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TMaroney: Ritual Tradition and Sex

To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick,alt.magick.tantra,alt.magick.sex,alt.sex.wizards,alt.pagan.magick,alt.religion.spirituality,talk.religion.misc,talk.religion.newage
From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nagasiva)
Subject: TMaroney: Ritual Tradition and Sex
Date: 13 Sep 1997 02:53:05 -0700

[from thelema93-l@hollyfeld.org: Tim Maroney ]

>This strikes me as a really succinct summation of what Liber XV ... and the 
>OTO, it seems ... is about.  It's about sex, pure and simple.  Not sex as 
>symbolism, or gender as symbolism ... just plain ordinary sex. 

It's an interesting and complex issue you raise.

The form of sacralization of sex that was happening in the late 19th 
century in groups like the HBL and the O.T.O. often seems somewhat quaint 
to us in the more open atmosphere of today. There is a displaced 
puritanism in it, a desperate attempt to show that it's actually not the 
sinful thing that the churches are holding it to be by larding it with 
all manners of esoteric symbolism and initiated interpretation. In the 
worst cases people come to think that only their "inner sexual formula" 
is valid and other forms of sex are just as evil as the churchmen of old 
would insist.

In this regard I would agree with you, if I am understanding you 
correctly, that a lot of people are drawn to sexual-symbolism rituals 
like the Gnostic Mass and the Gardnerian Circle by libidinal forces, and 
that there is an unconscious subterfuge in insisting that the real reason 
is something else.

On the other hand, while there may be a certain kind of neurosis that 
helped to create these quasi-puritanically ritualized forms of sex, for 
many people (myself included) they have a very real spiritual dimension. 
It may be a displacement of sexual energy that fuels the magic, but it's 
a damn powerful fuel. It doesn't just satisfy the sex drive but can 
create transcendental experiences that seem qualitatively distinct from 
ordinary romantic sex, wonderful as that can be.

(Exactly why is a subject for another time; I'll say briefly that I feel 
there is a broad range of spiritual feelings of love and adoration which 
are similar when they between sex partners, between an adorant and a 
deity, and between a child and its parents. These feelings are primal and 
involve the deepest levels of our being, so working with them creates a 
feeling of transcendence, or less grandiosely of qualitative difference, 
due to engagement of deep parts of the psyche; and their association with 
feelings of bliss and of the rightness of the world-order make these 
rewarding experiences.)

(I'll shut up about this now because I seem to hear all the mystics 
getting ready to unload their slings and arrows in the genral direction 
of my psychological reductionism....)

>It's possibly even better than the person who said that the gnostic mass
>made him "want to boink the nearest person". (A comment made on this list,
>some months ago, which I probably don't quite remember.) 

Again, I think you are correct in perceiving this as a factor in people's 
interest in such rituals.

>Some folks find this to be a useful religious/spiritual/magical form; 
>others find it useless, or less effective than other forms, or even 
>repellant. I fall in the camp that finds it pretty close to useless. 

If that kind of formula doesn't work for you, then all that means is that 
we're different people. I wouldn't think ill of you for it and I hope you 
wouldn't of me.
--
Tim Maroney    tim@maroney.org    http://www.maroney.org
-- 
(emailed replies may be posted);join the AMT syncretism!!;call: 408/2-666-SLUG!
see http://www.abyss.com/tokus; "Clement of Rome taught that God rules the world
with a right and a left hand, the right being Christ, the left Satan." - CGJung

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