling for them.

Of course, under any system, pessimistic or rigid, there will be sorrow, shock, remorse, confusion for some. Just read the letters in the Ann Landers columns.

Of course, sexual relations can be exploitative and uncaring for one partner and serious and caring for the other. But sexuality has always been with us and a good thing it has, or none of us would be here.