fuck your way to God

Music: Brian Eno: Another Day on Earth (2005)

Ugh: the final push. I'm reminded of the Underworld's song "Push Upstairs," that relentless filter-sweep up from the base, weeeerrooooh, weeeerooooh, weeeerooooh ("push . . push . . push . . ."). The goal is to get this Jungian foray done before my mind switches gears completely into deconstruction and Derrida's Specters of Marx. So, here is part three of my and Tom's essay:

The Uncanny Truth: Glimpses of God in Sacred Sex

The entire universe can thus become a crowd of beckoning symbols; for once speech is considered merely "symbolic," it is only one more step to considering action itself as symbolic . . . . This suggests a way of carrying symbolization far beyond the mere sexual symbolization of the Freudians, as the mystic would say that sexual yearnings are but the conventionalization of a still profounder yearning . . . .
---Kenneth Burke[1]

Thus far we have argued that TDC is a mystery about the Mysteries, and that its rhetorical style is classically alchemic insofar as the novel purports to advance a truth in the language of fiction. We then suggested that the strong reaction to the novel is in response to the peculiar mystery character of the novel as harboring a spiritual truth. For the remainder of the essay, we shall take to explaining in more detail what, exactly, this supposed truth is. Our purpose to not to advocate for this truth, but rather, to explain what is presented as the truth of TDC when we read it as an alchemical text. In other words, insofar as the "Language of the Birds" is a rhetorical strategy for occluding a truth in plain sight, TDC harbors a secret truth in the name of "fiction." That truth is the alchemist's understanding of change and transformation, the process of the coniunctio, and the illumination achieved at its highest level of completion, the rubedo.

Animism and the Sacred Feminine

As we noted previously, the spiritual and/or physical union of Mary Magdelene and Jesus is a common tale, so the intrigue of the novel must be located in something deeper within that story, perhaps even beneath it. A concept that helps to capture the reaction of many to Brown's yarn is the "uncanny," a concept that Freud used to denote the feelings of suspicion and fear in relation to some peripheral or startingly familiar object in a novel or story. Belonging to the realm of the "frightening," Freud links the uncanny to the work of Schelling, for whom the concept was "what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open."[2] He then gives Schelling's definition a psychoanalytic twist by linking the concept to the dynamic processes of repression, whereby the uncanny feeling emerges as a fear of something that was once familiar and conscious and was subsequently repressed. The uncanny thus becomes a symptom of the failure of repression, the return of the repressed.[3]

If we turn, then, to the story of Jesus and Mary's union in TDC, we are led to ask: what was once conscious, then repressed, and has now returned? Although Freud was more interested in primitive religious beliefs and practices, he furnishes us with a helpful answer. For Freud, ancient animistic views of the universe, views that feature a belief in human spirits, telepathy, and magic, dominated so-called primitive cultures:

It appears that we have all, in the course of our individual development, been through a phase corresponding to the animistic in the development of primitive peoples, that this phase did not pass without leaving behind in us residual traces that can still make themselves felt, and that everything we now find "uncanny" meets the criterion that is linked with these remnants of animistic mental activity and prompts them to express themselves.[4]

Bracketing the Lamarckism in this passage (the notion that outward experiences are imprinted on the psychic and genetically passed from one generation to the next), we are left with the notion that what has been repressed and is returning in the uncanny experience is an animistic set of beliefs. The appeal of TDC thus becomes, in part, its ability to speak to reader's repressed beliefs about [the interpenetration of spiritual and material realities----a classically alchemical and animistic point of view.

In fact, through the character of Robert Langdon, TDC specifies the animistic beliefs of the novel in terms of the sacred feminine: "Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever."[5] Langdon suggests that Matriarchal paganism, protected by the Mystery traditions for centuries, was repressed, "forgotten," and replaced by a fledgling, patriarchical Christianity. Owing to the fact TDC is fiction, one is right to be skeptical of the ideas Brown forwards about the sacred feminine, however, scholars more respected than Brown have made a similar case.

In her landmark study The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner examines the gendered dynamics in Mesopotamian religious practices in the second and third millennium B.C., a period that did feature a common belief in what Freud would label "animistic magic." "The answer to the question 'Who creates life?'" writes Lerner, "lies at the core of religious belief systems" of this period.[6] Her intricate and careful analysis of texts from this period reveals how the answer to this question shifts over the millennia in complicated ways. Beginning with the Mother-Goddess figure as the sole generator of universal fertility, the emphasis gradually moves to the Mother-Goddess as assisted by numerous male gods or human kings. From there, creativity shifts from the Mother-Goddess and her male consorts to a "symbolic creativity" that is captured in the magical act of naming; symbolism thereby became a site of mystery and magic. Subsequently, demonstrates Lerner, the male gods who could name things were eventually collapsed into one powerful, male, storm-God.[7]

The completion of patriarchy, Lerner argues, is perhaps most famously represented in the Book of Genesis, where Yahweh now creates all by himself:

To the question "Who brought sin and death into the world?" Genesis answers, "Woman, in her alliance with the snake, which stands for free female sexuality." . . . The weight of the Biblical narrative seemed to decree that by the will of God women were included in His covenant only through the mediation of men. Here is the historic moment of the death of the Mother-Goddess and her replacement by God-the-Father and the metaphorical Mother under patriarchy.[8]

Lerner's analysis is particularly of interest to rhetoricians because of the centrality of the magic of naming and the fundamental religiosity of symbolism. The suggestion here is that because men cannot procreate, symbolic activity and thought were gradually established as the more important type of creativity. Hence the longstanding association of men with linguistic creation and rational thought, and women with biological creation and the body (e.g., in the dialogues of Plato).[9] In making their case for the sacred feminine as a Templar secret, Picknett and Prince extend Lerner's observations to sexual intercourse: the arrival of (religious) patriarchy and the consequent association of the bodily with women led not only to sexual discrimination, but a demonization of sexual intercourse:

This simple-minded myth [of the singularly male God-head] has provided a retrospective justification for the degradation of women, and discouraged the alleviation of gynecological and birthing agonies. It has denied women a voice for thousands of years---and it has demeaned, degraded and even demonized the sex act, which should be joyful and magical. It has substituted shame and guilt for love and ecstasy, and it has inculcated a neurotic fear of a male God who was apparently so full of self-hate that he loathed even his best creation-humanity.[10]

Unquestionably, Brown's novel is a book length exposition of this argument. However, insofar as TDC's plot features a sacred "union" between Christ and Mary, the book does not so much advocate for a return to the dominance of the Mother-Goddess as much as it does a balance of the spiritual forces of male and female, a balance that alchemists referred to as the "hieros gamos" or "sacred wedding."

C. G. Jung on the Hieros Gamos

As evidence from the ancient Mysteries suggest, there have been moments in Western history when gender dominance was either collapsed or shared. In literature on the Mysteries and related Hermetic texts, the balance between the gendered forces of ultimate reality was achieved in hieros gamos. Mythically, the union is frequently represented by the Mother-Goddess taking a young male partner, typically her son or brother, and by means of their sexual union bring fecundity and rebirth to the polis. One better-known, mythic prototype of this kind of sacred sexuality was the coupling of the goddess, Isis, and her god-consort Osiris. It is generally believed that in the ceremonies and rites of various Mystery traditions, ceremonial couples would engage in ritual intercourse to both re-enact the spiritual origin-story was well as achieve spiritual insight. The Pharaoh dynasties, for example, practiced ritual intercourse and carried it into the pre- and then Hellenic periods. As the practice traveled from Egypt to the Greeks, Picknett and Prince explain that

The hieros gamos was the ultimate expression of what is termed "temple prostitution," where a man visited a priestess in order to receive gnosis - to experience the divine for himself through the act of lovemaking. Significantly, the original word for such a priestess is hierodule, which means "sacred servant", the word "prostitute," with its implied moral judgment, was a Victorian rendering. Moreover, this temple servant is, unlike the secular prostitute, acknowledged to be in control of both the situation and the man who visits her, and both receive benefits in terms of physical, spiritual, and magical empowerment. The body of the priestess had become, in a way almost unimaginable to today's Western lovers, literally and metaphorically a gateway to the gods.[11]

Seen in this way, "sex is . . . the bridge between heaven and earth, bringing a release of enormous creative energy, besides revitalizing the lovers in a unique way - even down to their cellular level."[12]

Although the idea of sex as a sacrament continued unabated in the East, mainly through Indian Tantra and Chinese Taoism practices,[13] it was violently oppressed and repressed in the West by the Church, whose terror and loathing of women was strongly grounded in the potential power of procreation and female sexuality.[14] There is, Picknett and Prince note, no clear-cut tradition of sacred sexuality in the West, "unless it was simply known as alchemy."[15] Indeed, it was through the secret practice of alchemy that the sacred feminine and the concept of the hieros gamos were both preserved and further theorized.

Although centuries of alchemical thought make it difficult to generalize about the diversity of alchemical beliefs and practices, many scholars agree that alchemists held (and continue to hold) a general worldview that orbited two concepts, the hieros gamos and the numiosum.[16] The numinosum is ultimate spiritual reality, a dimension that interpenetrates material reality and is synonymous with deity. The concept is fundamentally animistic and idealist in character, yet, ultimately material reality is part of the numinosum, even though we experience material reality as separate. A direct experience of the numinosum is fleeting but fundamentally transformative and often described in terms of "rebirth." Indeed, for the contemporary alchemist, "the greatest failing of our world today, probably encouraged by the abstracting nature of science and technology, is the alienation from the numinosum."[17] The most direct route to it is the hieros gamos, both in terms of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman and in terms of chemical substances.[18] The key to all alchemical work is the idea that "it takes two." Chemically, the numinosum is tapped when two baser metals combine to make gold; spiritually, sexual partners receive fleeting glimpses of the numinosum at the moment of orgasmic release. The process of the union of two different substances, be they people or natural elements, is termed coniunctio, and at the highest, most spiritual level the coniunctio achieves rubedo, a highly desirous state of spiritual illumination.[19] Working on both the exoteric level of metals and the esoteric level of spiritual growth, Jack Lindsay reports that the process of coniunctio proceeded in three basic steps: (1) the mixing of contrasting substances; (2) the introduction of a third, dynamic factor that changes the original relation between the substances into a qualitatively new substance (sexual intercourse, Hegelian sublation, and so on); and (3) the stabalization of the new substance (e.g., the production of gold or spiritual transformation and rebirth).[20] Achieving spiritual illumination and new substances was described as the "Great Work" of alchemy.

What is unique about alchemical thinking---and what attracted Freud's one time heir apparent, C. G. Jung, to alchemy---was its stress on the necessity of duality for spiritual insight and material change. With the introduction of the great monotheistic faiths, a more individualistic model of spiritual illumination replaced the pagan, epistemic teaching of the hieros gamos: from the ancient Mysteries to medieval alchemy, only a unification of contrasting substances can lead to spiritual rebirth. With the exception of a number of Eastern faiths, most contemporary religions feature a solitary individual seeking salvation from a transcendent deity (often with a middle man's guidance). Because clinical treatment in psychoanalysis stressed the fundamental necessity of interpersonal dialogue between the analyst and analysand, C.G. Jung began to research alchemy and, eventually, described his psychoanalytic teaching as fundamentally alchemical.

Nathan Schwartz-Salant argues that Jung's understanding of alchemy straddled the division between alchemy as a metaphor for self-improvement and insight and as a real "spiritually illuminated science." On the one hand, some theorists believed that alchemy was a figural projection of the general, human processes of inner development. Jung clearly had sympathy with this view. On the other hand, however, some scholars, such as Titus Burkhardt, see alchemy as "a continuous system engaged in by centuries of adepts who passed their knowledge on to one another."[21] Jung also had sympathy with this view, and particularly because of his understanding of the libido. Like Freud, Jung understood the life drive to be sexual, however, he found the drive behind the libido was a spiritual yearning for "individuation," a process of psychical progression by which an individual becomes increasingly aware of his whole being and the interconnections among all facets of psychical and material life. As is detailed in his autobiography, Jung saw the esoteric side of alchemy as an innovative anticipation of his own psychodynamics. For Jung, the mysterium conunctionis of sacred sexuality was merely one form that individuation might take. "The mystical side of alchemy," writes Jung, "as distinct from its historical aspect, is essentially a psychological problem. To all appearances, it is a concretization, in projected symbolic form, of the process of individuation."[22]

The alchemic form of the individuation process, at least from Jung's point of view, was also uncanny in a number of senses. First, of course, was the repression that the exoteric work represented: working with metals was a projection of interior processes (as is, Freud would maintain, civilization itself). Second, in respect to the threefold process of alchemy, Jung writes

The alchemic operation consisted essentially in separating the prima material, the so-called chaos, into the active principle, the soul, and the passive principle, the body, which were then reunited in a personified form in the coniunctio or "chymical marriage." In other words, the coniunctio was allegorized as the hierosgamos, the ritual cohabitation of Sol and Luna. From this union sprang . . . the transformed Mercurius, who was thought of as hermaphroditic in token of his rounded perfection.[23]

This remarkable passage not only links the alchemic process with the sacred marriage, but adds the ultimate gender-bender---namely, that the changed lovers will experience themselves as hermaphroditic---not physiologically, of course, but psychologically. This psychical hermaphordism was central to the Great Work: masculine and feminine differences were to commingle within a single person's psyche, just as the sexual act unites differences among bodies. We submit that it is the promise of this spiritual truth, the gender-bending promise and aim of the hieros gamos, that provokes so much reactionary rhetoric about TDC. Although ostensibly (and one might say even ideologically) TDC is a heteronormative tale, its tacit threat is the egalitarian promise of polymorphous perversity. For example, only the intercourse of Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu can unravel the spiritual secret, and only the contrast of their differences yields the Holy Grail of spiritual insight, an exciting contact---however fleeting---with the numinosum: the excitement of mystery itself.

We are now in a better position to revisit TDC and the terror it seems to provoke in many Christians and Church apologists. If the union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is an allegory for the hieros gamos of the Mysteries and related pagan religious practices, then even in fiction TDC poses a threat to any mainstream religious teaching that stresses the centrality of individual salvation: neither patriarchy nor matriarchy have access to the divine, as they are not dialectical. The centrality of sacred marriage to TDC implies that spiritual enlightenment comes, not through the symbolic mediation of a priestly class, but rather directly, personally, and even literally via sexual relations with an adept. The concept of the hieros gamos is the antithesis of the Eucharist.

In light of the affront the central teaching or "truth" of alchemy poses for contemporary Christian teachings, we submit that TDC is not merely an alchemical story, but rather, a repackaged, alchemical text: first, the prose can be seen as occult rhetoric, a "truth" hidden behind the veal of fiction and, though written in an accessible style, is still nevertheless doing a kind of Janus-faced labor; second, the secret about which the narrative hinges---the necessity of two for spiritual insight---is a central alchemical axiom rooted in the ancient, Western mysteries. Whether or not one believes in the ability of sacred sex to lead to spiritual insight (one of us is enamored with the possibility, while the other is hopelessly agonistic on the issue---though willing, very, very, willing, to practice the art with suitable volunteers), when one reads the novel itself as a demonstration of the kinds of secrets the story is about, TDC effectively functions as an alchemical text, delighting those "in the know" and offending (or secretly titillating) those who are not. The truth of TDC need not be "true" for it to function for millions of readers as a spiritual insight, irrelevant of the intentions of Brown or Doubleday. As a dutiful kabbalist might say, the consequence of getting this alchemical formula right is "in the numbers."

NOTES

1 Kenneth Burke. "Ausculation, Creation, and Revision: The Rout of the Esthetes; Literature, Marxism, and Beyon." Extensions of the Burkeian System (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 103.
2 Sigmund Freud. The Uncanny, edited and trans. by David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 2003), 132.
3 Also see Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003). In a chapter titled "The Private Parts of Jesus Christ," Royle details the intimate relationship between the uncanny, sexuality, and divinity.
4 Freud, Uncanny, 147.
5 Brown, Da Vinci, 133.
6 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 180.
7 Tom, we need some page numbers from Lerner here.
8 Lerner, The Creation, 198.
9 See Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), esp. 19-36.
10 Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (New York: Touchstone/Simon and Shuster, 1997/98), 160.
11 Picknett and Prince, Templar, 257.
12 Picknett and Prince, Templar, 152.
13 Cite something here on Tantric sex stuff.
14 We need to cite an authority of some sort here, and probably NOT Picknett and Prince.
15 Pickett and Prince, Templar, 153.
16 See C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies: Volume 13 of the Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 122-124, 180-185; and C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy: Volume 12 of the Collected Works (London: Routledge/Kegan Paul, 1953), 36-37; and Nathan Schwartz-Salant, Jung on Alchemy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
17 Schwartz-Salant, Jung, 7.
18 We need to have a discussion here about the essentialist basis of this theory, and where we would put homosexuality in all of this. I think the tack would be to discuss the ancient's not really having a concept of "gay" back then---sex was sex . . . I dunno. Some jerk will get up in our grill about this.
19 Schwartz-Salant, Jung, 10-14.
20 Jack Lindsay, The Origins of Alchemy in Greco-Roman Egypt (London: Frederick Muller, 1970), _______<---need page numbers Tom!
21 Schwartz-Salant, Jung, 11.
22 Jung, Alchemical Studies, 105-106.
23 Jung, Alchemical Studies, 122-123.