Sex & Drugs & the Left-Hand Path

This blog is inspired by (and thus dedicated to) a friend of mine. I'm not going to name her because that would be embarrassing but she's a Pagan of the Wiccan style and a hard-working young woman in the caring professions who is utterly devoted to her children.
She has, though, come in for some criticism for her use of certain narcotics and sex-magick in her magickal and religious practice. I love her to bits - most people do -but there's a small and vociferous minority who find her and her methods and philosophies offensive because they are "Left-Hand Path".

Disclaimer: Any non-Pagan or non-occultist reading this is likely to find it a wee bit confusing. Sorry! If you do need anything translating please ask.

Left-Hand Path

What do we mean when we talk about the Left- and Right-Hand Paths of magick? As a simple Pagan boy back in the '80s, who had read his share of Dennis Wheatley novels as a kid, the answer was pretty straightforward - good and evil! A Left-Hand Path magician would hurt and use people for their own ends. They would command demons, perform sacrifices and cause destruction. Proper sensationalist stuff.
Many people still believe this and judge accordingly. Certain activities, though, are classed as Left-Hand Path, regardless of whether they are destructive or harmful, and then condemned outright.

It can be argued, because words change their meanings over time, that a word or term means what people believe it to mean at any particular moment. A look at the history of the word "nice" is quite revealing in this regard. Equally a look at the origins of Left- and Right-Hand Paths is very enlightening.
The terms originate in Hindu and Buddhist Tantra and were first applied to Western Occultism by the famous Mme. Blavatsky back in the late 19th Century.
To give a general gist: Right-Hand practices can be considered the slow and safe way to Divinity - prayer, meditation, strict adherence to moral codes with the aim of (in Christian terms) "sitting at the right hand of God".
Left-Hand practices go direct - they are the methods which, occasionally dangerously, speed things up. The ingestion of certain mind-altering substances and sexual magickal acts are commonly used. They use real-world rather than symbolic methods and, most importantly, consider the practitioner to be potentially God themselves. A good description I've read describes the difference thus: ". . . the Great Rite performed symbolically using chalice and athame is a right-hand ritual. When the High Priest and High Priestess perform the Union by actually having sex, it is a left-hand ritual."

Magick

When we perform a Magickal act we're are looking at the multiverse in a different way from normal. We have to. We have to consider that there is an unseen force which we can be aware of and manipulate. During our normal lives this force is usually not noticed and we have to tune in in order to become aware of it.
Crowley defined Magick as causing changes in accordance with will, (such as the healing of an injury or the removal of an obstacle) but that's only a small part of the whole thing. What we are really changing using Magickal practices is ourselves. We change our awareness. We change it temporarily during a circle in order to be deliberately aware of the force we're tuning into and manipulating. In changing our awareness and perception of the multiverse we change ourselves into creatures with a wider perception.
And what is this force into which we tune? Mana, chi, the Holy Spirit, the "force", the True Will? By whatever name it's known it is our direct link to divinity, to Heaven, Samadhi, Yoga, enlightenment. By widening our perceptions we become more godlike, and the more we do it the more divine we become. The modern Pagan does this in very old-fashioned ways, such as invocation - which makes one divine by identification with the divine.

SEX!

How do you feel when sexually aroused? Do you feel "normal"? No, neither do I.
Sex is a great way of altering our awareness of the universe. The best method for most people appears to be loving sex with an absolutely equal partner - you open up yourselves and each other together. During orgasm the human being has an experience like no other and when two people do that together they join in a manner not possible by any other method. They literally know, for a moment, how it feels to be divine.
Yet, this is not the only way. The alteration of awareness via sexual methods can be done solo or even in large groups, via orgasm or the suppression of orgasm, or even via the various "kinks" which work so well for some people. Frankly from my own point of view, as long as everybody's happy doing what they're doing then whatever floats your boat is great. Go for it!
From a Western magickal perspective there is also another sexual road to divinity, to tuning in - the afterglow.

Here's a note to all men who get up, give it a wipe and then ring for a taxi - you're an idiot!
Awareness during afterglow whilst cuddling your partner/partners/simply enjoying it, is exactly the same as the awareness deliberately attempted during a circle. During afterglow we are automatically tuned-in, no longer a small, separate creature and instinctively aware of what Buddhists spend years of meditation trying to achieve.

DRUGS!

I'm not going to suggest here that people should use illegal and possibly dangerous substances. In fact, for legal reasons I'd like to declare this section on drugs entirely theoretical. Don't try this at home kiddies!
Okay, that's that out of the way!

I have a very limited experience of narcotics, so I'm happy to listen to experts on the subject. One of those experts is William Burroughs who considered opiates to be bad, and frankly he should know. So I'll say right now, stay away from opiates. Opiates include heroin, cocaine, opium, "smack" and so on.
There are certain other substances, however, which appear to have rather positive effects, both in the long and short terms. They also appear to have almost no addictive effects. These are the hallucinogens.
As I've said over and over already, magick is about changing yourself by means of changing your awareness, which is what hallucinogens do. Some people call them entheogens, which is lovely Greek(ish) word -literally within-god-create! They make you like a god inside.
In my own experience I have tried only one entheogen (unless you count kava-kava which was a bit pants), the psilocybe semilanceata or Liberty Cap/magic mushroom. In all honesty, it was great! It altered my perceptions so that I could see with ease all that I imagined and allowed me to look at the world in a completely different manner. Should I try it again I shall do so in a deliberately ritualised environment to heighten the experience yet further and to tune in even deeper.
This is exactly what shamans have been doing across the whole world for the whole of human existence! In other words, altering one's awareness has been magickal practice forever and the use of a substance to aid that change is one common, nay normal, method.

I'm not sure about marijuana simply because I don't like it. Personally I find it a vile substance and can't see the appeal. Different strokes for different folks!
There is one drug I would definitely not recommend - tobacco. Having spent most of my adult life addicted to the bloody stuff, and only having broken that addiction about 5 years ago I can honestly say that there is absolutely no good in tobacco whatsoever.

There is one mind-altering substance which is commonly used by millions on a regular basis. So commonly, in fact, that few consider it a drug at all. It's even used by people who disapprove of "drugs". It's legal, it's relatively cheap and it's incredibly dangerous. You've probably worked out by now that I'm talking about alcohol.
I deliberately use alcohol for what I consider its intended purpose - to get drunk. I'm not an habitual drinker (although there's always a danger of that) and so don't drink except for the effect. If I don't want to get drunk, I simply don't drink! To me this is a form of worship. A night drinking and dancing is my Bacchanale and I dedicate it to Dionysos as soon as I step through the door.

Paganism.

One of the wonderful things about Paganism is its immediacy. You don't need a priest to talk to the gods for you, you can do it yourself. You don't separate your worship to a specific day, your life becomes worship through the alteration of your awareness. You can even join with a spirit or deity so that they can speak through you and the two become one.

These are precisely the aims of the so-called Left-Hand Path!

By that definition, the whole of Paganism is Left-Hand Path, but does that mean that Paganism is also evil?
Bloody stupid question! Of course it doesn't!

It's about time we got rid of such simplistic definitions as Left- and Right-Hand Path. They don't help anybody. The vast majority of us use methods which combine elements of both definitions and therefore make a mockery of the whole concept. We're human beings and, as such, simple black/white categorisations are inadequate, belittling and frankly, bollocks!
If someone uses sexual magick to harm another person then they're not Left-Hand Path. They're bastards!
Similarly, if someone uses sexual magick to heal another person they're not Right-Hand Path, or Left- either. They're sexual healers, and probably an amazing shag too!

We need to get beyond petty moralisations and over-simplified definitions and open ourselves up to a whole multiverse of infinite possibilities. We are potential gods, and whatever methods we use to achieve that realisation for ourselves are the "good" ones.

An it harm none, do what you will.

Love,
Seán

Temple Tarts

Hooray! We're back on sex!

One of the things I love about the way life works is how significant things tend to clump together. A little while ago in a piece called Sex and Violence I mentioned the concept of the Temple Prostitute and my friend, Pegasus asked for some more info. I've also recently "met" (if that's the correct word for what one does online) a group calling themselves the Temple of Ishtar. On top of that I've found a group of American Qadishtu (more on that word in a moment) and I've just re-read Gilgamesh. Also, my friend Bridget recently gave a talk on ancient and modern Pagan attitudes to sexuality which mentioned Temple Prostitution.

I think the Gods are trying to tell me something, so maybe I should listen for once!

Anyway, I think I need to start off with what I know about these prostitutes, and I think it would a good idea to use some more sensible terms.
We have no word in English to describe the people I'm talking about. Whoever gave them the title prostitute did them a terrible disservice. It's technically correct in that they made their living by having sex with people, but so does a porn star. We have an image (I do anyway) of what a prostitute is like and it's pretty sordid. I've actually met a few prostitutes and, frankly, I'm amazed they make any money! It's definitely the wrong word so, as from now, I'm going to use a new term I've learned - Qadishtu.

Quadishtu
A Qadishtu is a sexual priestess, one for whom the act of sexual intercourse is given as a form of worship. What we know of this practise comes primarily from ancient Mesopotamia. It was expected of a woman that she would, once in her life, act as a priestess in the Eanna temple and have sexual intercourse with whoever wanted her. Most of the time the Qadishtu was someone who made it their profession and lived, or at least worked, in the Temple full-time.
We also have evidence that this practise was common well outside the walls of Uruk and for quite some time. Some 1,500 years later and roughly 1000 miles away in Biblical Canaan and Syria the practise was still going on. Deuteronomy 23:17-18 mentions it:

No Israelite man or woman is to become a shrine-prostitute.You must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male prostitute into the house of the LORD your God to pay any vow, because the LORD your God detests them both.

There are also references in I Kings, II Kings and Job. The Hebrews (or their leaders anyway) didn't like it at all!

So Who Were They?
Well for a start, they weren't all women. There were men as well. In fact the word Qadishtu refers to a woman. The male word is Qadash or Qedesh and I suppose the plural (it being a Semitic term) would be something like Qadishtim.
There are stories which tell of religious ecstasies where the men would castrate themselves. It appears that these men were naturally effeminate, whether castrated or not, and worked in the same way as the women. There may be a remnant of this in the Hijra of India, some of whom are castrated, many of whom work as prostitutes and are regarded with a mixture of awe and superstitious dislike. Many of the societies that we would consider "primitive" have kept a special place for their "third sex" members
I have no idea whether the customers were all male or not, but I don't believe there was any deliberate form of discrimination. I can see the job of a man being difficult, though, if he is expected to perform on demand. It would be easier for him to be on the "receiving end".

Most importantly though, is what they were doing it for. There are many ways of earning a living and there must have been some distasteful moments where a Qadishtu would have to "lie back and think of Babylonia". The point is that, unlike in our strange and hypocritical modern age, sex and sexuality were celebrated openly as good things. Most of the mythology we read nowadays is taken directly from Victorian and Edwardian scholars who edited heavily according to the appallingly prurient morality of their day. Here's an example:

"O Ishullanu of mine, come, let me taste of thy vigour, Put forth thy hand, too, . . . . . . . . . ."
(Gilgamesh Book VI, R. Campbell Thompson, 1928)

"Sweet Ishullanu, let me suck your rod, Touch my vagina, caress my jewel"
(Gilgamesh Book VI, Stephen Mitchell, 2004)

To be a Qadishtu was a source of pride and honour. It was to be a representative of the greatest and most powerful Goddess Inanna. The word Qadishtu comes from a Semitic root which literally means "Holy"

Inanna
Inanna seems to be a most powerful and primal goddess. She doesn't go all Victorian when it comes to sex either. She shaves her pubes off like a modern porn queen and hangs around outside pubs to take out her sexual lusts on drunken men. (Don't believe me? I got it from Wikipaedia)
She's quite aggressive too, in many ways. Her lovers tend to die by violence, and she can't handle rejection one bit. Despite the constant sex, though, she's not a Goddess of childbirth - just the bit that tends to lead to it!
There are characters just like Inanna all over the mythology of Europe and the Near East, and probably the rest of the world as well. Inanna is her Sumerian name (a language used by the Ancient Babylonians specifically for religious purposes), in Akkadian (ie. the normal language of 2,500 BC Uruk) she's called Ishtar. She's also called, in various languages across the Near East, Astarte, Asherah Esther and Ashtoreth.
The Romans identified her with their own Venus, which is very appropriate as they are both Goddesses of the morning and evening star. Likewise, in Greece, she is considered the same as Aphrodite. In Norse she's Freya and in Ireland she's the Morrigan (lit: "Great Queen").

The Qadishtu's job was one of worship by sex. A Qadishtu was the vessel of the Queen of Heaven herself and to have sex with her would be an incredibly important act of communion, not to be taken lightly. Similarly, if ancient texts are anything to go by, the Qadishtu enjoyed their job a lot. Hell, why not - it was their job to have orgasms for the good of the community!

Where Are They Now?
Nowadays due to 2000 years of Christianity we separate the sacred from the normal when we should be find the sacred in the normal. We separate sex from the spiritual and consider it profane. We hide it away as something "dirty" or "shameful" and don't talk about it in polite company. Even someone like myself, who thinks (and writes) about these things, has suffered the brainwashing that we all get about sex. I don't think sex is dirty or shameful but I still keep pictures of it private. I believe sex is a beautiful and sacred act but I don't think I could do it with people watching!
I consider myself fairly open-minded and well-educated on the topic but most people that I've met during my working life (blue collar) are not. They have a contradictory attitude which makes them disgusted to see teenagers snogging on the street, but lets them watch a porno DVD of the most blatantly abusive type. The only difference between them and me, really, is that we're all brainwashed but I realised, and am trying to do something about it.

So what can we do about it? Attitudes to sex are changing, particularly amongst the better educated and marginal groups like Pagans, but ground-level changes are very slow. In the end, though, in order to change society we need to change ourselves - the only bit of society we've any real control over - and hope others follow. There are modern-day Qadishtu like the lovely Inara de Luna and a variety of sex-educators, workers and helpers but they're often marginalised as nutters or worse, pornographers and therefore "dirty".

Intimacy
I think our attitudes to sex in general could well be improved by improving our attitudes and habits concerning intimacy. Specifically we need to look at touch and nudity.

Touch is a funny thing for an adult human. We're sociable creatures yet distant from each other at the same time. Small children don't care, they touch each other all the time without it being considered a problem. Babies actually physically need to be touched, held, cuddled in order to grow up healthily.
Somewhere between the child and the adult, though, we develop this weird thing called personal space. Personal space varies according to how crowded your upbringing was but it can be considered as about 12" with a person you really like and about 3 or 4 feet for ordinary social contacts. I have no idea why we develop personal space, and I'd be grateful to anyone who can enlighten me. At the same time we also have a craving for human contact, usually in the form of a friend or loved one.
Look at the different behaviours of the adults and children around you and you may notice something quite interesting. Adults will avoid touching and entering each other's personal space unless they are either lovers or one is trying to dominate the other. But, it's perfectly acceptable for an adult to touch a child (hair-ruffling) or a child to touch an adult (like the three-year old who will plonk themselves on your knee).
The answer to this is, of course, to be open to touch. Not to touch other people more, because that would be invasive, but to invite them to touch you. One of the most wonderful experiences I've discovered is the "friend cuddle". Nine times out of ten I've found that, rather than shaking hands with a friend, opening your arms to them has the result of causing a massive sense of relaxation in the other person. Tension drops, acceptance is felt and the two people become both physically and emotionally more intimate. I'm extremely glad to say that Pagans do this a lot and consequently we don't feel so tense if we're crowded into a small area together.
The Free Hugs guy is a genius and pioneer!

What about nudity, then? I've written a lot about nudity, and I'm sure I will again because I like it! One of the things I've found about social nudity is the absolute degree of acceptance, both from other people and oneself. I have found that clothes hide a lot more than just your body. When we dress we are subconsciously projecting an image, even if we don't think about it! Nobody sane and normal deliberately dresses to look bad (fancy-dress parties excepted). When we dress we put a personality on with our clothes and thus hide a part of ourselves.
First-time nudists almost always use one word to describe their experience - liberating!. They're right too. Once you find that you can't hide anything then you almost immediately realise that there was no need to hide anything in the first place. There is no need for a shield because there is no threat to be protected from and the personality that you would otherwise have put on can be your own.
In doing this you are, like with the friend cuddle, inviting intimacy.

What's This Got To Do With Sex?
Nudists will tell you that nudism isn't sexual. It isn't, but it is intimate and intimate is sexy. Sex is the ultimate intimacy. You can't have sex fully dressed (you've got to remove something!) and you definitely can't do it without touching (I'm not talking about phone sex here - that's something entirely different!)
The Qadishtu offered a valuable service to their community. By being intimate and vulnerable, by "opening up" to all comers they performed a marvellous Taoist paradox - they got on top by being underneath. They were valued for their nakedness and loving touch and the sacred nature of lying with them. They were powerful and important people - perhaps a memory of a bygone age of matriarchal communal sexuality - and this sense of acceptance and holiness in the sexual act would be passed into the wider community. Therefore, not only would it be an act of worship to have sex with the Qadishtu, but also to have sex with one's spouse(s) at home

Religion should, first and foremost, be fun. A religion is there to make one's life better and what could be better than more cuddling, nudity and sex - they are acts of worship to the Great Goddess Inanna.

Life is sacred, let's live like it is.

Love,
Seán

Sex and Violence?

One of my Fasebook friends recently wondered why violence is so prevalent in our society. My answer was that we don't have enough sex.

That's a pretty glib statement at first and sounds a bit like a joke. It is a joke, sort of , but that doesn't mean I don't think it's true. I didn't have enough space in the Facebook comments box to qualify my statement properly, so that's what this essay is about. I'm thinking of adding pictures too. (Why not - I like pictures!)

Just as an aside - does anybody else find Facebook to be the world's most amazing consumer of time? I'm beginning to think it may be evil.

Boys and Girls, Chimps and Bonobos

Have you ever noticed the different ways very young children play. At a really young age (crawling into toddling) they tend to play individual games next to each other, but as they learn to communicate boys and girls start to fall into different styles of playing. Boys become competitive and girls become co-operative.

This is an appalling generalisation because on an individual level it doesn't actually work, but the subject is so big I've got to use averages. I'm assuming - and with good reason - that my readers have the intelligence to see the difference between, for instance, "male" and "a boy".

So why should this be? The nature/nurture debate rages on; personally I think it's a little bit of both. The fact remains, though, that by the time they start infant school (3-4) girls play together and boys play against each other.

Let's apply this to our own societies which have been highly patriarchal in character across a vast history of thousands of years. Obviously competition becomes the norm and violence, which could be considered the ultimate form of competition, is widespread.

We could wonder how much different our societies would be if we'd been matriarchal from the start. Actually, we don't have to wonder because we've got a perfect comparative example right in front of us: chimps and bonobos.

I'm assuming that everyone knows what a chimpanzee is. Well, a bonobo - which is endangered and only lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo - is a smaller, slimmer species of chimp with longer legs, more individualistic facial features and a greater tendency to stand upright. Physically they're very similar. Socially they could hardly be more different.

Chimp society is male-dominated and competitive. Extreme violence to males outside the group is normal and violence as a conflict-resolution is common within the group. Bonobos are female-dominated, co-operative and egalitarian as well as very family oriented. They also have conflicts but deal with them in a completely different way: they have sex.

Bonobos have sex for any and every reason they, or we, can think of. They use sex as a greeting, as reconciliation, as conflict-resolution and tension-relief and, frankly, because it's fun. They don't discriminate in terms of age or gender, group sex is normal and permanent pairings are non-existent. You can usually spot a female bonobo by the huge, swollen vulva.

An example (which I think I'm plagiarising from Rev. Ivan Stang) would give a good demonstration of the differences between chimp and bonobo societies:

Imagine a small tribe of chimpanzees at rest. Now throw a large bunch of bananas into their midst. Immediately there's tension. The browbeaten females cower; the braver males make a grab for them. The dominant male beats the daylights out of everyone else until they give in and the bananas are all his. He eats what he wants, leaving the rest to the others to fight over. The females are lucky if they get the skins.

Okay - Imagine a small tribe of bonobos at rest. Now throw a large bunch of bananas into their midst. Immediately there's tension. Suddenly everyone turns to their nearest neighbour(s) and start having frantic, orgasmic sex. In a little while everyone feels much better at which point the dominant female takes all the bananas and shares them out evenly amongst the tribe. It seems that if violence is uncivilised then sex must be the world's greatest civilizer.

The chimps probably developed violent competition due to a lack of resources, the bonobos never needed to. They have all they need and more. Sounds idyllic doesn't it? It sort of is.

Human Bonobos

I'm going to state right now that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence for the existence of matriarchal human societies in our distant past. This doesn't actually mean that they didn't exist (and I believe they probably did), just that we can't prove it. So, I'm going to postulate one.

Imagine living in a place where all your immediate needs are completely taken care of and always have been. There is no need to compete for resources so competitiveness in society is unnecessary. Female-domination would be highly likely. Co-operation and leisure are, therefore, the norms and what could be more co-operative and leisure-based than sex? Lots and lots of sex.

Frankly, such societies would be rare. Should a highly competitive tribe from a neighbouring, but less well-resourced land decide they want all the food, then it's goodbye to our feminist utopia. But they wouldn't be completely forgotten. They would live on in memory and folklore.

They are certainly remembered in the ancient Greek and Celtic legends of the Fortunate Isles away to the West. Tir na nÓg and Tir na mBan in Celtic mythology are perfect examples. These are places where there is no hunger or thirst, where all are healthy and need not struggle, where sex has no shame attached and which are ruled by a Queen.

Patriarchal Religion

The supreme sexual power of women was still recognised (albeit in a somewhat lessened form) in the Middle East in the shape of the Temple Prostitute. This carried on right up to the 4th Century AD and was a form of worship for Astarte (Ishtar). The word "prostitute" has connotations nowadays which cannot be applied to the Qedeshah (local Semitic word). She was a sacred female, a minor queen in her own right and not the servant of the men who came to her. She was a servant of her Goddess.

Patriarchal Judaism didn't like it at all. In order to hold position and gain strength in a world quite hostile to its harsh and ascetic ways the Hebrews had to be competitive, they had to fight - like men!

The suppression of women is Patriarchy's most successful policy when it comes to gaining political power. The suppression of women is also the suppression of sex - remember that woman's sex-drive is far more powerful than a man's - and the suppression of sex leads to an immense build-up of energy. Nothing has suppressed sex like Patriarchal Monotheism.

The human sex-drive is incredibly powerful - it's next on the list immediately after food, warmth, shelter. When suppressed that energy has to go somewhere and a skillful propagandist can sublimate and redirect it in anyway he chooses. Fundamentalist Islam (which treats women slightly worse than cattle) is particularly good at this nowadays.

Back to the Present

So that's the history - but how does it apply to the present day?

Well, we're in a kind of flux position. The position of women in modern Western society has improved immensely in recent years, although true equality is still a long way off. Most of us also have all our immediate needs pretty much sorted and secure. A franker and more accepting attitude to sexuality has also become more prominent, although nowhere near enough.

On the other hand we have several thousand years of ingrained Monotheistic history and cultural propaganda which isn't going to go away.

Even though it's no longer necessary for survival, competition is still encouraged and lauded in ordinary society and on the sports field. Violence is less common than it was, but still prominent.

What we need to do now - and in many ways it's just following a trend that's already begun - is to promote two things: Firstly, the feminine (anarchist) virtues of mutual trust and co-operation and secondly sex - lots and lots (of lots of different types) of sex.

Taoist Bonking

According to the ancient Taoist sages in China, the teachers of wisdom are female. The Tao is female, and in sexual (ie. civilised) terms women are superior to men. The sooner both men and women realise this, the better. Sex needs to be learned and taught and practised a lot and, contrary to our society's norms, the teachers need to be women. This doesn't preclude homosexuality because in a truly civilised society all forms of consensual sex become normal - just like the bonobos.

There are violent people in our society, mostly poor and uneducated young men. There are less than the papers would have us believe, but they do exist. They are brought up to be competitive, suspicious of sex and fearful of difference, just like the boys who killed Michael Causer in Liverpool recently. Had they been brought up in a feminised society, would they have considered a gay person as a threat, or a target? Or would they be too busy with their own sexual experiments to want to go hurting anybody?

It's a huge subject and I've waffled for long enough, so here's a little question to finish:

You and you belovèd(s) have just had a fantastic, multi-orgasmic session - do you really want to listen to somebody telling you to get up and fight? No? Neither would I.

Love,

Seán