Women and sex have been the two targets of the Christian Church for centuries. In early times, especially in Hellenic Greece, women had certain rights. They were allowed to divorce a cruel husband or one who became mad or violent. They had their ways of contraception and it was seen as their right to use it. They could own property and even administer it in some areas. In short, they were considered to be the rightful 'other half' of humanity.
By contrast the Church, right down through the ages, has persistently railed against woman, calling her evil, debased, and the originator of sin. Most of this is due to St Paul's incessant hostility to the female sex. He may well have written some of the most quoted parts of the Bible, and he may well have brought Christianity to the rest of the world, but he remains an embittered personality who caused much suffering to women. His attitude towards sex was just as bad - his rejection of the gift given to man by the Creator prompting Cerinthus to say, 'Man should not be ashamed of what God has not been ashamed to create.'
Contrast this with the following (and I quote from Charles Seltman's invaluable book Women in Antiquity):
The [so-called] secluded and despised Athenian women ran homes, bullied their husbands with no fear of them, ran wild at festivals, went to the theatre, took lovers, drank wine . . . the land-owning women of Sparta . . . the young matrons of Lydia and Tuscany famed for their beauty and light-hearted promiscuity . . . the Hetairai . . . enjoying the freedom of the woman unattached . . .
There is no doubt who got the best deal. As far as Paul and the early Church Fathers were concerned (by the way, where were the early Church Mothers?) sex was something that kept man's mind away from God. This I find hard to believe, when anyone who has ever been in love and made love will tell you that sex brings you closer to the divine than at any other time.
Paul took the biblical story of Adam and Eve to be absolute truth and therefore believed with fervor in blaming the woman. However, if we read the Bible we see that when God came rampaging through the Garden of Eden heaven bent on finding out who had been 'scrimping' His apples, He found Adam holding the 'core' of the disturbance in his hand. On being asked about this damning piece of evidence, Adam, ever the gentleman, pointed to Eve and said, 'She made me do it . . .' or words to that effect.
This was the first buck-passing in pseudo-history, and that is all the Bible is. Not a word of it can be proven as actual truth. It is a collection of myth, legends, allegorical tales and writings put down, in some cases, centuries after the event, then mistranslated and twisted out of sight to suit the purpose of what was at the time a minor religious sect.
When we look back over the past, we see repressed men, sadistic popes, and a cruel priesthood, that on the one hand denounced, and rightly so, the cruel child sacrifices of Moloch, but on the other racked, tortured, and burnt women, children, and babies (some born to women in the process of being burnt and tossed back on to the flames) for no crime other than malicious gossip, the fact that they were old and lived alone with a cat for company, had property the Church wanted, or held a different belief - even if it was a Christian belief like that of the Cathars - from their own. The Protestants hated the Catholics, the Catholics hated the Pagans, Luther hated the Jews, Calvin hated everything . . . and they all slaughtered each other every chance they got.
This is a Church founded on love, preached by a wise and gentle man who had recognized his own divinity and relationship to the Creator, and wanted to share it with everyone, not just Jews. He was a Jew, by the way, he lived and died a Jew and would probably have been horrified to be thought of as anything else. He attended weddings and drank the health of the bride and groom, he healed the sick, no matter whether they were Roman and worshipped their own Gods, or whether they were Jews. He even took pity on the demons and allowed them to withdraw from their 'host' and take refuge in a herd of swine. Yeshua of Nazareth cannot be blamed for what has been done in his name, and he was got rid of for similar reasons, for worshipping in a different way from those around him.
The early Christians were almost morbidly fixed on celibacy and virginity. Tales are told of young girls, vulnerable at the age of puberty because of their feminine link with the inner levels, who allowed themselves to be put to death, usually in the most painful and sexually debauched of ways. Breasts were torn off with hot irons, red-hot swords were thrust into the vagina and/or anus, and all because they had been brainwashed into believing that their virginity, if preserved, assured them of a place in heaven. Books about such martyrs were considered educational reading for young Victorian children, and we worry about television violence today! This kind of influence over young minds shows how sick some fanatics can get.
However, as any psychologist will tell you, sex, when repressed, will come out in other ways. It is after all the most powerful of all human urges, linked to the most powerful of all, the urge to survive, because it offers a way for the species to survive as against personal survival. It has been rightly said that what you fear, you become: hide sex away and it will emerge in a different form, usually in art, as that which is creative will always find a creative outlet. We find it doing just that in medieval paintings of the Virgin and in those of Jesus on the Cross with the wound in his side looking suspiciously like the female labia, from which, having been pierced by the phallic spear, gushes a mixture of blood and water as the Christ is born into a higher world. We see voyeurism depicted in paintings such as 'Susanne and the Elders', 'Esther and the King', and of course 'Eve and the Serpent'. I remember my late mother-in-law being highly embarrassed at seeing a painting in the museum at Monserrat in northern Spain depicting an elderly Hebrew prophet being breast fed by his daughter who was visiting him in jail. (His captors were trying to starve him to death.) There is a painting extant of St Bernard of Clairvaux being fed by the Virgin Mary from her breast as a mark of favor. The cult of the mother is a cult also of her womanhood and femininity, her breasts and her vulva, those organs which make her a woman. Misogynists have mothers even if they despise them!
Has the Church changed its views on women? Not a lot. Women are still barred by their sex from reclaiming the ancient title of 'priestess', for example. (If we ever do get it back, are we going to let them style us as 'women priests'? I hope not. Let us make a stand to win back the older and rightful title, which is so much more suitable -and perhaps we can come up with something more feminine than a cassock!)
Celibacy is still demanded of its priests by the Catholic Church though there are rebels within the Church who are trying to change this. Should being a priest deny a man the fire and beauty of a sexual relationship? It might just make him more sympathetic to his flock and to women in particular.
Contraception was practiced in the old world, but in ours, with far more dependable ways of doing it, more than half the world is denied its use, not on medical grounds, or even because of non-availability, but because the Church of Rome says it is wrong. This is based on the 'be fruitful and multiply' edict of the Bible, given in an era when the total population of the known world was probably less than that of modern London. Never mind that we are running out of clean air, natural resources, water, land, food, and those species that share the planet with us. Never mind that in Latin America women are dying at 30, worn out with continual childbirth in dangerous and medically unsafe conditions. Sex, which should be a wonderful and uplifting experience between two people, is becoming an opiate against despair and poverty, lessening its glory and its godliness.
This article is excerpted with permission from the book:
The Tree of Ecstasy: An Advanced Manual of Sexual Magic
by Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki.
©1999. Published by Samuel Weiser, York Beach, ME.
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About The Author
Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki travels the world lecturing on all aspects of the occult and is the author of many books, including "The Ritual Magic Workbook".
