But Aphrodite hid nothing from the Greeks. Enjoying passion in her name was a joyous, unneurotic, holy act that simultaneously celebrated Creation and procreation. What could be more natural? The Greeks beheld the sexuality of the world, of plants and animals and gods, understood that it was a vital force animating all things, and became part of its holy empire. Sexuality was a single thread connecting the heavens and the earth, the sacred and the profane, the powerful and the weak. But they were latecomers to their senses. In China, Tao had already evolved its Yin and Yang, representing the male and female spirit striving to be in harmony. Tao associated lovemaking with the coupling of cosmic forces. The Hindu sacred text, the Rig Veda, presented lovemaking as a religious act, a bringing together of universal energies, and a reenactment of the way in which the world began, with the union of Shiva and Shakti. Shiva’s symbol is the phallic-shaped lingam; Shakti’s is the vagina-shaped yoni. In the medieval Jewish cabala, which seems to have been heavily influenced by Indian mysticism, a male god longs for his female partner, knowing that their union will make the universe balanced and harmonious. Humans having sexual intercourse is but a mirror of that divine passion, and so sex between husband and wife is seen as a holy, reverential act. Many of the pagan religions used a cross as their symbol, often combining it with a circle to represent the male and female genitals.
Throughout the Middle Ages, in Europe, around Eastertime, Christians celebrated spring with dances around a maypole, statues of a sexually aroused Priapus, or other phallic symbols which they wreathed with sacred circles of flowers. In Naples, an image of Priapus with an exaggerated erection was paraded through the streets in great solemnity and its penis was referred to as “the Holy Member” (il santo membro). Saint Guignole was depicted with a large erect penis, too, from which
women scraped splinters as conception charms. So much scraping went on that the saint might have had his holy member whittled away entirely. But the priests, with commendable foresight, made his phallus of a wooden rod that passed all the way through the statue to the back, where it was hidden by a screen, and could be periodically thrust forward by a tap of a mallet as it diminished in front.
Men with potency problems could pray to such virile saints as Saint Cosmo and Saint Damiano, votive statues of whom could be purchased, as well as wax replicas of penises, and “St. Cosmo’s holy oil” was said to have great invigorating powers. One British historian, exploring the altars of ancient churches (built before 1330) which had been damaged by bombing raids during World War II, was surprised to discover stone phalluses under many of them. To appeal to a wider audience, Christianity adopted and redefined pagan symbols and rituals, especially those from the goddess cult. Perhaps its most dramatic shift was from a maternal to a paternal god, which meant a radical change from picturing god as an all-embracing, nurturing mother to a demanding, judging, punitive, or rewarding—at times monstrously violent—father. A warrior god, a jealous god, a god with weapons. If one does good works and follows his rules, one may win his favor. The New Testament God is still a fickle master, still tyrannical, but he offers forgiveness and love; and he requires an uncritical, adoring love in return. However, one is supposed to fear him, which isn’t difficult since he’s the sort who carries a grudge a very long time. People all over the earth are born in “original sin” because of a transgression Adam and Eve committed ages ago. This God is everybody’s temperamental matinee idol.
Pagan sensuality blended nicely with the idea of a white-bearded, patriarchal god and his holy son, whose body is a source of devotion. As mentioned, nuns refer to themselves as “brides of Christ,” they wear his wedding ring, keep their chastity for him, experience “passion” for him, eat his body and blood during communion, when they become one with him. Priests and monks sometimes describe their religious passion in homosexual terms. Their mystic goal is a transcendent love in which one fuses with the beloved God. As Meister Eckehart wrote:
Some people imagine that they are going to see God, that they are going to see God as if he were standing yonder, and they here, bur it is not to be so. God and I: we are one. By knowing God I take him to myself. By loving God, I penetrate him.
The literal meaning of the word ecstasy (from the Greek ekstasis) is “to stand forth naked,” and mystics have often prayed in the nude, vowing that one must throw off the mask of culture, the straitjacket of fashion, the carapace of reason, to truly purify oneself enough to unite with God. Tellingly, it is when we are naked and in the throes of sexual ecstasy that lovers so often call out God’s name, over and over.
The need to feel transcendent touches a primal nerve. Even though I am agnostic, and belong to no organized religion, I am a deeply religious person. An earth-ecstatic. I believe in the sanctity of life, and in the perfectibility of people. I find wilderness a holy place, and all life sacred. Often I have stood before the plunging altar of a great canyon, breathed in the incense of an ocean storm, stood beneath a tabernacle of trees in the forest, or praised the starry night in the desert, in what can only be called religious ecstasy. Our need for whole-ness, for holiness, seems as much a part of our heritage as is our need for protein. If we look at the vocabulary of the Indo-Europeans, hoping to get a sense of the texture of their lives, we discover that they invented a word for holy. It meant the healthy interconnectedness of all living things, a sense of connection to the whole, a state in which one sees and appreciates even what is hidden. They had a verb for “to retreat in awe,” and another for “speaking with the deity.” Their poet, who undoubtedly retreated in awe, spoke with the deity, and celebrated life’s holiness, was called wek-wom-teks, “the weaver of words.”
We ask the same questions as the first humans who feared the night, were happy to be alive, and felt awe. Who are we? Where do we come from? How should we behave? Whom should we trust? Why is life so hard? How can beings with such a powerful life force face death? Our ever-analyzing brains, questing to make sense of life, cannot do so, finally, and so make sense of it anyway through magic, miracles, and faith. At least that stops the nagging itch to know absolutely. For some. For others, the nagging never stops.
Religious love also returns us to childhood, when we love-worshiped our parents, on whom we were absolutely dependent. And what miracles they performed! Mothers could heal a wound with a kiss, make fruit hang suspended in the Jell-O, tie shoes with magic knots; fathers appeared with food and toys, and could master wild animals or monster machines.
Tonight, a crust of starlight crackles over the winter sky. To the Egyptians the dome of night was Nut, the great mother from whose breasts poured the Milky Way. In the tomb paintings, she’s shown curving overhead, her arms and legs spread wide, as she touches earth’s farthest corners with her fingertips and toes. Her lover, Geb, lies on the flat ground beneath her, his erect penis reaching toward her luminous body. Pharaohs often claimed to be her son or lover, and to live their lives, as Pepi II put it, “between the thighs of Nut.” Orion the hunter has just risen. His sword points to Sirius; in neolithic days they foretold the coming of a messiah. Long before the Bible, Egyptians worshiped their god of gods, Osiris, a human who died and was resurrected and who offered followers salvation and eternal life. His coming had been announced by three wise men—the belt stars of Orion: Alnilam, Alnitak, and Mintaka—which pointed to his birthplace. Many of Christianity’s rituals and symbols (crucifixes, rosaries, communion, holy water, and so on) were borrowed from the Osiris cult. Tonight Ursa Major, the She-Bear, is guarding the pole of the world. I tell the month and season by watching her movements. For days now, the tail has been pointing to the east at nightfall, so I know it will soon be spring. When the tail points south, summer is near. It points west to signal autumn, and north to announce winter.
Somewhere in that mysterious swirl of stars we locate “Paradise.” A Persian word (pairidaeza) for the garden where the Tree of Life grows, a Hebrew word (pardes) for the garden of love where a man’s virgin bride waits to be deflowered. In bot
h gardens, the air is drenched with perfume, luscious foods are scattered everywhere, music serenades one, and a beautiful woman offers the endless comfort of her love. The lost paradise, for which we long, the world of plenty where all our needs are met, the true “land of milk and honey”—we knew it only in infancy, when we were loved and protected, and suckled in perfect bliss at our mother’s breast. That rich desire touches the heart of all love, religious or erotic, a yearning for reconnection, with mother earth, mother church, mother love.
Religious love calms our terrible loneliness, and our need for family, for being special in someone’s eyes, protected, noble, forgiven. The word religion means to bind or connect, and a sense of reunion is built into it. We enter the exalted, welcoming home of the temple or church, where all are accepted regardless of real or imaginary crimes, where instant kin is waiting, and relatives are painted on the walls or the windows—sometimes even wearing calicos and pastel ribbons. There we learn about the history we share, and look forward to a future free from heartache or hunger. We kneel before our doting father, ask his blessing, and sing him sweet songs. We praise him, we adore him, we fear him, we promise to be obedient, we wear his favorite clothes, and recite his favorite sayings. His house is a fortress, an ornate palace in which even the poorest of us can dwell. The chanting and calm, incense-thick air puts us into a hypnotic state, so that we are open and vulnerable.* It’s as if everyone placed an ad in the personals column of the soul and received an answer from their ideal match. He has a thousand faces. Those in contact with God say he’s ideally responsive, attuned to their private needs and woes, completely on their wavelength, able to pick out their hesitant prayer from the lamentations of millions. And nothing could be more reassuring, no embrace more comforting, no loving union closer.
*A chic sex club in eighteenth-century France called itself “The Aphrodite,” and catered to aristocrats, clergymen, and high-ranking politicians and military officers. One noblewoman, who belonged to the club for twenty years, kept a list of her sexual liaisons there, which included “272 princes and bishops, 439 monks, 93 rabbis, 929 army officers, 342 bankers, 119 musicians, 117 valets, 1,614 Englishmen and other exiles in London during the revolution, 2 uncles, and 12 cousins.”
*Chemical analysis of incense reveals that it contains mind-altering steroids.
ON TRANSFERENCE LOVE
This morning I went to the local deli for breakfast, and to spend time with Carol, a pretty, chestnut-haired, single woman in her forties. A zoologist, she had been away on an expedition, and we hadn’t seen each other for many months. So we set out on a girlfriend expedition of our own, catching up on all the travels in each other’s lives. In time, the conversation turned to her latest thought: going into therapy to construe some of the patterns in her life, and to find detours around the rocky relationships with men she always seems to plow into. She asked my advice about whether she should choose a male or female therapist, and, since she is the daughter of an alcoholic father who made her early life a misery, I suggested a male. She was fearful about having an intimate relationship with someone under such artificial circumstances. That got me thinking about the goals of psychotherapy.
Uppermost in a therapist’s mind are such matters as not making the client worse; putting out any roaring fires; investigating difficult conflicts; helping the client become more stable, self-reliant, and self-accepting. But one aspect of a therapist’s job is to develop a safe, stable, accepting relationship with a client, showing her by example what a healthy attachment would be like, in the hope that she will then be able to recognize its features and look for the same sort of relationship outside therapy.
“You believe their duty is to offer love to each client?” Carol asked.
“If they are any good, they are serial lovers.”
“I’ll be meeting this guy, intimately, twice a week,” she said. “What if I fall in love with him? That’s the standard joke, that you have to fall in love with your analyst, right?”
“Actually the standard joke is: How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?”
“I give up,” she said, slicing into a Mexican omelet.
“Only one. But the light bulb has to want to change.” We laughed, as a waitress appeared with cups of hazelnut coffee.
“Falling for your therapist isn’t required,” I continued, “and many people don’t feel anything of the kind. But the circumstance—meeting secretly in a quiet room with a man who is completely open to you at your most vulnerable, and with whom you share your fantasies, hurts, and dreams—that’s very seductive, and it encourages love, it allows love to flourish.”
“Suppose I fall head over heels in love with him, body and soul, hot and heavy?”
“That would be both agonizing and very helpful. True, you would find yourself in a diabolically painful, unrequited relationship with a man you feel physically rejected by, and yet have to meet regularly. You’d be sitting across from him, face-to-face, knowing that he knows how desperately you love him, and also knowing that he doesn’t want you—it can’t get much more humiliating than that. But you’d also have the unique luxury of being able to analyze your pain with him, pick out which elements hurt and why, which are based on reality, which are exaggerations and distortions, which reflect scars you are carrying from childhood or past relationships with other men.”
“But there I would be, dying to have a real relationship with him, to do things together, to make love …”
“Let’s suppose you get your wish. He gets sexually involved with you, and for a while that seems fabulous. He’s most likely married, and the odds are that he’s not going to leave his wife. I say this because statistically that’s the picture—roughly 7 percent of male therapists have affairs with their clients, but only .01 percent of that figure go on to marry them. Soon enough all sorts of man/woman problems would arise. There you would be, having another bad relationship with a man. His job is not to add to your list of unsatisfactory relationships; it’s to help you learn from them and avoid them. To that extent, he would have betrayed your trust. And, of course, it would make continuing therapy impossible. How would you feel if you were paying a man you were having sex with? Wouldn’t that make you feel exploited? You would almost certainly end up in therapy with someone else just to deal with your bad relationship with your first therapist.”
“All right, let’s suppose I don’t fall in love with him. A long time ago, I was in therapy briefly with a woman, and I couldn’t bear the broken relationship at the end. Here you have this intense intimacy with someone you care for and trust, and then suddenly the reverse is true and you never see them again. I felt so disposed of; it was crushing.”
“From the therapist’s point of view, I guess that’s the safest course to follow. Sometimes in novels or movies, strangers meet on a train and don’t even tell each other their full names. But they have the freedom to be unparalleled lovers, acting out any fantasy, feeling unjudged and totally uninhibited. They can reveal anything, be anything. Psychotherapy is like that. Most therapists feel that they cannot become friends with their clients—even after therapy ends—because it would prevent that intense, liberating anonymity if the client should ever need to return for help. So their policy is: once an intimate always a stranger. Freud himself didn’t practice this principle; over the years, he became dear friends with a few of his patients whom he particularly liked. They often socialized, and neither he nor they reported any problems resulting from the fullness of their friendship. Indeed, I know a psychiatrist in Manhattan, a wonderful woman in her seventies, who has outside friendships with some of her patients; and they rave about her as a person and as an effective therapist. But that requires remarkable people who can compartmentalize exceptionally well, and most therapists can’t manage that, or don’t want to as a general principle. In any case, you are having the most intimate relationship of your life with him, but he is having intimate relationships with many people. His day is filled wit
h tumultuous human dramas and towering moments of empathy. Dealing with them often requires pinpoint concentration. After hours, he undoubtedly wants to clear his mind of all that, and for his own mental health he needs to. Probably the last thing he wants is to fill his leisure time with the same psychic carnage, or even with people who remind him of it. I very much doubt that many therapists have relationships with their friends—or for that matter with their families—which are as intense as the ones they have with their clients.”
“And yet you still believe it’s worth doing, despite everything, despite the ordeal.”
“Because of the ordeal. Because learning how to love in a way that’s not self-destructive is essential for survival. At this point, your world seems littered with hidden snares and bombs, some of which life dropped when you weren’t looking, and some of which you have set for yourself. Defusing them is an ordeal. How could it be otherwise? But the world will be a safer place for you if you can defuse them.”
I knew I was sending her to her salvation, but perhaps also to considerable torment. In the ancient hieroglyphic poems, love is a secret. It is so obsessive, so all-consuming, so much like insanity, that one is ashamed to admit how much life one has surrendered. Caught in the undertow of a powerful transference, Carol might not be able to reveal to her therapist how much of her mental and emotional life he consumes. Because she has a sensitive and tender heart, she will love him honestly, beautifully, with all the ampleness of her spirit, but because he will not return that love, or even comfortably acknowledge its seriousness and proportions, it will seem shameful. She may feel self-hatred, since it seems to be heir fault alone for loving him so one-sidedly. She will not understand that the love has formed—to use Stendhal’s image—as naturally as a crystal of salt does on a branch in a sealed salt mine. She could not have stopped it; it did not arise because of some defect in her. It is an entity that sometimes grows in the caverns of psychotherapy, particularly if the therapist encourages it to flourish. But it will burn in her open wounds, it will torture her.