Among the powers of Sex we can take three from the articles of Way Out Magazine, July 1970:
- Generation
- Degeneration
- Regeneration
While the articles are dated, are they really archeological or is this sane and then sacred treatment of this immense power possible today?
See the following Posts:
Sex and Marriage, Malcolm Muggerige
Sacred Sex Regeneration Part 2
And hear some of the teachers on this subject:
Gurdjieff Commentary on Sexual Discipline
All that you tell me about your “sins” calls to mind my own experiences when I was younger. Part of us recognizes that some form of purity is necessary in regard to sex. But we forget that the principal form of purity for us is the love of truth. Remember that, remember that! Don’t you understand that the Fathers whose lives inspire you were themselves always close to self-observation and self-questioning? Don’t try to imitate, outwardly, the stories told about them. Do you know what preceded their retreat into the desert? Do you know what experiences they had in that civilization which even more than our own, was permeated with sexual excess? Don’t you remember what we have said about others who went to the desert to imitate them? How so many came to nothing even with the help of the great masters? Always seek the Question, even in Hell. Let that search become your permanent center of gravity. Concerning our other ancient Teachers and Fathers who did not retreat to the desert, you must stop feeding your imagination by believing everything essential is known about their lives. I tell you now that only very few of those whose attainments we recognize found it necessary to live entirely without normal sexuality, no matter what you read about them. When you have understood more about the laws of the inner life, you will know why this cannot be doubted. I, too, did not understand this at the beginning. There was a time, in my own life, when this problem brought me to such despair that I was on the brink of abandoning the teachings of Christianity. I could not fathom what was going on. I thought to myself: “This teaching is certainly the word of God. It brings the whole of life together, with everything in its rightful place. Then why do the holy Fathers seem to refuse this part of life? Why has so much suffering, without light at the end, been brought to people because of this?” I could not bear this contradiction. I felt that if only this contradiction could be resolved I could give my whole heart to Christianity. Something was wrong. Something was twisted or left out somewhere, by someone. But it was incredible. Wherever I turned I met a wall. All roads seemed to lead to the same contradiction. The unanimity of textual writings and statements by respected people was astonishing and depressing. There were beautiful theories and mystical symbols about love and union, but I saw that they still led others and myself to hypocrisy or sadness. I was not seeking a life of indulgence—far from it; I had been through all that many times over. I did not want the “new morality.” But I did not and could not want the “old morality” either. Not out of any conscious decision, but solely because it seemed that all other avenues were closed, I began to investigate and explore this question experimentally, for myself. Can you imagine how clumsy and painful this was without anyone to guide me? I do not recommend it. But I had no other choice at the time. Two unexpected discoveries resulted from these investigations. In the first place, I saw unmistakably that my feelings of guilt and shame were made of exactly the same cloth as my fantasies and desires. I have spoken about this many times in our gatherings. The guilt and desires originate in the same part of the mind. The first problem of our lives is that this part of the mind captures all our attention and all our soul’s energy. It is all, equally, “thoughts.” I realized that although what I called “desire” was equivalent to what the holy Fathers designated by that word, this was not the case with what I called “guilt” and “shame.” Christian guilt in its real meaning applies only to people in whom there has fully begun the reversal of the first dispersal of the soul. By indulging in these mechanical feelings of guilt I was not at all imitating the holy Teachers. I was only indulging in thoughts, feeding a small part of the mind with a precious force that belonged to the whole self, the inner God. I realized that the holy Fathers were men who had already begun the process of the in-gathered light of attention and that therefore they could speak of shame, the shame of wasting the energy that belongs to the whole. I understood that this waste is the true corruption of the sin of lust, and applies to the system of guilt and desire.
Needleman, Jacob. Lost Christianity
Charles Williams, Â on The Early Christian Practice of Sacred Sex in The Descent of the Dove
At that time [The Apostolic time], indeed, the Church seems to have moved in a cloud of wonders, as if the exact pattern of the Glory was for a while descended. It was not only her more formal and central Rites—Baptism and the Eucharist—which were maintained and spread and sacramentally pledged to converts. As if the Ascent of Messias had opened heaven, as if the Descent of the Paraclete had brought heaven out, the languages and habits of heaven seemed for a few years, a few decades, to hover within the Church after a manner hardly realized since except occasionally and individually. There were miracles of healing and even miracles of destruction. In that first full vision and realization, powers exchanged themselves between believers. As in other great experiences, the primal sense of this experience renewed energies more than mortal. At that time the Spirit in the Church sent ” through every power a double power Beyond their functions and their offices.” And this power was recognized and accepted. “After the Eucharist, certain inspired persons began to preach and to make manifest before the assembly the presence of the spirit which animated them. The prophets, the ecstatics, the speakers in tongues, the interpreters, the supernatural healers, absorbed at this time the attention of the faithful. There was, as it were, a Liturgy of the Holy Ghost after the Liturgy of Christ, a true liturgy with a Real Presence and communion. The inspiration could be felt—it sent a thrill through the organs of certain privileged persons, but the whole assembly was moved, edified, and even more or less ravished, by it and transported into the Divine sphere of the Paraclete “*( L. Duchesne, Christian Worship.)
These things were gradually to fade. There was among them another method, also to fade, and yet of high interest and perhaps still of concern, dangerous but dangerous with a kind of heavenly daring. There grew up, it seems, in that young and ardent body an effort towards a particular spiritual experiment of, say, the polarization of the senses. Our knowledge of it is very small, and is indeed confined to a famous passage of St. Paul, to a letter of St. Cyprian’s, and to one or two disapproving Canons of various Councils. The method was probably not confined to the Church; it is likely to have existed in other Mysteries. The great necromancer Simon Magus carried with him on his wanderings a companion who may have been for that purpose, and there were attributed to her high titles.**
**Thou art Helen of Tyre
And hast been Helen of Troy, and hast been Rahab,
The Queen of Sheba, and Semiramis,
And Sara of seven husbands, and Jezebel,
And other women of the like allurements,
And now thou art Minerva, the first Æon,
The Mother of Angels.
But Simon is said to have preached that he had himself appeared “among the Jews as the Son, but in Samaria as the Father, and among other nations as the Holy Ghost.” Christians, less ambitious, attempted the experiment both within the doctrine and within the morality of the Church. This is clear from that passage in St. Paul which shows that in some instances the experiment broke down owing to the sexual element between the man and the woman becoming too pronounced. The Apostle is asked whether, in such cases, marriage is permissible, and he answers that though, all things considered (and he meant precisely all things considered), it would be better if they could have continued with the great work, because marriage means the introduction of all sorts of pleasant—but less urgent—temporal affairs, still there is nothing wrong with it, nothing against the Faith and the New Life. If sex is becoming an inconvenience, let them deal with it in the simplest and happiest way; it is better to marry than to burn.
It seems that there was, in the first full rush of the Church, an attempt, encouraged by the Apostles, to ” sublimate.” But the experimenters probably did not call it that. The energy of the effort was in and towards the Crucified and Glorified Redeemer, towards a work of exchange and substitution, a union on earth and in heaven with that Love which was now understood to be capable of loving and of being loved. In some cases, it failed. But we know nothing —most unfortunately—of the cases in which it did not fail, and that there were such cases seems clear from St. Paul’s quite simple acceptance of the idea. By the time of Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage in the third century, the ecclesiastical authorities were much more doubtful. The women— subintroducta as they were called—apparently slept with their companions without intercourse; Cyprian does not exactly disbelieve them, but he discourages the practice. ***( We must interfere at once with such as these, that they may be separated while yet they can be separated in innocence.” The Writings of Cyprian: Epistle Ixi: R. E. Wallis).  And the Synod of Elvira (305) and the Council of Nicæa (325) forbade it altogether. The great experiment had to be abandoned because of “scandal.”
Tolstoy put the crude objection in the Kreutzer Sonata, and Cyprian more or less agreed. ” But then, excuse me, why do they go to bed together?” Both wise men were justified as against a great deal of sentimental lust and sensual hypocrisy. But even Cyprian and Tolstoy did not understand all the methods of the Blessed Spirit in Christendom. The prohibition was natural. Yet it seems a pity that the Church, which realized once that she was founded on a Scandal, not only to the world but to the soul, should be so nervously alive to scandals. It was one of the earliest triumphs of ” the weaker brethren,” those innocent sheep who by mere volume of imbecility have trampled over many delicate and attractive flowers in Christendom. It is the loss, so early, of a tradition whose departure left the Church rather over-aware of sex, when it might have been creating a polarity with which sex is only partly coincident. The use of sex, in this experiment, might have been to pass below itself and release the dark gods of D. H. Lawrence directly into the kingdom of Messias. It failed, and it must be added that St. Paul’s foresight was justified. The Church abandoned that method in favour of the marriage method, which he had deprecated, and eventually lost any really active tradition of marriage itself as a way of the soul. This we have still to recover; it is, no doubt, practiced in a million homes, but it can hardly be said to have been diagrammatized or taught by the authorities. Monogamy and meekness have been taught instead. Yet in some sense this experiment in polarization corresponded to the first knowledge of the Church; the grand experience of, and faith in, an otherness and a union, a life from Others or from another. The lovers of that period—or some of them—realized the impact of Love, and desired to act and grow from it. It was the beginning, and they conceived it so. The point of its discovery was the point to be at once practiced and transformed. Christianity is, always, the redemption of a point, of one particular point. “Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation.” In this sense there is nothing but now; there is no duration. We have nothing to do with duration, and yet (being mortal) we have to do with nothing but duration; between those contrasts also all the history and doctrine of Christendom lies.
Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove
Sacred Eros, from Inner Journey, Views from the Christian Tradition, The Battle for Person in the Heart, James and Myfanwy Moran, sub title: Sobornost.
The Eros is that power of desire, or longing, by which we are drawn out of ourselves toward God and other persons. Eros both recognizes the beauty of personhood, and yearns for communion with that personhood as the only fulfillment of its deep hunger. St. Dionysus says that this power of love to draw man out of himself and into communion is its ecstatic quality. “Love . . . is ecstatic, making us go out of ourselves: it does not allow the lover to belong any more to himself, but he belongs only to the beloved.” Does this mean ecstasy is a losing of oneself? No, it means that one ceases to be complete without the other. Life ceases to exist in self-preserved wholeness. Ecstasy also means that what Eros seeks is not a mere release of energy, but a meeting with the other, through contact with their energy. Ecstasy, in short, is the final fulfillment of synergy.
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