{"id":3874,"date":"2012-02-28T15:29:18","date_gmt":"2012-02-28T22:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3874"},"modified":"2013-10-29T11:25:31","modified_gmt":"2013-10-29T17:25:31","slug":"yoga-ectasy-religion-and-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3874","title":{"rendered":"Yoga, Ectasy, Religion, and Sex"},"content":{"rendered":"

Religion is sexy \u2014 at least some of the time. (To scholars of religion, all religion is “sexy” in an intellectual sense.)<\/p>\n

Last year, I edited and prepared for press a new biography of the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. <\/a>She was a leading figure in American religion in the 1920s, but a sex-related scandal<\/a> in 1926 hurt her with the news media.<\/p>\n

McPherson was widowed as a young woman, then briefly re-married. She was a “rock star” of religion, working larger and larger venues with thousands of people focused on her preaching and healings.<\/p>\n

And after raising all of that divine energy, she was supposed to go home to her solitary bed. According to the author\u2014in our private conversations\u2014she did not always do so. Why am I not surprised? Maybe some day he will write that follow-up volume that tells all.<\/p>\n

Interesting, a lot of today’s Pentecostal Christians do not know her name, although she founded one of its denominations.<\/a> One of my students, a Pentecostal, said she had heard of her and thought of her as “scary”\u2014but she did not know why.<\/p>\n

All of this is a long introduction to a\u00a0 New York Times <\/em>article: “Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

One factor is ignorance. Yoga teachers and how-to books seldom mention that the discipline began as a sex cult \u2014 an omission that leaves many practitioners open to libidinal surprise.<\/p>\n

Hatha yoga \u2014 the parent of the styles now practiced around the globe \u2014 began as a branch of Tantra. In medieval India, Tantra devotees sought to fuse the male and female aspects of the cosmos into a blissful state of consciousness.<\/p>\n

The rites of Tantric cults, while often steeped in symbolism, could also include group and individual sex. One text advised devotees to revere the female sex organ and enjoy vigorous intercourse. Candidates for worship included actresses and prostitutes, as well as the sisters of practitioners.<\/p>\n

Hatha originated as a way to speed the Tantric agenda. It used poses, deep breathing<\/a> and stimulating acts \u2014 including intercourse \u2014 to hasten rapturous bliss. In time, Tantra and Hatha developed bad reputations. The main charge was that practitioners indulged in sexual debauchery under the pretext of spirituality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But it’s not just yoga and tantra. People get crushes on supposedly celibate Catholic priests, as Edie Falco’s<\/a> character, Carmela,\u00a0 did in The Sopranos.<\/em><\/a> And so on. It’s a issue for clergy, just as it is with psychotherapists.<\/p>\n

As a polytheist, I would like to time-travel back to one of Sister Aimee’s healing services and see if she was\u00a0 channeling only Yeshua the radical rabbi or maybe someone else as well, someone known for lifting his devotees up and them hurling them down.<\/p>\n

As polytheists, we know<\/em> that some of the deities and some ritual practices carry a strong sexual charge. People who work these will feel the results. If we know that in advance\u2014and if we can ways to use these energies that do not have bad social consequences\u2014then Pagans won’t “find themselves less prone to surprise<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Religion is sexy \u2014 at least some of the time. (To scholars of religion, all religion is “sexy” in an intellectual sense.) Last year, I edited and prepared for press a new biography of the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. She was a leading figure in American religion in the 1920s, but a sex-related scandal in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,5,42],"class_list":["post-3874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-religion","tag-paganism","tag-sexuality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-10u","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1776,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1776","url_meta":{"origin":3874,"position":0},"title":"Elders Down the Memory Hole","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 25, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"All summer I have been editing and laying out a biography of the American Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944). I just sent the galleys to the writer, a professor in Arizona, and am working on my own corrections as well. There have been the usual hassles\u2014missing \"essential\" photos, notes\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":794,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=794","url_meta":{"origin":3874,"position":1},"title":"My Catholic\/Wiccan\/Asatru ex-girlfriend","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 18, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Al Billings shares some religious\/magickal paths personified as ex-girlfriends.Thelema and the OTOThe freaky ex-girlfriend who likes her sex kinky, her parties wild, and her drugs. She goes clubbing, dresses all in black, and has the razor scars on the wrists to show that she\u2019s serious. She has a lot of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4356,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4356","url_meta":{"origin":3874,"position":2},"title":"The Witches and the Stripper","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 25, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Someone at the Daily Mail no doubt had a good time writing the headline \"The drunken stripper from the Golden Banana, a coven of Salem witches and the 'groping' man horrifically impaled when she crashed into a flatbed truck.\" Yes, it is link bait, and I bit. Wouldn't you? But\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5325,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5325","url_meta":{"origin":3874,"position":3},"title":"Sarah Pike on Witchcraft and American Religion","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Religious studies professor Sarah Pike, author of Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community and New Age and Neopagan Religions in America discusses her work at the Religion and American History blog. In a chapter I wrote recently on \u201cWicca in the News\u201d about changing representations\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1200,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1200","url_meta":{"origin":3874,"position":4},"title":"Sex and Witchcraft","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 3, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The popular image of the sexually alluring witch goes back to Circe at least, was notable in the early modern period in the work of artists such as Hans Baldung, and got a big boost from Jules Michelet.It keeps popping up today. Sometimes it is lightly disguised, as in the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"sexuality\"","block_context":{"text":"sexuality","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=sexuality"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6406,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6406","url_meta":{"origin":3874,"position":5},"title":"Who Ruined Hoodoo?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 29, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013) 248 pp., photos, index, $85 (cloth), $28 (paper), ebook available. \u00a0 Hazzard-Donald teaches anthropology and sociology at Rutgers University-Camden. She is herself an initiate into the Orisha religion, but this is not a work\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Africa\"","block_context":{"text":"Africa","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=africa"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.press.uillinois.edu\/books\/images\/9780252078767.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3874"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6061,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3874\/revisions\/6061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}