Gnostic Mysteries of Sex by Tobias Churton

Author:Tobias Churton
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Esoteric /Occult
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Company
Published: 2002-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The practice gains immeasurable stimulus from its transgressive characteristics, albeit within strictly defined contexts. Its practitioner is a hero (vira) who has dared to transcend the limitations of ordinary human beings and embraced the lawless power that comes from transgressing the bounds of impurity; eccentric appearance and behavior are associated with Tantriks, such that, as Jeffrey J. Kripal asserts in his study of the Bengali saint Ramakrishna: “Too often scholars have equated Tantra with a philosophical school . . . and have ignored the popular connotations of the term Tāntrika, almost all of which revolve around the notions of magical power, strangeness, seediness, and sex.”6 This makes one think immediately of Simon Magus and of his spiritual descendant, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) who asserted, tellingly, in his diary in 1920: “I recognize Magick as concerned to reverse any existing order.”7

Crowley’s friend and sometime disciple, Gerald Yorke, wrote with regard to Crowley’s antinomianism—Crowley once ate his mistress’s excrement at her command to prove he could practice what he preached in terms of “everything partakes of God”—“Crowley didn’t enjoy his perversions! He performed them in order to overcome his horror of them.”8

Alexis Sanderson’s Purity and Power9 refers to the Tantriks’ attainment of an “unfettered super-agency through the assimilation of their lawless power in occult manipulations of impurity,” for with the practice may come the parergon, or by-product of siddhis: reception of exceptional spiritual wisdom, Gnostic insight, or apparently miraculous phenomena.

The sixteenth-century Kaulavalinirnaya advocates behavior like that described by Irenaeus of the Gnostic magician, Marcus, follower of Valentinus, namely, having adulterous intercourse for magical purposes: “The Goddess is fond of the vulva and penis, fond of the nectar of vulva and penis. Therefore one should fully worship the Goddess with the drinking of the virile fluid and by taking pleasure in the wife of another man, as well as with the nectar of the vulva and penis.” While such assertions, typical of the Tantrik vira, suggest to most Westerners a mere worship of sex, Hugh Urban insists that “in most Asian traditions Tantra is generally understood less in terms of ‘sex’ than in terms of power or energy. That is, it is a series of teachings and techniques aimed at awakening, harnessing, and utilizing the spiritual power believed to flow through the entire cosmos and the human body.”10

We cannot, however, avoid noticing that the embrace of the lawless power is very much in tune with the Gnostic attack on the god of the law who binds his dupes to the Earth, preventing consumption of the fruit, and who works through the lowest level of created existence, manifest in the unredeemed genitals that under normal circumstances, waste seed or push it into unhappy reproductions of unredeemed souls.

It is also important to recognize then that in Tantra’s consciousness of kundalini (the serpent), we may see the Gnostic itinerary placed firmly within the human body, as it may be supposed members of Gnostic groups did as well, judging by what we have seen. Much of what the

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