While reading a book, I came across a very interesting piece of information. While reading it, many of our own old traditions came to my mind. Khajuraho Temple, Devdasi traditions, Osho and his concepts of Nirvana came to mind. Also, many of our religious practices, which are symbolic in nature,came to mind which are in line with the informations. Most interestingly, this piece of information is not about Hinduism……
"Hieros Gamos" dates back more than two thousand years. Egyptian priests and priestesses performed it regularly to celebrate the reproductive power of the female. Hieros Gamos is Greek. It means sacred marriage. Marriage as in union. Sex.... yes, in a manner of speaking, but not as we understand it today. Though it probably looked like a sex ritual, Hieros Gamos had nothing to do with eroticism. It was a spiritual act. Historically, intercourse was the act through which male and female experienced God. The ancients believed that the male was spiritually incomplete until he had carnal knowledge of the sacred feminine.
Physical union with the female remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete and ultimately achieve gnosis—knowledge of the divine. Since the days of Isis, sex rites had been considered man's only bridge from earth to heaven. By communing with woman, man could achieve a climactic instant when his mind went totally blank and he could see God. "Orgasm as prayer”. Physiologically speaking, the male climax was accompanied by a split second entirely devoid of thought. A brief mental vacuum. A moment of clarity during which God could be glimpsed.
Meditation gurus achieved similar states of thoughtlessness without sex and often described Nirvana as a never- ending spiritual orgasm. it's important to remember that the ancients' view of sex was entirely opposite from ours today. Sex begot new life—the ultimate miracle—and miracles could be performed only by a god. The ability of the woman to produce life from her womb made her sacred. A god. Intercourse was the revered union of the two halves of the human spirit—male and female—through which the male could find spiritual wholeness and communion with God. The Hieros Gamos ritual is not a perversion. it was not about sex, it was about spirituality. It's a deeply sacrosanct ceremony.
Admittedly, the concept of sex as a pathway to God is mind-boggling at first. But the early Jewish tradition involved ritualistic sex. In the Temple, no less. Early Jews believed that the Holy of Holies in Solomon's Temple housed not only God but also His powerful female equal, Shekinah. Men seeking spiritual wholeness came to the Temple to visit priestesses—or hierodules—with whom they made love and experienced the divine through physical union. The Jewish tetragrammaton YHWH—the sacred name of God—in fact derived from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah.
For the early Church, mankind's use of sex to commune directly with God posed a serious threat to the Catholic power base. It left the Church out of the loop, undermining their self-proclaimed status as the sole conduit to God. For obvious reasons, they worked hard to demonize sex and recast it as a disgusting and sinful act. Other major religions did the same. Our ancient heritage and our very physiologies tell us sex is natural—a cherished route to spiritual fulfilment—and yet modern religion decries it as shameful, teaching us to fear our sexual desire as the hand of the devil.
What I feel is that before the onset of modern religions, like Christianity and Islam, the religion and society considered women as sacred and worshipped them. However, since the modern religions were based on a control system of administration, where the Church or the Mosque was the sole arbitrator/ sole conduit between man and god, women were demonised and put behind the veils. If you will go through the hidden pages of history, you will come across horrifying accounts of killing of free thinking women in those regions, where the new religions were getting a hold. But then, as usual, normal history is written by winners, and they simply remove or blacken the loser’s story.
And that story some other day………
