Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism (review)

This eclectic and erudite collection of essays was based on the second of a series of conferences on the topic of the Esoteric Renaissance sponsored by the Esalen Institute and held between 2004 and 2007. Its ambitious chronological and international scope provides a provocative historical survey of the linked topics of eroticism and esotericism (described by the editors as “things we do not talk about”). Despite Esalen’s popular image as a bastion of “New Age” narcissism, the conferences provided an important venue for the increasing academic respectability of scholarly research into Western esoteric traditions. While Chairs and teaching programs on the subject currently exist at the Sorbonne, University of Amsterdam, and University of Exeter, other “mainstream” departments (history, literature, philosophy, psychology, religion, etc.) are opening their doors to research into the “hidden” sexual dimensions of spiritual experience. While “esotericism” is hardly coterminous with “magic,” there remains a large enough overlap that readers of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft should find much of interest in this volume. Given the complexity of the seventeen essays, a brief summary of each must suffice to provide an insight into the cumulative effect and overall value of the long scholarly journey from the fourth-century Borborites to the twenty-first-century Big Surites.

In the opening essay, Roelof van den Broek provides the central theme of much of the volume in his discussion of the belief of second- to fourth-century Hermeticists and Gnostics that “the highest God is bisexual,” which also implies that “androgyny is the most perfect form of sexuality” (p. 5). The belief in the original androgyny of God and man led to differing judgments about human sexuality. In the Hermetic Poimandres, sexual desire was viewed negatively as the cause of death, while the Asclepius affirmed positively that human intercourse provides “an image of the divine androgyny” (p. 8). The Gnostic Borborites were accused of practicing a curious Eucharistic ritual, in which male semen and female menstrual blood were ritually eaten instead of bread and wine. Combining ascetic and nonreproductive rules of sexual behavior with their belief that the male and female sexual emissions contained “the pneumatic seed” of the divine, the Borborites claimed that Jesus himself taught this esoteric meaning of the Eucharist. In a later essay, when Marco Pasi describes “the Knight of Spermatophagy” performing a similar Eucharist in the twentieth century, a sense of déjà vu is inevitable. However, that sense of the perennial effort of spiritual questers to give transcendent meaning to the basic sexuality of the human animal is what makes this collection so provocative.

April DeConick discusses how the second-century Valentinians added a contemplative theme to the notion of the divine semen or “seed,” which led them to elevate marital intercourse to a sacramental act, but only when practiced with “some sort of consciousness-raising during sexual relations to insure that the children would resemble God” (p. 40). Unlike Augustine’s reproach of eros, “that sex should ideally be no more than a handshake,” (p. 43) the Valentinians believed that at the Eschaton, “the Pleroma would open up as the fantastic Bridal Chamber” (p. 45), when all the saved souls would be transformed into perfected bodies (p. 46). In the next essay, Pierre Lory reveals how early Islamic esotericists believed in the possibility of sexual intercourse between humans and demons, while the latter could be either bad or good. As with the Valentinians, the joining of “the will of God and the intention of man” can actually turn an individual into a jinni or an angel, a perfected body. The individual’s “intention” occurred in “a very special dimension of human consciousness, in an ‘inter-world’ between dream and waking consciousness” (p. 57).

The role of “consciousness-raising” and “intention” during marital intercourse points to the importance of...