Friday, February 29, 2008

Sex and the Paranormal

Most ancient cultures include some form of sexual ritual. The powerful opportunities lying behind the unity of the male and female energies and the possibility of creation make the sex act an obvious choice for ritualization.

While Pagan cultures used sexual ritual to align with the fertile energies of the Universe through hedonistic Bacchanalian/Dionysian abandonment, Gnostic Christianity adopted more complex Eastern philosophy. The ancient religious discipline of Tantra, from which Tibetan Tantric Buddhism and orthodox Hinduism have developed, teaches that mystical enlightenment can be achieved through the careful ritualization of sensuality.

Unlike the ancient shamanic traditions from which it developed, Tantra taught the strict disciplining of Mind and Body to create an acute awareness and opening to the dual male/female energies of the Universe, and thus the ability to understand and experience the Unity of the Divine. Simply put, it is the transmutation of desire and experience into an authentic understanding. When Tantric ideas reached the Middle East from India, ecstasy cults such as the Nazarenes and the Mandeans sprung into being.

Scholars now believe that the Historical Christ belonged to one such cult, and from the crossing of the two cultures, Gnostic Christianity emerged. The Celts were the first Europeans to embrace Gnosticism recognizing the similarity in symbolism, and so Celtic Christianity quickly emerged. Unlike the Holy Roman Catholic Church, it understood the sexual ideas of the teachings of the Historical Christ. Transmutation of sexuality rather than repression of sexuality created a distinctly different form of Christianity, which is illustrated clearly on the covers of the first Christian Bibles that depict the crucified Jesus with an enormous erection, as displayed in London's British Museum.

Celtic Christianity was destroyed by the Holy Roman Empire, but Christian Gnosticism saw a renaissance in Europe in the 12th Century. Surviving Pagan nature cult followers again embraced Christian Gnosticism, but a split between the Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Church caused the marginalization and eventually demonization of Tantric/Gnostic ideas. In order to consolidate dogmatic power, theologians within the Church cast out sexuality from within ideas of spirituality.

As we see today in most modern Christian traditions, sexuality far from offering a path to enlightenment, if embraced is seen to offer only a path to misery, destruction and perhaps even Hell.

It is no coincidence that the inversion of AMOR, meaning love, is ROMA. Evidence of Rome's demonization of Tantra is clearly displayed by the Holy Eucharist, which is the centerpoint of the Catholic Mass.

A particular Indian Tantric ritual, the Five Enjoyments, which is a celebration of life through the appreciation of fine meat, bread, fish, wine and sex, became to the Gnostic Christians the sharing of Bread and Wine as is illustrated in the story of the Last Supper. It is pertinent that the meaning behind the echoed rituals of the Catholic Eucharist were radically altered in the turbulent 12th Century by St.Thomas Aquinas. The bread and wine of the "five enjoyments" became the transubstantiated and literal body and blood of Christ. The celebration of life was now a celebration of death through a vampiric act of cannibalism.

This fundamental alteration in the approach to simple human pleasures may go some way to explaining the repressed and violent nature of the European Christian cultures that have since spread throughout the world.