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1. The Recurring Nightmare, the Elusive Secret: Historical and Imaginary Roots of Sex Magic in the Western Tradition
- University of California Press
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1 The Recurring Nightmare, the Elusive Secret Historical and Imaginary Roots of Sex Magic in the Western Tradition The whole power of Magic is founded on Eros. The way Magic works is to bring things together through their inherent similarity. marsilio ficino, De Amore Love is one of the great instruments of magical power, but it is categorically forbidden to the Magus, at least as an invocation or passion. Woe to the Samson of Kabbalah if he permits himself to be put asleep by Delilah! . . . Sexual love is ever an illusion, for it is the result of an imaginary mirage. eliphas lévi, Transcendental Magic Sex, magic, and secrecy have long been intimately associated in the Western imagination. Since at least the first centuries of the Christian church, sexual licentiousness was often believed to go hand in hand with experimentation in occult arts and secret rituals. Conversely, heretical religious groups were typically accused of the most perverse sexual activities. One of the most common charges leveled against the Gnostics by the early church fathers was that of hedonism and sexual abandon in the course of their obscene rites, and this accusation of sexual license and obscene ritual would recur throughout the later Middle Ages in the church’s war against various other heresies, from the Cathars in the thirteenth century to the Knights Templar in the fourteenth century to the witch trials in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. As Robert Lerner observes, “heretics of all stripes were simply assumed to be immoralists.”1 Repeatedly and with remarkable consistency, a narrative emerged that linked sexual intercourse with dangerous power, and in turn linked sexual transgression with occult ritual and obscene inversion of religious practice. Even the most renowned exponents of magic,such as the nineteenth-century occultist Eliphas Lévi, quoted above, warned of the awesome power and terrible danger bound up with sexual intercourse. As David Frankfurter observes, 21 the fear of this unholy union of sexual license and black magic is one of the most persistent fantasies in theWestern imagination over the last two thousand years.2 But how much of this association of sexuality with magic has any real historical basis, and how much is pure fiction or simply Western society’s own “fantasies of the world turned upside down”?3 Was there ever any widespread practice of sexual magic prior to the nineteenth century,or is the very concept of sexual magic simply a modern attempt to enact a recurring fantasy that has tantalized the Western imagination for two millennia? The association of sex and magic is by no means a new idea in the modern comparative study of religion. Early anthropologists and historians of religions from Sir James George Frazer to Mircea Eliade compiled masses of data about various fertility cults across the globe that were believed to link sexual license and orgiastic behavior with fertility rites and agricultural ceremonies. Thus, Eliade sees the orgy as a basic and widespread form of “magico-religious” ritual aimed both to enhance the fertility of crops and to restore humankind to the primordial, unformed chaos from which all life proceeds: “The orgy sets flowing the sacred energy of life.”4 [R]itual orgies . . . are attested among populations as different as the Kurds, the Tibetans, the Eskimos, the Malgaches, the Ngadju Dyaks, and the Australians . The incentives are manifold, but generally such ritual orgies are carried out in order to avert a cosmic or social crisis . . . or in order to lend magico-religious support . . . by releasing and heightening the dormant powers of sexuality. . . . [I]ndiscriminate and excessive sexual intercourse plunges the collectivity into the fabulous epoch of the beginnings.5 Other historians,such as Narendranath Bhattacharyya,have even argued that there is an archaic matriarchal substratum beneath all the religions of India, the Middle East, and most of the ancient world which is rooted in a form of sexual magic. Above all, Bhattacharyya suggests, the ancient goddess cults of Cybele, Isis, Ashtarte, and the Indian mother goddesses are rooted in “primitive sex rites based on the magical association of natural and human fertility.”6 Not surprisingly, contemporary popular authors have taken this argument still further,by arguing that sex magic is in fact one of the oldest,most universal of all forms of human spirituality. “Sex magic is as old as mankind ,” writes popular sex magician Don Webb.7 Another neo-Tantric guru, Nik Douglas, argues that sex magic and Tantra can be traced back to the Paleolithic era...