SACRED FIRE : REDISCOVERING EROTIC MYSTICISM

                     by Earthkin/Gary Lingen


[Preface:

The following article was presented as the opening statement of a
workshop I facilitated at the 1990 COG Grand Council in Washington
State. The workshop was very well received and approximately forty
women and men participated in 2 1/2 hours of discussion.]

The theme of this presentation and discussion focuses on the re-
spiritualization of the Erotic. It is not a discussion about how to
have good sex. It is about putting the sacred - spirit - vision -
celebration - communion - back into sexuality. It is a post-
feminist vision. It is about creating a new erotic paradigm or
rather reclaiming the ancient relationship between spirituality and
eroticism. Taking on this subject is very scary because each of our
life experiences and belief systems and erotic orientations are
different. Additionally I am not presenting myself as an expert or
sexual magician but rather as a person on a spiritual and erotic
journey. Where I speak from is my own experiences as a changing,
non-sexist, non-homophobic male and from my personal and focused
study on the Spirituality of the Erotic and with a growing and
changing Vision about the Sacred place that Sexuality should have
in our culture, community and in our individual lives.

In as much as we , in America, have been nurtured in a culture with
religious values predominantly influenced by Judeo-Christian
traditions and values, we have been imprinted with a very sex-
negative heritage leading many to view sexuality as a necessary
evil for the continuing of our species functioning - only for
procreation - and essentially never for pleasure or as an
exploration or experience of higher consciousness.  Along with this
limited vision of the spirit and function of sexuality in our
lives, add a layer of guilt and shame to further devalue and
complicate the experience of the Erotic for each of us.

Our various spiritual heritages as Nature's people, including
contemporary Wiccans, give us an image and vision that is very
positive concerning the relationship of the Spiritual and the
Erotic as we are able to envision it in ancient Goddess cultures
(where "All Acts of Love are my Rituals") before the onset of the
Patriarchy as a vision for our contemporary culture. Yet we too,
despite this spiritual heritage, are born into and are nurtured by
the sex-negative tradition of our present culture - so we do not
escape its darker and more negative aspects either - particularly
its focus on the Erotic as power over another rather than as power
within.

However, there is within the Experience and Vision of several
spiritual and erotic paths (i.e. particularly Tantra and Tao) a
message which teaches that Sexuality as well as having a
procreative role was/is viewed as a potential channel/pathway to
discovering and experiencing the Divine (Goddess/God - Life Force -
 Creation) within ourselves and within each other. It also seems
important to acknowledge that erotic pathways to higher
consciousness/the Divine may at times be the same or very different
for women and men as well as depending on ones erotic preference or
orientation whether same sex - opposite sex - or one's primary mode
of erotic expression.

The first step in reclaiming the Sacred in the Erotic in our
contemporary culture is in my view about Sexual Healing. It is
about working out and moving from the negative imprints and
conditioning of a predominant sex-negative Christian heritage to a

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