Sexual Intimacy was the First Holy Ground
Sex’s prominence in the earliest, Mother goddess religions deflates theism
Religion is like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps in that the myths, creeds, and rituals are bizarre enough that they seem to call for miracles to explain them.
We might think that if someone tells a strange enough story, saying for instance that a person created the universe in six days, this story could only have had a supernatural origin since no mere man or woman could have imagined something so fanciful or preposterous. Or no mere fiction could have spread so far, taking hold of the imagination, without divine aid.
This is indeed the paradoxical logic of the so-called Hitlerian lie. Ordinary lies are small, and we’re quick to dismiss them if they’re dubious. But whoppers, as in lies that are extravagant in their detachment from mundane reality turn out to be harder to dismiss. These “big” lies exploit our unwillingness to believe that anyone outside of a mental hospital could be so disturbed or dishonest as to present a surreal narrative as the profound truth.
In fact, we’re more likely to enshrine such big lies than dismiss them. Dismissing a Hitlerian lie would even come across as rude. Whereas the Hitlerian liar is rather a villainous bullshitter, if the lie is intriguing enough and told with a straight face by someone who doesn’t seem crazy and may even have power in society, suddenly the blame shifts to the “faithless” victim who blasphemes such a sacrosanct message by questioning it or the prophetic messenger.
In fact, though, there are numerous secular explanations of how religions arise. Elsewhere, I’ve explained how politics and psychology provide ample natural ingredients for the monotheist’s concept of God. The social divide between children and their guardians is the basis of the idea that humanity depends on supernatural benefactors (such as nature spirits or angels); kings are models of aristocratic deities; and the split between the unconscious and conscious sides of our mind supplies us with the sense that we’re always being watched by a wise judge of our character and deeds.
Here, I want to posit yet another mundane origin of religious conceits: sex.
Theistic religion binds a social group by sacrificing reason and dignity
The thought is sacrilegious, of course, but the parallels are striking. Consider that like religion, politics, and the structure of consciousness and the brain, sex is a universal human experience. And just as the relevant social or proto-political and psychological phenomena predated religion, so that the former could provide models for religious concepts and behaviour (without anything supernatural transpiring), sexuality, too, came long before religion.
More specifically, the split between mating and the rest of the life cycle in animal species parallels the religious division between sacred and profane domains. Even though most animals aren’t self-conscious about performing the sex act, they often gather in a special season to mate collectively, as when Chinook salmon return to their spawning grounds at different ages. Moreover, some animals, like Arabian babbler birds, physically hide when having sex.
But this mirroring of the sacred-profane dynamic became acute when behavioural modernity took root in our genus, when humans used language, reason, and imagination to invent cultures that began to outlast their individual members, some tens of thousands of years ago, and when we later retreated systematically from nature, building artificial dwellings for us.
Once we preoccupied ourselves with our elaborate, culturally driven social roles, whether we were slaves, farmers, soldiers, scribes, or royalty, we grew accustomed to certain manners that distinguished our ethos. While some cultures were more prudish than others, the professionalization of public roles meant that sex generally became a private activity.
Now, by the time of this shift to organized, sedentary societies, humans had already likely been religious in an animistic sense, so this domestication of sex could hardly have been the sole cause of religiosity. But what this domestication seems to have done is provide yet another metaphor or model that intensified the distinction between the sacred and the profane, as we’ll see in a moment.
What’s key here, though, is that religion likely couldn’t take hold of a large population unless this institution were grounded in some reality, as opposed to being wholly as frivolous as its theological speculations would indicate. On the surface, that is, theistic religion is just preposterous, and much as we may prefer not to accuse someone of being a Hitlerian liar, we’d also rather not waste our time with flagrant nonsense. The gods, of course, are hidden, which is to say they’re apparently nonexistent — unless they’re identified with concrete natural phenomena, such as planets, kings, or statuary idols, as they indeed were.
The reason it’s important to see how geology, politics, psychology, and perhaps sexuality provide mundane sources of religious concepts and practices is that these explanations show how religions acquire their gravitas.
There’s a bait-and-switch game that’s played here, just as there is in the indulgence of fiction. We might know that an entertaining story isn’t exactly factual, yet we suspend our disbelief to enjoy the pretense, bracketing our suspicions because the story might be grounded in the laws of nature, at least, so that it’s plausible rather than nonsensical.
For instance, a narrative may feature fictional characters. Why take such a narrative seriously if we know that the events depicted never happened? Because the story isn’t wholly fantastic or gibberish. The author just imagines an alternative way in which the real world might have developed.
Similarly, theism works by grounding itself in certain mundane realities, as I’ve argued. That grounding supplies the “bait,” but the switch is made when, instead of treating the stories as useful fiction, we trick ourselves into thinking they’re true in some special sense: they’re “spiritually,” “theologically,” or “mythically” true, or they’re “divinely revealed” from a “supernatural” realm. Again, without some grounding in, say, the mundane early civilized familiarity with the difference between kings and peasants, the metaphor of the gods as aristocrats would have had little appeal or even relevance.
Crucially, it’s not as though we must explain religion’s mystique by taking theism at face value or assuming that only the reality of some gods could account for religious scriptures and practices. The most astute esoteric reading of religious messages subjects the mystique to bathos, and this occurs when you downplay the theist’s “switch” and focus on the bait, the mundane, natural basis of the theistic concept or practice that hides in plain sight.
Sex and shibboleths
To understand the relevance of sex to religion, then, we need to appreciate religion’s basic social function. Elsewhere, I’ve explained how shibboleths secure the camaraderie of cultists and the members of religious communities. This tribal logic is found in tight-knit secular groups too, such as gangs and police departments. There’s an initiation ceremony in which your loyalty is tested. You may have to break the law, so that the group’s leaders can blackmail you, and you don’t stand above the other members.
In the case of theistic religion, the laws that the initiate breaks are the rules of critical thinking. So, you prove your fealty to the church or temple by sacrificing your intellectual integrity and affirming a preposterous creed. The creed’s absurdity is a feature, not a bug. The more absurd the religion’s basic claims, the more faith is needed to compensate for the cognitive dissonance of belonging to this wayward culture. Your reason tells you, at first, that the theology is nonsensical, but because you want to join the group, you suspend your doubts and force yourself, through indoctrination or a dark night of the soul, to accept the religion’s worldview.
Donald Trump used his Hitlerian lie of the stolen election in 2020 to test Republicans’ allegiance to his cult. The more these initiates swore in public that they agreed with Trump that Joe Biden stole the election, the more they burned their bridges to sanity, self-respect, decency, and the American civic religion. All that was left for them was Trump’s cult of personality, or the disgrace of recognizing that they’d been conned.
The shibboleths, then, are code words or “dog whistles” that reinforce the religious training and signal allegiance to the group. The code words pick up on the root absurdity you must affirm so that the leader has “dirt” on you and can blackmail you at any point if you renege on your commitment to the cult or religion. After all, in logic, any assertion follows from a contradiction, so if you can force yourself to believe that two and two make five, you can believe anything, including any piece of propaganda that promotes this group’s interests.
Notice that sexual intimacy works in a similar way, in that to establish a love bond with someone, you must sacrifice your civility to demonstrate your loyalty to this sexual partner. Here, then, the laws you must break aren’t those of critical thinking, but the manners that govern public places in civil societies, and more broadly the humanist expectations that distinguish people from animals. While sexual partners may have their verbal shibboleths, too, as in their “pet names” for each other, the partners prove their special commitment mainly by performing certain pleasurable acts, such as kissing, fondling, foreplay, kinks, and the sex act itself.
Kissing, for example, establishes trust and intimacy. Although sex means less to young adults who experiment with life options before their brain has fully developed, generally you only consent to romantically kissing your life partner. The thought of kissing a stranger or someone of the same gender as you (assuming you’re heterosexual) should be repellant. Similarly, the thought of publicly affirming that two and two make five or that Jesus walked on water should promise humiliation.
More egregiously, the prospect of getting caught performing the whole sex act in public, in flagrante delicto, is disgraceful. This may be especially so in prude, traditionally Christian societies, but the taboo is based ultimately on civilization’s implicit humanism (notwithstanding the sexual exhibitionist, whose exception proves the rule).
The moral problem with sexual reproduction is that animals have sex too. Even insects copulate. Thus, this establishes the same pattern found in religious initiations: cognitive dissonance suffered because of the contradiction involved in degrading ourselves. As civilized people we commit ourselves to the Anthropocene, which entails taming all wild things and thus domesticating or extinguishing wild species. Consequently, when we, the would-be planet-conquerors degrade ourselves by overtly acting like animals, such as by having sex, we prove we don’t deserve to rule after all. In that case, human sexuality contradicts civilization’s secular humanistic mythos.
We get around that contradiction by making a religion out of sex. The sacredness of sex is thus an ur-religion. Unlike with arbitrary theologies, we have little choice but to excuse our primitive side in the case of sex, assuming we want our species to continue after our generation perishes. In the case of religion, we could admit our ignorance regarding life’s big questions, rather than pretending that some prophet or scripture has a special relationship with the universe’s source. But we must violate our humanist ideals and denigrate ourselves by having sex, by acting like the animals and insects we run over with our cars, cook up for dinner, or swat to death without giving it a second thought.
In fact, humanism itself licenses this exception as a necessary evil because if the existential revolt against nature’s wildness is justified, the revolt should endure for as long as possible. Until the advent of artificial means of insemination, sexual reproduction was the only way to sustain our anomalous genus of people. On humanist grounds, though, we ought to prefer non-animalistic, logically consistent means of carrying out this revolt. Short of using technology to reproduce, we distinguish between lovemaking and “fucking,” the former being domesticated, even “spiritually” wholesome sex that makes for a less flagrant violation of civilization’s humanist ethos, and the latter being a shamelessly animalistic, wholesale betrayal of it.
Sex’s role in the clash between animality and the Promethean ethos
In any case, this contradiction between sex’s primitiveness and the humanist ethos likely began with the emergence of behavioural modernity and culture, tens of thousands of years ago. The more we awakened to our personal traits and recognized that we’re special in the animal kingdom, due to our self-awareness, intelligence, imagination, autonomy, creativity, and ambition, the more we’d have resented our animal side.
Our bodies are shaped by natural selection, just like those of reptiles, fish, and mammals, but our minds are liberated, to some extent, by culture, by the artificial environments we create to release us from the animal’s life cycle. Animals are more enslaved to their genetically determined instincts, whereas we people can think for ourselves, mentally model remote possibilities, and use our opposable thumbs to engineer fulfillments of our farfetched preferences.
At some point in the Upper Paleolithic, when humans were using stone tools, painting in caves, burying their dead, and perhaps practicing shamanic forms of magic and animism, these early humans must have faced the need to rationalize their sexuality. They had sex, of course, because their bodies were driven by their genes, just like the other animals. But their minds told them they weren’t animals, that they were subject to some sacred calling that’s fit only for people.
The early goddess religions that promoted the veneration of the mother’s procreative power were drawn into this underlying humanist need to excuse sex’s animality. Early humans would have had sex because women were sacred since they were as fecund as nature, so the male paid homage to the woman by copulating with her.
The power of those early nature religions faded with the rise of sedentary societies in which men thrived due to their greater capacity for manual labour as farmers and soldiers (and because of the masculine sociopathy needed to rule over other people and make Machiavellian sacrifices). But the dynamic of the humanist’s need to provide excuses for sex’s animality set a standard for the patriarchal religions. Instead of having to rationalize the primitive practice of sex in a civilized setting, the later religions would substitute theological abstractions to test people’s loyalty and establish spiritual intimacy.
God’s mystique derives from that of the sex act, and the all-consuming orgasm was perhaps the first religious experience, predating the shaman’s psychedelic state. Again, with the most penetrating esoteric scrutiny, we should deflate theistic religions and recognize the bathos: the so-called profundities of theology are reifications of mundane realities. Religious folks revere their scriptures, creeds, rituals, temples, and spiritual leaders. But what must first have been revered was the sex act since early humans needed to excuse that primitive performance as their powers of personhood dawned on them.
Of course, animists already revered everything, so adding sex to the list would hardly have been a bother. But while the reason for revering the animating powers of nature was to overcome the alienation entailed by the self’s rational detachment from stimuli and instinct, the reason for venerating sex was more specific. This is because the conflict between sex’s animality and behavioural modernity was acute.
After all, we have sex not because we think existentially about the need to perpetuate our species but because the orgasm is a proto-holy pleasure. Sex feels good, so our animal bodies want that pleasure. Thus, sex’s intensity forces a conflict with the emerging self-assurance of early progressive people. Once early behaviourally modern tribes began seeing themselves as distinct from nature, they would have invented a rudimentary lifeworld, a culture made up of artificial norms that didn’t yet include an organized religion. But sex’s primitiveness would have fueled that flight into cultural abstractions.
The bottom line is that when religious folks bask in their faith that some shrine or mantra is sacred, we should interpret this behaviour as deriving in part from sex’s early cultic meaning. Before there were temples and altars, holy books or priests, there was the paradox that sex was supremely pleasurable and common in nature, even as people too had sex. We overcame that conflict by treating sex as virtually sacred, whereupon like religious initiates, we tested our partner’s loyalty to us by gauging their willingness to perform the absurd, grossly misplaced sex acts with us. These acts were out of place in the dawning of the humanist, Promethean hubris that came with behavioural modernity (language, reason, and art).
Perhaps the first temple, then, was the vulva, just as the first standout deity was the mother goddess who had the power to give life. The mechanics of sex weren’t likely understood in the Stone Age, but early humans knew at least that infants emerged from the woman’s genitals that were also central to sex. Hence, sex must have helped spur one of the earliest cults. The disparity between intimacy with a life partner and the anonymity of performing your tribal duties as a functionary wielder of tools, gatherer of food, or slayer of animals set the pattern for how religions would later propagate themselves by making a virtue out of absurdity.
In a nutshell, the barbarity of sex in the civilized context already established the dichotomy between the sacred or the taboo and the mundane. As profane as sex seemed in some prudish contexts, sex’s importance was like that of altars, temples, and religious revelations. Both were rare and precious for most folks who lacked harems. Thus, to the extent that religious stories and practices weren’t wholly nonsensical, they likely built on some such natural metaphors.
Islam even makes this connection explicit by imagining sex with virgins in the paradise of Heaven with God. After all, if you were going to make up a story about glory in an afterlife, why wouldn’t you base your story partly on the universal ecstasy of sex? More importantly, how could your story capture people’s imagination if its metaphors weren’t grounded in some such commonplace reality?
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