Is an Erotic Christian Religion 
Really Possible?

[Excerpted from Gnostic Mysteries of Sex: Sophia the Wild One and Erotic Christianity by Tobias Churton]

I discussed in the introduction why I have not focused on the alleged sexual excesses of the numerous Gnostic schools before. There is probably an additional reason, less easy to express. To be honest, I don’t know about you, but I find the idea of communion with God through sexual communion very difficult to conceive of clearly, either as an idea or in a practical sense, unless, that is, one takes it that there is something profoundly godly about sexual intercourse in the first place. While familiar with the crossover between romantic yearning, deep love, passion, desire, and spiritual feelings—feelings where physical acts are experienced as far more than mere sense experiences and where more appears to be involved than a physical exchange of energy or emotion, however intense—something in my thinking is still inclined to balk at the prospect of applying a sense of reality to expressions such as sacred sex, which fall too easily, it seems to me, from the lips of moderns.

We know what was understood by this expression in the ancient, pagan world. Religion, then, being based on nature (cycles of birth, death, and rebirth), could be very sexy indeed, even when rhetorically elevated. Their idea of the sacred might appear to us as strangely tainted with literalist vulgarity. We might find their sacred sex neither sacred nor sexy. Priests and priestesses performed sexual rites as ways of magically imitating the hieros gamos, or sacred marriages, between deities, as ways of magically invoking divine powers. Sex, being so closely linked to the mysterious powers of actual creation, of life itself, as well as inspiring music, poetry, plastic arts, and dance, was felt to be intrinsically magical and mysterious, with connotations of mysticism, initiation, and esotericism. To yearn to know a god or goddess was inherently erotic, where to know was to have erotic relations with. Intimate knowledge was intimate eroticism. Pagans found nothing surprising in this; it was natural to them. Erotic love made the world go round. A pretty face could launch a thousand ships. Gods could be attracted to human beings and even disguise themselves as humans to experience human love.

Children might be a by-product of fertility and mystery rites, but that would not have been intended necessarily, unless, say, one wanted the god, or the virtue of the god, to dwell in the child.

However, the Christian religion shot straight out of a Hebraic womb, at least to begin with, and much of the prophetic wisdom of the Jews was aimed precisely at denying the delights and conceits of the pagan world of polytheism and anthropomorphic deities (because they were so popular). Today, we are inclined to see ancient Judaism as uniquely patriarchal, gravel-voiced, overbearing, and bass-booming; sex in the Jewish Bible, where not tied to the blessing of marriage and children in the strictly natural order, is almost always the cause of disaster: David and Bathsheba, the priestly lust for Susanna in the Book of Daniel, Samson and Delilah, Jezebel; the list goes on. When Adam and Eve discover their nakedness, it betokens the absolute loss of innocence. Guilt holds mighty sway over those covenanted to Jahveh ever afterward: Thou shalt not! There is sacred love dotted about the scriptures, but out-and-out erotic demonstrations such as the Song of Solomon are rare, and where they do occur, the love is always sublimated by commentators into realms of symbolism that extend all the way to today’s Christian marriage ceremony where marriage symbolizes the love of Christ for his church.

In first-century synagogue life, menstrual blood is considered dirty; women need to be covered lest they shame the congregation with filth and lust. The first thing a baby boy can expect on entering this world is for religion to take hold of his penis and cut it with a knife.

It was the perception of primitive Christianity being thoroughly Jewish with regard to sex that led German theologian Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) to characterize Gnosticism famously as “the acute Hellenization of Christianity.” All that tolerance of menstrual blood, sperm, and worship of a female deity (Barbelo) could not have been original; something had contaminated Jewish Christianity: ­Greek-speaking pagans had gotten their greasy hands under the skirts of the virgin faith and started messing around with what they found. Von Harnack’s precise view is not one popular with scholars today, but it challenges us nonetheless to account for the phenomenon of Christian groups practicing some kind of sacred sex.

From the generally understood Christian perspective, is there not something contradictory in the expression?

Sacred . . . 

Sex . . .

Are not those who talk blithely of such a thing today simply kidding themselves? Are they not trying to have their cake and eat it too? Is there not a confusion of worlds in this expression? This world and the next, purity and the corrupt body? Of course, in a pagan worldview, everything may partake of God. We find echoes of this idea in Christian liturgy, where our sacrifices are regarded as forms of return to source: “All things come from you, O Lord, and of your own do we give you” (I Chronicles 29:14). (Some Gnostics, as we shall see, would apply this idea to sacramentalized semen.) Catholic believers in transubstantiation “eat the flesh of the dear Son” through the form of a wafer.

In pagan philosophy, and in common practice, God (theos) or gods constitute the invisible aspects of the visible world. Everything has a god or an angel behind it: bodily organs, too, even pleasure itself. Church father Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–215 CE) referred to sexual intercourse simply as “Aphrodite,” she being the tutelary deity of the act; such was normal in educated Alexandrian circles in the second century. We make nothing ourselves. God has created everything, sex included.

Arguably, and from a pantheistic point of view particularly, sex is always potentially sacred; is it our ignorance that prevents us from realizing this? Gnostics substituted gnosis for ignorance, and this fundamental adjustment seems to have involved a revaluation or even a transvaluation of sex, away from the primitive church’s Judeo-Christian point of view. As a redeemed spirit, you had to understand what sex really meant, so as not to be dragged about by it like one caught in the jaws of a hunting hound.

However, we should, I think, be making an error if we thought distinctly sex-positive Gnostic practice was simply a transposition of sensibilities from the pagan world. Pagans were also scandalized by Gnostic worldviews, as is demonstrated by the great Egyptian Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (205–270 CE) in his treatise Against the Gnostics (Enneads II, 9). Though Plotinus did not mention Gnostics by that generic name, his pupil Porphyry’s title for his master’s polemic, “Against those who say the maker of the world is evil and that the world is evil,” indicates clearly enough what Plotinus found objectionable in the writings friends of his chanced upon. For Plotinus, Gnostics indulged in obscure mythologizing to excess and made the error of confusing the deficient aspects of manifest existence—when compared to the perfect ideas of heaven—with actual malevolence and positive evil. Plotinus would tolerate no rupture in continuity between the One and the created order, a position characteristic of Christian Platonism. Nevertheless, Plotinus’s invective against Gnostics is suggestive that in many respects, his thought was not as far from theirs as he might have hoped, and that, in fact, Plotinus recognized in them an arguably open flank in his own philosophy of spiritual emanations from the One and the Good. People who liked what he had to say liked the Gnostic stuff too! This is still the case.

Gnostic mythology, however, was determinative in giving the heretics distinct ideas that Plotinus, like other philosophers, could not have arrived at by strictly logical means. Gnostics took as their launchpad the sacred books of the Jews (Genesis, the Psalms, and Proverbs, in particular), as well as traditions—written and otherwise—associated with Jesus. Gnostics have been called brilliant exegetes. Indeed, their thought culture did come from books, but they brought to the texts distinct sensibilities and highly characteristic, and original, attitudes, inspiration and tropes, almost as if they shared a gag—a special, liberating esoteric gag with a touch of ironic comedy—that gave those “hip” to it a key to understanding all inherited religion, capable of giving the whole disparate body of religious ideas a unity within a greater scheme of cosmic conspiracy against the truth of their freedom attained via transmundane redemption.

To the hard-core Gnostics, the world was a fraud; it could be laughed at from the heights of exalted realization. Once this was recognized, things taught to be taboo could be revealed, au contraire, as gateways to knowledge, as symbols denied and forbidden by the repressive pseudodeity. Gnostics penetrated into disturbed territory of the psyche where, we may suppose, Plotinus feared, or had more sense than, to tread.

Where would it end?

Gnostics departed from the very essence of paganism—acceptance of nature. And here, almost paradoxically, we can see the startling face of Jewish religion’s historic objection to the pagan world: graven images of God were blasphemous; the Creator is not one with the creation. God must never be confused with the visible world or with objects and substances within it; the essential message of the Jewish prophetic tradition was upended by everything the Greeks and Romans did: statues, statues everywhere!

Excerpted with permission from the publisher, Inner Traditions, Gnostic Mysteries of Sex: Sophia the Wild One and Erotic Christianity by Tobias Churton, is available now at Amazon and other good bookstores.

Tobias Churton is Britain’s leading scholar of Western Esotericism, a world authority on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Rosicrucianism. He is a filmmaker and the founding editor of the magazine Freemasonry Today. An Honorary Fellow of Exeter University, where he is faculty lecturer in Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, he holds a master’s degree in Theology from Brasenose College, Oxford, and created the award-winning documentary series and accompanying book The Gnostics, as well as several other films on Christian doctrine, mysticism, and magical folklore. The author of many books, including Gnostic Philosophy, The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians, and Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin, he lives in England.

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