Aphrodiphobia, the Sistine Heresy, and Ecstasy

"If Catholicism were really like what Greeley describes, there would be no need for the Craft."
Lady Epona (Julie O'R.)

I’m 69; I’m working on my autobiography. This essay will probably become part of it, though no doubt much rewritten. Here, following a particular thread, I include only the autobiographic details needed for the thread to make sense. There are many references to concepts, experiences, discoveries that I will not expand on here. I do not mean to tantalize; if what I set forth here intrigues you, please look forward to my life story. I’m thinking of titling it To Madness Near Akin (I read a lot of Plato during my doctoral program).

Given what I am discussing here, let me please emphasize that I am not speaking as a hostile non-Catholic. I was raised in the church and, after a commodius vicus of recirculation, was trained as a Roman Catholic theologian at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, receiving my Ph.D. in theology from the Franciscan School of Theology exactly on my fortieth birthday. I then taught theology and religious studies at the University of San Francisco and at Holy Family College for the next ten years.

In the 1950s the Roman Catholicism I was raised in seemed to be all about sex—or, more precisely, about not having sex. Jesus was a virgin, his mother was a virgin, all the apostles were virgins, and all the saints were young women who were martyred for refusing to have sex. We were taught to remain “pure in thought, word, and deed.” That is, even thinking about sex was a sin, to be expiated by, usually, saying ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys.

I don’t need to describe here all the details of what happened to me at age 14. What is relevant is that I hit upon a logical paradox in Catholic doctrine: by the official Nihil obstat; imprimitur teachings of the church, I was relieved from any obligation to believe in the truth of Catholic doctrine. The psychic energy thus released exploded into a mystic enlightenment experience of the sort described by William James. Afterward, I knew that I knew nothing—except that I was endowed with a moral imperative to investigate the truth of all things religious for myself. I have carried out that mandate ever since—at least when I had some free time.
However, being relieved from orthodoxy did not reverse the conditioning I had been subjected to. Almost all of the church’s teachings about sexuality now seemed like utter nonsense to me, but I was still an extremely inhibited “good Catholic boy” emotionally, and I was quite angry about that disability. Those inhibitions, combined with the high libido I had inherited from my father, combined with cyclic clinical depression, made my teen years quite difficult. As my oldest friend from high school, Alan Rein, once commented, “We were too busy being miserable to realize how much fun we were having.” I spent many years struggling to uncoil those tentacles of inhibition from around my neck, so that I could at least breathe normally.

At 14 I also discovered the myth of Aradia, which gave me a glimpse of a religion I could believe in. I was specifically fascinated by the idea that the ultimate divinity might be a female person, a Goddess. I have been exploring the implications of that idea ever since as well.

I soon began to speculate about what beliefs concerning sexuality might be healthier than what I had been taught. As a teenager, I thought that Christianity was based on the belief that sex itself is sinful. I know that a great many people do believe that. However, as I began to learn in the 1960s (first from Alan Watts), such a belief is just bad theology, opposed to what are historically the essential concepts and beliefs of Christianity. Let’s consider an easy example.

The first commandment that God gave to human beings, according to the first chapter of Genesis, was “Go forth and multiply.” In Jewish tradition, it is this commandment that requires Rabbis to be married. In both Jewish and Christian tradition, a “sin” is a failure (or, worse yet, a refusal) to fulfill, i.e., obey, one of God’s commandments. If we have been commanded to multiply, then we must have sex in order to fulfill that commandment; therefore sex in itself cannot be sinful. Instead, refusing to have sex is a refusal to fulfill that commandment and is therefore a sin. (We can skip all the casuistry about why celibacy is a virtue, right?). As the sociobiologists might point out, people who believe that God had commanded us NOT to multiply would strongly tend to die out—as has in fact happened to quite a few ascetic communities throughout history.

Wilhelm Reich and Aphrodiphobia

I first heard about Reich from my friend Gerard Kohbieter, whom I met at San Francisco State in 1959. Gerard was then in his forties. His family had escaped the Nazis by taking the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostock and then getting to the US. He was a professional magician, among other things, a devotee of Reich’s theories, and a thoroughly charming person. I remember an evening when, during a party, he and two other guys were juggling oranges in our kitchen. He told me that Reich was the only man whose writings had been burned by the U.S., the Nazis, and the Soviets.

It wasn’t until about 1963 that I got around to reading Reich and found him to be one of the dozen most important thinkers I've ever encountered and one of the three greatest psychologists of the last century. He provided the first confirmation that my beliefs about sexuality were not merely idiosyncratic. He titled one of his books with the first line of Blake’s quatrain,

Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love! Sweet love! was thought a crime.

As I’ve sometimes said to my English classes, we are the children Blake was speaking to, and things haven’t got much better, have they?

Reich agreed with Freud's argument in Civilization and Its Discontents that the domestication of sexuality had made the creation of human culture possible. However, the restrictions on sex needed to enable culture to exist are far less stringent than those imposed by Puritanism. Objectively, orgasm is an intensely pleasurable physical phenomenon, but it causes no other physical changes in the organism. When it is over, nothing has been gained or lost or changed–except sometimes for pregnancy. Reich recognized that there is no objective reason why us human mammals should not indulge in sex very freely, casually, joyfully, valuing and safeguarding it, but always enjoying it, nor is there any reason why humans should instead hate, fear, and avoid sex, creating rules to make it almost impossible for anyone to have sex, let alone enjoy it.

Reich therefore deduced that the domestication of sexuality had evolved into a pandemic mental illness that infects almost all human cultures and that is as pathological as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or sociopathy. He labeled this illness the "Emotional Plague" (as his German term is usually translated). On it he blamed the worst social ills of Western and other societies, including the Inquisition and the Holocaust. He argued that any sort of negative attitude toward sex, any negative emotion or assumption about sex, is a symptom of the Emotional Plague, and that if after sex a person experiences guilt, shame, anxiety, fear, anger, etc., those negative emotions are caused not by sex itself, but by the negative programming that constitutes the Plague. His choice of Blake’s line displays his belief that a truly human society—peaceful, creative, happy, healthy—cannot be achieved until that Emotional Plague is overcome and extirpated from human societies.

I have long thought “Emotional Plague” to be too vague a name for this illness. It’s not just any old emotions that are the issue. Hence I recently devised "Aphrodiphobia,” which means specifically “fear of having sex," as an alternative name for it. My neologism also gives us “Aphrodiphobes” as a useful name for those who suffer from the illness and the corresponding adjectival form, “Aphrodiphobic.” (An aside to classicists: the name “Aphrodite” was related to "aphrodizein" a common Greek term for sexual intercourse.) We are immensely far from being able to combat this illness, of course, but being able to recognize it and name it is a first step toward that goal.

There are many symptoms of Aphrodiphobia: A woman is naturally capable of endless multiple orgasms. A woman who has few or none is suffering from Aphrodiphobia. A man is also capable of multiple orgasms, given a little recovery time between them, especially when young. A man can have an active sex life as long as he is alive. For a man to lose his libido completely in his mid-40s is a symptom of Aphrodiphobia.

In the Second World War, about 50 million people died. Although no one has attempted to keep accurate statistics, probably about that many women were raped. That too is a symptom of Aphrodiphobia. As William Blake said, ”War is Energy enslav’d.” That is, Blake has reached the same insight as Wilhelm Reich, that war is a sexual perversion, indeed, the ultimate sexual perversion.

Aphrodiphobia has waxed and waned from time to time and place to place. Very often Roman Catholics have suffered less from it than members of other faith communities. A bizarre detail of history is that, when Innocent III sent the Inquisitors into Provence to root out the Cathars, the Inquisitors quickly found that the surest way to identify the heretics was that the good Catholic girls would sleep with them, whereas the Cathar girls would not. (I learned this from H. C. Lea’s History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages.)

It was unfortunate and ironic that Reich apparently became manic about 1930, and his concepts and claims became more and more radical—which the Aphrodiphobes have used as an excuse to dismiss all his real work. He began to think of sexual energy, which he called Orgone Energy, as a fundamental force of nature, and he thought that if it could be collected and directed, it could cure many illnesses, including cancer. As a result, the Feds sent him to prison (where he died) as a cancer quack, and confiscated and burned his publications, even the earliest ones. (The copies Gerard showed me were legally contraband, much prized by collectors.) The Nazis, however, burned his books merely because he was Jewish.

In passing, let me note that his concept that sexual energy may be a fundamental reality may turn out to be correct. There are arguments to support that hypothesis in theology, psychology, and physics—but expanding on all that would take this essay too far afield.

Origins of the Sistine Heresy

When I was teaching church history at Holy Family College in the early 1980s, I finally read through the documents promulgated by the Second Vatican Council, and discovered that in 1964 the Roman Catholic Church had abandoned all the medieval theology that denigrated sexuality. The Council created the first written constitution that the Roman Catholic Church has ever had. In it, in the passage on marriage and sexuality, the Council threw out all the medieval insanity about sex and set forth a genuinely realistic and humane theology of sexuality. It proclaimed that sex within marriage has not one purpose but two. The first is the traditional and obvious one: to propagate children, on which the survival of the human race depends. But the second is that sexual intercourse itself is a sacrament, that is, the vehicle for the divine grace that enables a couple to maintain a happy marriage and therefore to have the motivation and commitment to do all the hard work of raising happy, healthy children. Yes, Virginia, Catholics finally capitulated to the obvious biological fact that God designed sex to be pleasurable in order to guarantee the survival of mammalian species, including us.

A non-Catholic might at this point ask, “Why was it important to make an official announcement about something so obvious?” But had it been obvious? Let me explain its significance by means of an incident my father related to me.

In 1964, five years retired from his career in military intelligence, my father went to his parish priest and said, “Father, I need to have permission to use artificial birth control. We’ve always used the rhythm method, but my wife’s cycle has become so unpredictable that won’t work anymore, and her ob-gyn says that another pregnancy could easily kill her.”

(At age 47 my mother still hadn’t hit menopause.)

The priest said what my father had nevertheless hoped he would not say: “The Church teaches that any birth control aside from the rhythm method is a serious sin. I cannot give you permission to commit a sin. I can forgive a sin, but I cannot permit one.”

“Father, I cannot risk my wife’s life.”

“I’m sorry, but in this situation the only moral choice is to abstain from sex completely.”

“Father, I have no gift for celibacy. I know I cannot do that. And I know my marriage and my life will fall apart if I cannot make love to my wife.”

“Mr. Kelly, I’m sorry. I do understand. I wish there were some alternative I could offer you. But you know as well as I that there is none, and I’d be lying if I said there were. Given what I’m hearing from Rome, maybe there will be one, maybe soon, but for now that is what our church teaches.”

So my father, after four decades of being a devout Catholic, found himself in a dilemma: he had to choose between the sin of using birth control and the sin of risking my mother’s life. He was also committing the sin of disbelieving the Church’s teaching on birth control. As a career Army officer, he had had to obey all legal orders or else resign his commission. As a Catholic, he believed that he had to accept all the Church’s teaching—and he could not. So he took the only remaining option: he walked away from the Church.

My father’s dilemma was typical for all too many Catholic men, and many marriages were destroyed by the misery of couples who could neither afford more children nor bring themselves to disobey Church teachings. The church had taught that having sex simply to enjoy it was a sin—and that teaching, which has no scriptural basis, was, I believe, a symptom of Aphrodiphobia. The new Constitution asserted that the enjoyment of sex is needed for the health of a marriage; that provided a theological basis for allowing use of birth control. But did that happen? No. Instead, the Catholic Church has endured a calamity, at least in the United States

To understand why, we need to backtrack, to the First Vatican Council, in 1870. At that time there had been a huge controversy, including many bigoted attacks against the Catholic Church, over its declaration that belief in the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin was infallible doctrine. The council was concerned not with the doctrine—there was no controversy over it within the Catholic Church itself—but with defining and delimiting the concept of infallibility.

Many people then and now have considered belief in the Immaculate Conception to be tantamount to lunacy, almost always because they have not bothered to understand what the concept means; or to grasp that there were two immaculate conceptions in Catholic theology, that of Mary and that of Jesus; or sometimes even to understand the difference between the concepts of the Immaculate Conception and of the Virgin Birth. The former is in fact a rather inescapable corollary of free will theology, which has been central to both Jewish and Christian theology for about two millennia—but I’m not going to discuss all of that here.

In 1870, the Catholic bishops knew it was reasonable for people to question how any human being could be infallible. Hence the First Vatican Council promulgated a very precise definition of infallibility. It said that if the Pope, in unanimous agreement with the laity, the clergy, and the scholars, issued a proclamation defining a doctrine as essential to Christian faith, then by God’s grace that proclamation would be infallible, in the sense that it could not be so wrong that it would destroy the entire Christian community (although it might still destroy the Roman Catholic Church as an organization). Notice that the Pontiff can pronounce a doctrine to be infallible only if the vast majority of the Catholic people already believe it.

The Council also declared that believing absolutely everything the Pope says under any circumstances to be infallible is itself a heresy—they called it the Ultramontane heresy—which stands to reason. Since the Vatican is legally an independent nation-state (all that’s left of the Papal holdings in the Middle Ages), sometimes the Pontiff speaks as head of state rather than as head of the church—and in that situation is no more infallible than Henry Kissinger or Barack Obama. There are many church teachings that are administrative rules, not revealed doctrine—for example, the rules that women cannot be ordained, that priests must be celibate, that bishops must be appointed instead of elected (as they were for centuries), that the Pope must be elected by aged Cardinals rather than by an ecumenical council—and these have no theological claim to infallibility either.

The Vatican II Constitution for the Church is one of the most authoritative statements of Catholic faith ever issued, because it was promulgated by an ecumenical council, the highest authority in Catholic faith, with the consensus of every significant Catholic cleric and scholar in the world, including the Pope. It therefore met all of Vatican I's criteria for infallibility. Hence the Catholic people in general expected that at least some form of birth control would soon be allowed.

Instead, in 1968 Paul VI issued an encyclical on his own authority continuing the ban on birth control, and then claimed that his opinion was infallible! He thus, like many ordinary Catholics, committed the Ultramontane heresy. The result has been a catastrophe. At that point many American Catholics who thought like my father walked away from the Church also. Other Catholics, who believed that they did have the right to decide which teachings they should believe, decided (without ever using the term) that the Pope had become a heretic, have ever since ignored almost everything any Pope has said, have used birth control, among other issues, and continue to participate in the Eucharist every Sunday.

And in fact every Pope since Paul VI, in refusing to carry out the mandates of Vatican II, has been a heretic. I propose to call theirs the Sistine Heresy, in honor of Paul—since calling it the Pauline Heresy would be ambiguous. It has been church doctrine since about the thirteenth century that a Pope who ignores the decrees of an ecumenical council is in a state of heresy. More importantly, the Pope is a heretic simply because the people treat him like one. Instead of making a compassionate decision that would strengthen families, Paul made a decision that would continue to destroy families—and Catholic families simply refused to allow him to get away with that. The Constitution also proclaimed that the Church belongs to the people, not the clergy—and I think the people were thus exercising their ownership rights.

I have heard (probably from one of Andrew Greeley’s commentaries) that every year since 1968 the National Council of Catholic Bishops, which is the governing authority for the Catholic Church in America, has received a letter from Rome insisting that all the Church’s rules, including that on birth control, must be enforced. And every year the Council writes back, saying, “It is our considered professional opinion that if we were to attempt to enforce all the rules in question, the entire membership of the Roman Catholic Church in America would walk away. We do not believe this is the result you wish to achieve. Please advise.” This stalemate shows no signs of being resolved, and the policies of Benedict XVI appear to be rapidly worsening the crisis.

That issue aside, let me comment on another aspect of the Constitution’s teaching on sexuality. The passage on marriage argues that sex outside of marriage is wrong only because it can and often does damage the ability to form a total commitment to another person. The theology here does not assume that sex is sinful or evil or at all wrong in itself; it is merely a natural appetite. Rather, the argument is simply cautious: it is not prudent to risk spoiling something that can be infinitely precious. That is a rational argument, a far cry from medieval insanity. And why is such total commitment and fidelity important? It's not an abstract virtue, like duty, honor, country; those are necessary for the survival of society but rarely benefit an individual directly. The document argues (if one understands Catholic theological terminology) that the sexual ecstasy of a totally committed married couple is an order of magnitude beyond what anyone can experience in any other sort of relationship or context. Why?

Here I must offer my own interpretation of what happens; they just assert it, not explain it. A totally healthy and totally committed married couple can be totally open psychically to each other. They have no barriers, no secrets, no reservations. In the instant of mutual orgasm, their minds, souls, spirits, personalities, whatever you label it, merge into a single person. For that instant they break free from the illusion that we are separate individuals, and they feel the edge of the ecstasy of a full enlightenment. Afterward they know absolutely everything about each other, even more than before, though much of that knowledge cannot be stated verbally.

What sort of crackbrained metaphysical hogwash is all that?—you may ask. Actually, it’s part of Jesus’s own teaching. When asked about divorce (according to Matthew), he replied, “What did Moses teach? . . . That the two shall become one person. And what God has joined together no man can take apart.” I think he was describing psychological realities, not ecclesiastical rules.

No doubt you’re confused at this point, think I am misquoting, and so on. No, I’m interpreting the meaning, not the words. “The two shall become one flesh” is a Semitic idiom. It obviously did not mean that husband and wife would merge into one physical body. It meant that they would merge into one person, one personality. That merging experience is not a metaphor. It is real. I have experienced it. So have a great many other people. Few people talk about that, of course. Other people would think they were nuts, right? And if that’s what Jesus meant, how did he know about that?

Then Jesus goes on: if two people have merged like that, then they have been joined together by God, and it is impossible for them to be separated again. On the other hand, if they want to and can separate, then they had never been truly married in the first place. Either way, the concept of divorce is meaningless. Jesus was certainly not saying that whenever two people get legally married, God will always cooperate by validating it. That’s how bureaucrats think.

Just to rattle another cage, the Semitic idiom “body and blood” meant “entirely.”

Theologico-historical
Havoc has been wreaked
Whenever Semitic idioms
Were taken literally by Greeks.

In a full awakening, the barrier between the ordinary self and the Deep Mind vanishes: one feels one's immortality, one's eternal safety, and the ecstasy, an order of magnitude greater than that of the ecstatic couple, that is the continual state of the Deep Mind. And I am describing the foregoing from my personal experience.

Aquinas argued, if I understand him right, that the ecstasy of the Earth's guardian angel is again an order of magnitude greater than that of the Deep Mind. The next angel "up" from him feels ecstasy that is again an order of magnitude greater. and so on up the ladder toward, but never reaching, the infinite ecstasy of God. In the early 1980s I heard a young priest, Father Tom, deliver a sermon in the Oakland cathedral, with the full approval of Bishop John Cummins, saying that the mystery of sexuality goes to the heart of the Trinity, that human sexuality is one of the most fundamental gifts of the Holy Spirit, and that our sexuality even at its best is only an infinitesimal reflection of the sexual ecstasy that rages between the persons of the Trinity.

Of course, Catholics, and many other Christians, are hampered in grasping all this (among the other problems) by thinking of the Trinity as three MALE persons, and of Mary as the Perpetual Virgin. The concept of the Virgin Birth, and especially of the Perpetual Virginity (for which there is no scriptural basis), was also, I think, a symptom of Aphrodiphobia: Jesus could not have been free of sin if he had been conceived sexually, right? No, Jesus was free of sin because his will was free; sex had nothing to do with it.

The duotheism of the Wiccans, Mormons, Christian Scientists, etc., makes it easier to think of divinity as sexual. Let us ask some difficult questions.

Genesis says, "Let us make man in our image . . . Male and female he created them." If God's "image" is both male and female, then could the mystery of gender be an ultimate reality as well?

If, as the Mormons believe, God has a physical body and a real wife, then why not the Son as well?

If, as the Nicene Creed proclaimed, he was a "true man," i.e., "a man like us in all things except sin," then would he not as a Rabbi (his human calling) have been married?

If he had had children, would that have made him less of a Messiah?

Again it's the Aphrodiphobia, which defined sex as sin. All that was thrown out absolutely by Vatican II.

Perhaps you see where I'm going. Sexual intercourse is not only the sacrament that preserves the human race, but also the first step toward realizing our divinity, working out our salvation, and ascending into Heaven. Aphrodiphobia destroys that first step for almost the entire human race. That is the incredible spiritual calamity that we collectively are trapped in. If sexual ecstasy is our best path toward enlightenment and salvation, then it stands to reason that the forces of evil (if there are any aside from human weakness and illness) would want to destroy our ability to fully enjoy sex. Hence in hating sex, churches and The Church have served evil itself. Not comfortable to think about. But we must think.

Religion as Ecstasy

To recapitulate, the Vatican II Constitution of the Church argued that sex outside of marriage is morally wrong because it may easily damage the ability to form a total commitment to one’s spouse, and that strict monogamy is therefore the only moral form of marriage.

Am I agreeing to that? No, I’m not. It is a sensible argument. It is a prudent argument: sex is both precious and fragile; don’t risk damaging your capacity for enjoying sex. But it is still an argument intended to defend an obsolete morality, an argument that ignores the objective facts about human needs and behaviors, the most obvious being that strict monogamy itself damages the sexual capacity of persons who have no innate talent for being monogamous.

The exact location of the border between science and religion has long been disputed. One resolution of the problem is known as Gurdjieff’s Partition. (I suppose other philosophers may have offered similar proposals, but I learned it in reading about Gurdjieff.) It proposes that if a statement could be confirmed or refuted by any conceivable fact, whether that fact is already known or not, then the statement falls in the province of science, not religion. In contrast, a genuine religious doctrine must be inherently nondisprovable.

A person’s ability to maintain a long-term commitment can be measured, at least roughly. Research can establish whether there is a reliable correlation between sex before marriage and a reduction of that ability. Hence the Constitution’s assertion about sex outside marriage is not a theological argument at all: it is a scientific hypothesis, not a revealed doctrine. Current researchers have established that there is a monogamy gene—but only about 10 percent of the population has it, which certainly accords with statistics about marriage and divorce. The point I am reaching toward is that the sacramental merging of personalities can and does take place outside of monogamous marriage.

The year 1963 was the end of the Fifties and the beginning of the Sixties. It was the year of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the year when Bob Dylan invented electric folk rock, when Chet Helms took the format of Kesey’s Trips Festival and reinvented the rock dance. It was the year when Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Quicksilver Messenger Service first performed together in public. It was the year of the Beatles. And it was the first year of a window that gave me and my friends a glimpse of paradise, a window that lasted less than two decades, because it was the Year of the Pill. For the first time people, especially young people, could enjoy sex freely with no fear of pregnancy—and we did. The STDs of that decade could all be cured by antibiotics, and we could live out our dreams of ecstasy, of plural marriage, of communal sex, of polyamory. Few of us would have used the word “sacrament,” but belief that sex could and should be sacramental was common ground for us, even more than radical politics was. In many ways, still chafing under the Catholic brainwashing that formed my conscience, I was more inhibited and Puritanical than almost anyone else in our network of hundreds of friends.

Our search for an adequate way of life is a good part of what led me and my friends to create the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn as a new Wiccan tradition. It was based on as much as we could find out in 1967 to 1969 about what Gardnerian practices really were. The details about its history, etc., are a story for another time.

It is known throughout the Craft, including its pre-Gardnerian forms, that a sexual initiation is traditional. It is never required, but for those who desire it, it is always an option. It is the most powerful and transformative type of initiation. It is also the characteristic of the Craft that most panics the Aphrodiphobes. They will, of course, insist that it must be immoral, exploitative, and so on. No, it’s not. Carried out by two people who are mature and secure enough, it can be an astonishing rite of passage, holy, sacramental, with the merging of personalities I have been describing.

Let me tell you about the woman I named Lilith, who has been my friend for forty years now. We were emailing each other a few years ago, discussing the year 1970. She has agreed to let me share part of her story.

Lilith:

I was steeped in the Catholic mystic tradition. Our good Irish nuns were forever telling us about the lives of the saints. For me the whole notion of kneeling on tubercular knees, going into ecstatic states, was "normal" fare: suffer enough to drive yourself out of your body beyond the physical and you attain a glimpse of God! So, when I got involved with the Craft, the Catholic mystic trad was a foundation for me. I had experienced "ecstatic" states throughout my childhood, and I wanted MORE of that.

My recollection of Brigid: OHMYGOSH! (said with full-on Valley-girl dialect!)

Judy came up to me that afternoon and said, "We're having a party here tonight and you're invited."

“OK, I live here, why wouldn't I be invited?”

“Well, it's a special kind of party. It's a Witch's Sabbat.”

(The words “Witch's Sabbat” turn slowly in my good Catholic girl's mind. I had spent my entire life until that point going to school, practicing piano, and doing homework! I was socially retarded! What IS it with Catholic education? Repression?)

“Of course I'll come!!”

I, of course, am way curious. . .thoughts of naked bodies, pagan sacrifice, strange incantations, . . . my mind went into overdrive! Imagine my surprise when I see this motley lot with kids and dogs and potluck and smiles and, jeeze, it all looked so normal! And here I am in my red velvet dress expecting some Hollywood B movie version Ah! the mind!

I remember standing in the circle and you asking if there was anyone present who wanted to be initiated. [This was our Order initiation. It mainly involved taking an oath and signing our membership list.] I just stood there rooted to the spot. I couldn't take my eyes off you. I was completely enthralled. And I was pushed form behind. You looked surprised and I looked in back of me to see who had pushed me. There was no one there. You asked me to pick a name, and the first thing that popped into my head was Zahran. You just shook your head No at me and said, "Your name is Lilith."

What was compelling for me was this: any religion that celebrated women, that included singing, dancing, and kissing, couldn't be all bad. It felt right. It felt like family to me. And I felt, for the first time in my life, that I belonged here. I always felt like an outsider or at best, at the edge of things. So I loved the ritual, but I think I loved you more. . . .

When I first opened up, in that period between The Frog House and Summer Solstice, I was out of control. Stuff would flood in, I could "see" everything, and functioning in any real sense was beyond me!

That ritual was so memorable for me. Through the woods from Glenna's house to this magical knoll under a full moon, naked! It was the first time I had taken my clothes off in front of anyone and it felt so right, so free. Coming back, I walked alone, seriously deep in thought. I could feel the ground beneath my feet shifting. I was conflicted about my life before, with Dennis, and this new possibility. I think on a soul-level I resonated deeply with this notion of the sacred feminine, and I connected to the reality that SHE comes in so many different forms, tall, short, beautiful, plain, and all so wonderful, and if they were all wonderful, there existed the possibility that maybe I was wonderful and beautiful too! . . .

Aidan:

I remember our Litha Sabbat in Lagunitas that summer . . . seeing you above me, transformed, enlightened, not a metaphor, because I rarely see auras, but I saw yours that night, rainbow hues rippling outward like a Van de Graff machine, "shining like shook foil," for you had dropped your psychic shields completely. I felt gifted and blessed that you could trust me so much that you became totally vulnerable, and I loved you. I hope you have always known that ecstasy was your true initiation . . . White Cord and Red Cord later were mere documentation.

Lilith:

Somehow, we got enmeshed, you and I, and you're right, I opened up to you, totally without conditions or reserve. Whatever happened in that moment happened only that one time and never again. It was, as they say, a defining moment. I suddenly had this self-realization. I also came to see the power of sexual energy and the possibility of transcendence, numinous. You opened the door of the timeless to me.

It is good to hear that for you something deep happened, and YES!! a true initiation into the mysteries of sexuality, divinity, the open door of possibility, all of that. I'm glad to hear from you that I stood truly naked, not just in body, but totally, radiant, whole and beautiful, that someone, you, saw that, that at least once in a life that could and did happen. I stopped looking for that quite a while back, not because I don't think it's ever possible again, but because it was just for that one moment, and that ignited the deeper search. So to say I am grateful is an understatement. How many times in our lives can we be told by someone that you changed the course of my life, and because of that I am better, greater, more possible in a world of limitless possibilities?

Aidan:

I'm glad to know I had such an overall positive effect on your life. I've often wondered about that, for you and others. Looking back, I can see that I could have been the "guru of a cult"--if I had been a psychopath or whatever, but I wasn't. I never gave the coven orders (can't you imagine them laughing in my face?) I had to persuade them that I was right, I didn't always succeed, and sometimes they showed me that I was wrong. So it should have been and was.

There were several evenings in those years when I realized I had made love to every woman in the circle, and I am grateful that most of the women who were my lovers are still, like you, my friends. A Catholic genius like Andrew Greeley would understand all that, but I doubt that very many ordinary Catholics (or other flavors of Christians) could. I often examined my conscience about whether I was merely another callous womanizer, but I don't think that was how women saw me. Z. Budapest, notorious as a separatist with a fine contempt for men in general, became my ally after my defense of women's rights at Caerdderwen guaranteed the Dianics their membership in the Covenant of the Goddess. I have heard that she told several people that I was not a "womanizer" at all, but the sort of lover that any sane woman would pray to have. Blew my mind, I tell you!

Lilith:

What a crazy time that was, but for whatever was going on in the interpersonal level with all the players, there was this thread of Wicca: the feminine, being a Priestess, feeling the current run through my body, feeling embodied by HER, being HER, bridging the gap between dimensions. This was the drug for me, the search for the deepest, for consciousness, for the Divine Connection of that Summer Solstice, that all too fleeting moment. I wasn't interested in the academic, the words of the ritual, where it came from. I was only after the energy that was invoked, pulled through, directed, what IT could do.

(The luxury of e-mail is that one is drawn to disclose more than what's comfortable.)

So!! Initiation on the deep level is VERY powerful. Perhaps that's why the Church is so repressive. That power unlocks the great secrets and mysteries of creation, opens the doors of the mind, and frees creativity, gnosis. We are/have God within. WE create and destroy. No longer are we victims nor do we have to remain on the sidelines of creation.

What were you thinking when you named me? No, I don't think you were "thinking," but rather it just came out of your mouth! And, like Lilith, I was banished from the garden (perhaps quite by luck!) but banished, nonetheless. Lilith, within me, survives. She is fierce, a warrior, compassionate, kind—surgical.

In a religion such as Wicca, where a woman's power is celebrated, nurtured, the levels of initiation serve to empower women, gradually, with care. That is, unless you've been "initiated" as I was. My perception was that the power coursed through me. The rest was more about tempering my spirit, maturing me to handle the power wisely.

Aidan:

Perhaps it is not obvious enough that Lilith’s initiation opened up the innate psychic abilities that I believe all humans have but are usually not aware of. Our coven had an extensive system for helping our members open up and train such abilities. The system had largely been devised by my wife Alta, working with her own extraordinary abilities, her broad background in psychology, and materials, both traditional and novel, we had received from other Witches. Lilith’s maturing comprised her mastering that system, going on to find even more advanced training, then developing her own system for such training. She has practiced as a clairvoyant reader and counselor for at least 30 years, and has acquired many of the “powers of the Witch” described in Leland’s Aradia. Many remarkable people passed through our coven; yet I have always thought that she was one of the greater success stories of our “grow your own witchcraft” experiment. Consider this anecdote she sent me:

Lilith:

In 1983, I took eight students of mine on a journey to Mexico. They had just completed a one-year seminar with me and the trip was their final. We camped on the beach in San Felipe. Every morning the old Mexican vendors would come by. The first day they tried to sell us stuff. The second day they just came and sat outside our RV until I came out with my coffee. They would smile, then come up to me, one by one, take their hats off, and take my hand. I understood, in the moment, that they wanted me to "bless" them for good luck, which I did every morning for ten mornings, and they would regale me with stories of how well they had done that day. It's clear to me that the "locals" sensed that we weren't the usual tourists, and these old men "recognized" me—interestingly, to the chagrin of a couple of my female students, who were in a power struggle with me. They struggled, I watched! For them, to see that strangers were paying respect to me was a breakthrough. Why are people so hardheaded? You just want to train them to develop their power and use it wisely.