Posted on 05/08/2006 7:42:20 AM PDT by NYer
Girls, girls, girls: Reviving religious sex
Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code is on solid historical ground when it claims that the Judeo-Christian tradition suppressed goddess worship and sexual mysticism. When St. Paul embarked on his missionary journeys in the first century, many of the West’s pagan temples were filled with prostitutes. At one time, for example, Corinth’s temple to goddess Aphrodite employed as many as a thousand prostitutes. Prostitution was considered socially respectable and religiously purifying. Adultery, on the other hand, was punishable because it was an economic offense ― taking someone else’s property (wife).
Today, red light districts in many Western cities demonstrate that socially, economically, and politically, prostitution is, once again, an acceptable if not respectable profession. However, it still lacks the religious sanctity that Christianity had removed. For decades, religious movements such as Tantra, goddess spirituality, and the Church of Satan, have tried to provide religious sanction to sex outside marriage, as well as to transform “public women” into goddesses. In the 1970s and 80s, Indian guru, Osho Rajneesh, wrote that Jesus taught sacred sex as the path to "super-consciousness" (becoming divine). Rajneesh’s followers remained on the fringes of American consciousness but terms such as “chakras” and “tantra” became a part of the mainstream vocabulary, popularized by celebrities such as actress Shirley McLaine (Going Within) and physicist-turned-mystic, Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics). Brown’s novel represents the latest incarnation of sexual mysticism. Its film version has the potential to turn this movement into a significant tsunami.
Praise the Lord…and pass the condoms!
The Da Vinci Code promotes salvation through sex more effectively than its predecessors because it is an engaging novel. It teaches "sacred sex" not on the basis of Pagan philosophy, Jungian psychology, or quantum physics, but by invoking the authority of Jesus – albeit a Gnostic rather than Jewish Jesus.
Those unfamiliar with the rituals of "sacred sex" may not realize that the novel alleges that Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples was a sexual ritual: the “Cup” (Chalice) that Jesus offered to his disciples was the vagina of Mary Magdalene. In Tantra, this ritual is called Yoni Chakra Puja or Swadhistana Sattva – the worship of the second chakra, that is, the vagina. Tantra calls the feminine fluid, Amrita – goddess’ “nectar”, “sacred water”, “healing elixir”, “the fountain of youth”. Hardcore Tantriks (even in America) drink menstrual blood for its healing powers and, because “it transmits knowledge”. The blood from the first menstrual flow of a virgin is the most coveted magic potion of all.
It is easy to miss the point of Brown’s interpretation of Leonardo’s painting of the Last Supper because Brown follows the tantrik tradition of using suggestive rather than explicit language. Tantra believes that the knowledge of truth is to be experienced: it has nothing to do with words, thoughts, or beliefs. Therefore, Tantra’s language, called sandhbhasha, is designed to mislead the non-initiate, while giving clues and symbols to the initiate, who navigate through tantrik texts in the same manner as a cryptologist or symbologist does in Brown’s novel.
Eve and the serpent
Dan Brown debunks the biblical story of the fall of Adam and Eve to do what the serpent did in the Garden of Eden ― offer the “apple” of secret “knowledge” (Gnosis) to help men and women realize their divinity. The novel asserts that great men such as Newton and Leonardo Da Vinci were Grand Masters of a secret society called the Priory of Sion that practiced the path of sexual mysticism taught by Jesus himself. In the novel, Newton’s legendry apple is the ultimate code word that reveals the sexual secrets, allegedly suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church for seventeen hundred years.
Paul – the liberator of women?
The historical irony is that in the pagan world many goddess-worshipping women flocked to Paul because they heard him preach a gospel that liberated women from sexual exploitation in the name of religion. Within a few centuries the Christian movement sent pagan “religious” sex into oblivion. As a result, for fifteen hundred years or so, the West has held that matrimony is holy, that the only sacred expression of sex is within marriage, and that the work of the Holy Spirit includes turning "the hearts of fathers to their children” away from a pursuit of selfish pleasure to building strong families.
An impotent tsunami. . . ?
The movie is not out yet: the novel, although riveting, fails to motivate readers to join secret societies or to go on line to obtain the services of goddesses because its conclusion is disappointing. In the end we do not find the main characters blissfully experiencing their divinity; nor do they discover the "long suppressed documents" that might prove Brown's suggestion that Jesus was a practicing mystic of the Tantrik variety. Instead, at the moment of the hero's final enlightenment, he is alone in Paris, kneeling . . . not in a Cathedral but . . . near a modern glass pyramid where the sacred bones of Mary Magdalene are allegedly hidden.
The grand anti-climax comes when we learn that it is not the Roman Catholic Church but the Priory of Sion that has hidden these sacred relics from public. And who has suppressed the documents allegedly discovered by the Templar Knights centuries ago beneath the Jerusalem temple? Once again ― the culprit is not the Church! The novel’s “good” characters suppress the truth: the Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion, Newton, Leonardo, and the Curator of the Louvre. Ironically, it is the apparent villain who gets the Grand Master murdered because the villain alone is passionate about revealing the liberating and enlightening truth to the general public. The confusion of moral categories has more to do with the philosophy of sexual mysticism than with the writer’s skill.
Trapped in the maze of sexual mysticism
Although Brown’s rhetoric of sexual enlightenment is pervasive, the reader gets lost in a philosophical maze because of a problem inherent in sexual mysticism. Normal sex is about the dualism of male and female enjoying each other. On the other hand, "mystical sex" is about experiencing one’s own completeness, unity, or “divinity”.
Embracing the dualism of Yin-Yang means more than embracing the equality and union of male and female: it also means embracing the dualism of good and evil, light and darkness, truth and falsehood. It leaves no room for ultimate salvation or victory of good over evil. That’s why at the end of the novel the reader is confused about who the villain really is? Who is good? Who is suppressing the truth? Perhaps the novel’s agenda is deeper: subverting the very concepts of "villainy" and "truth" and by implication destroying the West’s traditional moral clarity regarding good and evil, corruption and integrity!
Kundalini Yoga, from which Brown occasionally draws, tries to resolve the problem of dualism by postulating that every human being is both male and female. The classic version of this philosophy says that female energy (Kundalini Shakti) lies dormant and coiled up like a serpent at the bottom of one’s spine. Male energy (Shiva) lies at the seventh chakra (the crown on the head). The mystic experience consists in awakening one’s female energy through secret techniques, often with the help of a teacher/sexual partner. As the energy rises up and passes through various chakras, the yogi goes through many psychic experiences. The yogi realizes his/her divinity or completeness when one’s female energy merges with one’s male energy. At this point one is neither male nor female, s/he is androgynous – one, complete, simultaneously male and female, divine.
Monism denies not only the dualism of male and female, but also the dualism of good and evil. As Rajneesh used to say, our perception of dualism is the sickness of our minds. Reality is one; all perception of duality, including good and evil, is illusion. Under British rule in India in the 19th century, Tantra had to go underground, because it required tantriks to embrace evil – including kidnapping, raping, and killing – in order to rise above good and evil.
A yogi who has realized his/her completeness, renounces marriage because marriage assumes one’s finiteness: I am male, not a female (or vice versa). Therefore, I need a wife (or husband). Rajneesh taught that the yogi or tantrik uses a heterosexual or homosexual partner only as a ladder. He has to abandon the ladder (sexual partner) once he has reached his goal – his divinity, completeness.
Nothing but a good time: Plato, Paul, and Dan
Plato recommended that in his utopian Republic, the ruling guardians should not be burdened with responsibilities for children and wives. They should not marry, but have wives in common. How do you get women to love you if you do not offer security to them and to their children? Love was not Plato’s concern: neither for a woman, nor for a child. He was interested in building utopia. He had no revelation and no moral absolutes. Therefore, his utopian end justified manipulation and murders, as did Nazism and Marxism. Plato asked philosophers to invent sacred ceremonies, clever myths, and poetry to manipulate the best women to have sex with the best men in order to breed a superior race. To ensure the best upbringing for the children, they should be put in the care of professionals. There was no need for parents even to know their children, and utopia required that all the inferior children be discarded.
Paul’s Gospel won the Roman Empire partly because pagan practices made women insecure, leading them to practice abortion and infanticide. This practice had two consequences relevant to this theme: the pagan population declined relative to the Christian population and religiously sanctioned sexual promiscuity turned insecure pagan women into slaves in their own homes, without status and without dignity. These goddess-worshipping women turned to Paul’s preaching, partly because the religion of the Bible condemns sexual promiscuity in both men and women. It exalts responsible fatherhood as a godly virtue and a spiritual blessing (Genesis 17). The Bible says that God’s original blessing in making us male and female was so that we may be “one flesh” in order to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth to manage it as God’s vice-regents.
Contemporary West is beginning to resemble the promiscuous Roman Empire – marked with easy adultery, divorce, and abortion. The troubled conscience of our generation is happy to buy religious peace that requires no repentance, preferably through a religiosity that justifies its life-style. Most men would be quite happy to consider a woman a goddess, if she gives him sex and enlightenment without the hassle of marriage and children!
The devil inside
The goddess worshipping ancient world oppressed women, just as they are oppressed today in the post-Christian West. Why didn’t the goddess of feminine power, Kali or Shakti, inspire a women’s liberation movement in Hindu India that burned teen-age widows as “sati”? Why do goddess worshipping Indian women today abort or kill their unborn or newborn daughters? Sadly, in some parts of India, the male-female ratio has reached 1000-800!
The question is: Why do men and women oppress the female? Is it because we are gods and goddesses or is it because we are “sinners”: good creatures gone wrong?
When I was six or seven years old, I stole some water chestnuts. When confronted, I said that a friend, who got them from a pond, gave them to me. My story did not amuse my father. He wanted me to be truthful. I insisted that I was truthful. Disappointed, he asked me to take him to my generous friend or to the pond. I made him walk for over an hour, hoping that he would give up. He kept walking, hoping that I would confess and ask forgiveness. His exhortation, patience, frustration, anger, love, and discipline did not help me. I only learned stubbornness. By the time I was a teenager, lying and stealing had become habits. What or who would save me from my sin? Dan Brown says that I need sex with a goddess: orgasm is the “prayer” I need to experience.
The Bible teaches that our problem is moral: we were created good but we have become sinners. Therefore we need a savior: someone who would forgive our sin and deliver us from its power and consequences. Mysticism, on the other hand, teaches that our problem is not moral but metaphysical – that is, we are ignorant of our divinity. We are God, but we have begun to live at a lower, rational level at which we perceive ourselves to be finite – e.g., male rather than female (or vice versa). We need to rise above rationality to a state of mystical, thought-less, wordless experience of our divinity. Self-realization is an experience of our oneness with the feminine (or the masculine) as well as everything else.
But is it a tsunami . . .?
The sexual revolution of the last generation shook merely the foundations of Western family. In comparison, Brown’s mysticism is a tsunami. It goes way beyond the beaches to the heart of the West’s culture. It takes the West’s ongoing intellectual and cultural degeneration to a whole new depth. For example it is obviously true that the Roman Catholic Church could become stronger by becoming more transparent. But how do you build transparent societies?
The Protestant movement built the West’s transparent culture by submitting human power to the authority of the written word: an objective document that was open and available to all. The pioneers of the Protestant Reformation were university professors. They did not believe the Bible because the Catholic Church said that it was God’s word. They submitted everything to the Scriptures because Jesus lived and “died according to the Scriptures.”
In contrast, Brown’s mysticism demolishes the authority of all words – be they words of Scriptures, creeds, covenants, or constitutions. It replaces the authority of written words with the hidden authority of secret societies. Would neo-pagan secret societies communicating in codes, symbols, and riddles help anyone build transparent culture? Pagan priests lost to Christianity in the first place because they used the promise of salvation as a cover for the sexual abuse of women and men. Brown’s novel makes him into a neo-pagan priest who sells his mumbo-jumbo on the authority of Harvard and Oxford, but following his teachings will only to turn us as individuals into confused prostitutes, called gods and goddesses.
It will lead the West into the kind of bondage suffered, because of a very similar philosophy, by my country, India, for thousands of years.
I think all this public fuss is only promoting the movie. It's lousy strategy. A lot of people will be interested in finding out "what's so bad about it."
Do you remember "Monty Python's Life of Brian"? I remember Christian groups picketing that. You know what? It made the movie a hit. It drew attention to a movie that is probably not Python's best work.
I think the same thing is likely to happen here. Is that what you want?
The question is how to achieve your objectives without promoting the movie.
Dang he left out the part about UFO's.
The movie is being promoted aplenty by the media. Me or you or someone on FreeRepublic not talking about it (not refuting it) makes about zero difference. I don't really have an agenda, I believe people will make up their own mind, regardless. However, it helps if the truth is out there for them to find.
What I get tired of is the implication that people shouldn't be talking about something because it promotes that thing. Do you thus hide all of your opinions on things in the mistaken belief that then people also won't hear the side you disagree with? THAT sounds like a silly strategy.
susie
So why aren't you protesting this?
1 We are discovering again that we live in a deeply mysterious world, full of sudden coincidences and synchronistic encounters that seem destined.
2 As more of us awaken to this mystery, we will create a completely new worldview - redefining the universe as energetic and sacred.
3 We will discover that everything around us, all matter, consists of and stems from a divine energy that we are beginning to see and understand.
4 From this perspective, we can see that humans have always felt insecure and disconnected from this sacred source, and have tried to take energy by dominating each other. This struggle is responsible for all human conflict.
5 The only solution is to cultivate a personal reconnection with the divine, a mystical transformation that fills us with unlimited energy and love, extends our perception of beauty, and lifts us into a Higher-Self Awareness.
6 In this awareness, we can release our own pattern of controlling, and discover a specific truth, a mission, we are here to share that helps evolve humanity toward this new level of reality.
7 In pursuit of this mission, we can discover an inner intuition that shows us where to go and what to do, and if we make only positive interpretations, brings a flow of coincidences that opens the doors for our mission to unfold.
8 When enough of us enter this evolutionary flow, always giving energy to the higher-self of everyone we meet, we will build a new culture where our bodies evolve to ever higher levels of energy and perception.
9 In this way, we participate in the long journey of evolution from the Big Bang to life's ultimate goal: to energize our bodies, generation by generation, until we walk into a heaven we can finally see.
And in this movie, the people trying to suppress the "Insights" are high officials of the Catholic Church, in conjunction with the government, which they are portrayed as owning.
This movie is already out.
http://www.thecelestineprophecymovie.com/celestine/theaters.php
The Celestine Prophecy is playing in select cities across the U.S.
Following current film distribution models, Celestine Films is opening the movie in successive cities over the next weeks and months. Below is the list of locations already established.
More cities and theaters will be added over the next weeks, so please check back for further details.
Enjoy the movie!
Currently Playing
Austin, TX
Landmark’s Dobie Theater
2025 Guadalupe Street in the Dobie Mall
Austin, TX 78705
512- 472-FILM
I'm not protesting anything. I'm saying that it's silly to tell people to stop talking about something. Go protest that if you choose to. In the meantime, people are free to discuss this stuff as they wish.
susie
If we can't defend our faith and our Lord against such trash then we aren't very good Christians. My 12-year-old son recently read the book, and he gave quite a good presentation over dinner as to why it was all preposterous and he didn't believe any of it! He thinks "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" was a more plausible explanation about the Holy Grail than "The DaVinci Code!"
The godless assume that the reason the Judeo-Christian culture put strict limits on sexuality was because they were just a bunch of fuddy-duddy old prudes. It never enters their minds that there is nothing new under the sun, and that the self and culture destroying effects of pagan sexuality were well known in pre-Christian times.
We still have examples of pagan sexuality today -- we call it sexual slavery and prison sex.
Mostly they were free women completing their cultic obligations at the local temple. This was a a rite of passage that confirmed their womanhood. They were not considered marriageable until they had prostituted themselves at the temple.
This practice went on well past the period of Biblical authorship and was part of Roman and Hellenistic culture until Christianity became firmly established.
In the early days of Christianity, critics claimed that Jesus was born of Mary's temple obligation. Women were still considered virgins afterword. It is also the origin of the term "son of god".
Now there's a book that would've created a firestorm.
So you'd be OK with it then?
How come that guy on Jesus' right, `John', looks like a chick?
http://aerosmithlyrics.homestead.com/Permanent_Dude.html
Open homosexuality, collapse of marriage, lack of procreation among the upper classes and a great many other factors are common to classical society and today. These are often mentioned by conservatives to illustrate "why" Rome fell.
Unfortunately, these factors were generally most extreme during the period when these civilizations were at their height of power. They were much less common during the "decline and fall" period, which I thinks blows a pretty good hole in the "homosexuality caused Rome to fall" theory.
After all, Rome was a Christian state for almost two hundred years before it fell.
Anyway, when you actually study ancient attitudes towards these things, they were so dramatically different from any held today by anybody that there is little parallel. Liberals generally view ancient society in a way that is even less realistic than conservatives, as one in which sexuality was free of the guilt imposed by Christianity.
If anything, ancient Greeks and Romans were even more conflicted about sex than people of today. They just had very different types of conflicts, ones that have no parallel at all today.
The whole thing is utter B.S. What amazes me is how otherwise seemingly intelligent adults......let alone professing Christians.....actually BELIEVE this tripe that has absolutely ZERO historical evidence of truth. None. Zip. Nada. Zilch.
I think the main problem is that we live in a self-censoring PC society where the left has a heckler's veto over many things they find offensive. In contrast, those of us on the right can't even engage in debate over attacks on us or our faith without being accused of "censorship".
So Islam is depicted positively in novels and films. On the rare occasion that it isn't, it gets corrected, as in THE SUM OF ALL FEARS, where the movie version changed the novel's bad guys from Middle Eastern terrorists to more politically correct white neo-Nazis. Why is this the case?
It's because unlike passive Christians, Muslims will react violently and even in a murderous manner if anything offends their faith. So Islam has a heckler's veto. Everyone is afraid to offend Muslims, so writers pick on a religion that isn't violent. That's the irony. Christians are constantly depicted in films as being intolerant, conspiratorial, oppressive, and violent, precisely because they aren't any of those things. Thus, Ron Howard & Dan Brown & Co. feel free to smear Christians with the knowledge that no one will murder or beat them up for doing so. In fact, if Christians even mildly protest (which is all they will do), that will be cited as "proof" of Christian intolerance.
Combine that with the fact that it's actually fashionable among the fine wine & limousine crowd to smear Christians, and it becomes pretty tiring for us Christians after a while. We get accused of all sorts of imaginary wrongdoings, precisely because we aren't guilty of them. Meanwhile, those guilty of such wrongdoings get favorable treatment because everyone's afraid of them.
Muslims are thus in a position to veto any criticism of their faith by threatening violence and invoking the protections political correctness provides to every faith except Christianity. Christians, unprotected by PC and almost universally non-violent, are the daily target of accusations of wrongdoing. Then, if we so much as protest these attacks on us, and try to answer them in formal debate, we're accused of not understanding that the attack on us is a work of fiction, or "only a movie", or whatever.
But it gets tiring after a while to be the daily target of the schoolyard bullies who wouldn't dare pick on a faith that's protected by PC ideology, or, even more significantly, which would physically respond.
Sure, just make sure you spell my name right and DeNiro plays ME in the movie.
Best done the way they are doing it today -- teaching moral relativism in the schools, destroying the concept of absolutes. Isn't that what is behind the homosexual agenda? Sure it is.
Anyone who has ever witnessed a beheading who did not become convinced that there were absolutes dwells on the lowest plane of self-deception.
Because it was painted by a guy who dug effeminate-looking young men, if you catch my drift (not that there's anything wrong with that....)
Accurate for the Middle East. Not for Greece or Rome, except perhaps in Hellenistic societies heavily influenced by the East.
If you wish to disagree, you're going to have to document it before I will accept it.
It's interesting to read Herodotus, who was fascinated by Babylonian practice in this regard. The way he wrote quite obviously shows that the idea of "free women" doing this was entirely new to him.
"Whenever a liberal at my workplace (I'm surrounded by them) smarmily asks me how I know my Christian faith is correct, I simply point out that it's the faith that angers liberals the most."
At my workplace, we tend to talk about work.
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