Ebook Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Jeffrey J. Kripal
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Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Jeffrey J. Kripal
Ebook Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Jeffrey J. Kripal
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From rumors about gnostic orgies in antiquity to the explicit erotic symbolism of alchemical texts, from the subtly coded eroticism of medieval kabbalah to the sexual magic practiced by contemporary occultists and countercultural translations of Asian Tantra, the history of Western esotericism is rich in references to the domains of eros and sexuality. This volume, which brings together an impressive array of top-level specialists, is the first to analyze the eroticism of the esoteric without sensationalism or cheap generalizations, but on the basis of expert scholarship and attention to textual and historical detail. While there are few domains where the imagination may so easily run wild, the various contributions seek to distinguish fact from fiction-only to find that historical realities are sometimes even stranger than the fantasies. In doing so, they reveal the outlines of a largely unknown history spanning more than twenty centuries.
- Sales Rank: #1321457 in Books
- Published on: 2011-04-01
- Released on: 2010-10-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.00" h x 1.50" w x 8.90" l, 1.67 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 568 pages
Review
Hidden Intercourse is a book that turns people's heads around, so thatthey can never think of sex the same way again.-Joscelyn Godwin
A collection of essays addressing a doubly fascinating topic, namely, theintersection of the erotic and the esoteric in western culture from ancient Greece to contemporary California--where west meets east, as the American counterculture supplements its already eclectic garb with the mantle of a refashioned Asian Tantra.-Virginia Burrus
A thoughtful, well-written, and extremely wide-ranging text that examines the crucial role of eros/sexuality in the western esoteric tradition.-G. William Barnard
From the Back Cover
From rumours about gnostic orgies in antiquity to the explicit erotic symbolism of alchemical texts, from the subtly coded eroticism of medieval kabbalah to the sexual magic practiced by contemporary occultists and countercultural translations of Asian Tantra, the history of Western esotericism is rich in references to the domains of eros and sexuality. This volume, which brings together an impressive array of top-level specialists, is the first to analyze the eroticism of the esoteric without sensationalism or cheap generalizations, but on the basis of expert scholarship and attention to textual and historical detail. While there are few other domains where the imagination may so easily run wild, the various contributions seek to distinguish fact from fiction--only to find that historical realities are sometimes even stranger than the fantasies. In doing so, they reveal the outlines of a largely unknown history spanning more than twenty centuries.
About the Author
Wouter J. Hanegraaff is Professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam, and a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his many publications is the two-volume Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism.
Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he is also the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies. He is the author of numerous books, including Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred and Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
A smorgasbord of sexually occult revelations
By P. Nagy
Excerpt: In recent years, the academic study of Western esotericism has been developing rapidly from a somewhat obscure specialty pursued by a few dedicated researchers into a burgeoning professional field of scholarly activity and international organization. Once a domain restricted to the relatively secluded circles of specialists and hence hidden from the sight of most academic and non-academic readers, it is now becoming an increasingly popular topic of public and critical discussion in the context of journals, monographs, conferences, and scholarly organizations. The book you now hold in your hands is the fruit, one of many, of this growing branch of knowledge.
That there are connections between Western esotericism and the domains of eros and sexuality (which extend far beyond what we nor�mally mean by "sex") has, of course, been recognized before, not least by practitioners, and the various contributions to this volume provide abundant illustration of that fundamental and indubitable fact. But scholarly analyses of how and why the two domains of esotericism and eroticism are so intimately interwoven are difficult to find. Moreover, the closely related problem (or is it a promise?) of how the history of sexuality in the West might be related to the history of Western eso-tericism implies a range of further questions that still remains virtually untouched. In the absence of any such developed analysis, only a few tentative suggestions will be made here. In a historical field this new, this rich, and this provocative, all we can reasonably do is point to the heavy fruit hanging low on the branches, and then hope a sufficient number of readers will choose to begin plucking it. Our own general sense is that such fruit contains its own important truths, but these are, at best, difficult to grasp for a whole host of intellectual, linguistic, political, historical, and social reasons...
The essayists ask and advance their own specific questions and proffer their own answers. Among their numerous illuminations, we might briefly mention the following figures and themes, not to summarize the content of Hidden Intercourse, much less to offer any premature closure, but simply in a spirit of temptation:
A common esoteric reading of the fruit of the garden of Eden as a patent sexual metaphor, with sexual differentiation understood either as a sign of the "Fall" and a subsequent mortality (hence the ascetic components of these traditions), or as the bipolar basis for a sexual technique of reunion and restoration of the primordial Adamic androgyne (hence the erotic practices of these traditions);
An ancient Christian mystery involving sacramental sexual union in the "bridal chamber";
The Levites of ancient Christian heresiology as a homosexual "priestly" trope;
Hermeneutical techniques that out-Freud Freud through readings like that of Psalm 1 and its flowing water as symbolic of seminal emission, or the Christian eucharist as a kind of secret spermatophagy or sperm-eating (with examples from the fourth century to the twentieth); Sufi saints coupled spiritually with jinniya or feminine spiritual beings in order to increase and transmit their baraka or supernatural power; The erotic nature of secrecy itself as a simultaneous revealing and concealing, that is, as a kind of linguistic strip-tease;
God as the delight of all delights, erotic and otherwise;
Mary as both the virgin mother and bride-lover of Christ; Marsilio Ficino as a conflicted homoerotic scholar who turned to an interpretation of Plato's Symposium at the instigation of his younger male friend in order to work through his sexual melancholy; Sulphur as paternal seed, mercury as menstrual blood;
Two-headed hermaphrodites;
Male sex with a (male) bull hide;
A popular sixteenth-century artist who drew things like women rub�bing (psychotropic?) ointment on their genitals in order to "fly" to the Witches' Sabbath, a naked witch looking backwards through her vagina to see the Devil (on a Christmas card no less), and a dragon performing cunnilingus on a witch;
The Platonic model of the brain as producer of semen, with the spinal cord as the transmitter of this cerebral substance to the penis;
A Christian, goddess-like Sophia, who marries herself to a German theosopher on Christmas day, sensually "plays" with him for years, finds an appropriate house for him in Amsterdam, and then helps edit her departed lover's letters through a disciple;
The forward-looking social liberalism of the nineteenth-century American Spiritualists, which included such marvels as Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States, who also happened to be a famous spokesperson for free love, which she believed would help implement a kind of millennial utopia in which young women would date the dead;
Thomas Lake Harris married to his divine faerie, the Lily Queen, and living in celibate chastity with his second wife;
The "internal respiration" of Harris and his community, experienced as a kind of bodily electricity flowing from the reproductive organs, particularly the vagina;
Hashish, magic mirrors, and a cosmic domain of scintilla-like souls or monads, each a reflection of God as Light accessible through the secrets of sexual magic;
The father of psychoanalysis in Italy involved in occult traditions;
The "practice of separation" of the solar Self and the alchemical creation, through sexual magic, of a second subtle "glorious body" to survive the physical death of the mortal frame;
A fictional Tantric town in the American Midwest called "Paradox," where the Wizard of Oz meets the human potential movement, Asian Tantra meets Western sexual magic, and the counterculture comes to the heartland...
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
One of the best and most authoritative overviews available.
By The Mysterious Mr. E.
Not unlike The Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, this book contains among the best writing currently available in English on a number of lesser known currents of sexual magick in the West: such as the Fraternitas Saturni. Academics are starting to 'get it,' at least on an intellectual level and what they related are typically well sourced and authoritative insights into relatively arcane matters, which have here to fore suffered under a cloud of obscurantist and obfuscating occultnik sensationalist blather. This quote from the Introduction indicates the approach taken to this subject:
... what is so striking about so many of the figures treated in these essays is their conviction that in the depths of human sexuality lies hidden _the_ secret of religion, occultism, magical power; spirituality, transcendence, life, God, Being itself. This astonishing connection, such figures would insist, is not metaphorical, or rhetorical, or symbolic, as some would prefer to have it. It is fundamental, cosmic, ontological, religious. We are dealing here, then, with a metaphysics of sex, itself intimately entwined with the destiny of the soul."
P. xiv, Introduction to the book, Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, Edited by Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jeffrey J. Kripal.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Loquacious Disappointment
By Innocence Branch
Loved the cover art but the book was entirely too tedious to get beyond the initial chapter..... I wanted to love it or even like it (and I am a full time graduate student reading dense material all of the time). Couldn't get any pleasure from it. Very disappointed
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