With Halloween right around the corner, and everyone busy constructing their “sexy Bob Ross” costume (hey, you do you, boo) for the weekend’s wild parties, it seemed like a good time for us to take a break from Serious Sex Education posts and indulge instead in some sex-themed edutainment. As Lotus Blooms’ resident witchy occult nerd, I thought it would be fun to take you all on a whirlwind trip through history and around the world and tell you some of my favorite anecdotes about the ways that sex, magic, religion, death, and the occult have crossed paths. Who knows, maybe they’ll turn out to be the thing that saves you from conversational death when you and your Halloween hookup from Tinder encounter an awkward silence on your date. Enjoy!
No, that’s not an ancient Egyptian cock ring that bird-Isis is about to toss down on Osiris, but you could be forgiven for thinking so.
…But did Frankenstein have a magic gold penis?
In a version of Egyptian mythology as recounted by Plutarch, the ongoing feud between brother gods Set and Osiris turned deadly when Set killed Osiris, dismembering him and scattering his body parts throughout Egypt. The goddess Isis, Osiris’s wife and the most powerful sorcerer among the gods, searched for and found all of the pieces—except for his phallus, which had been eaten by fish in the Nile. In an act of magical badassery, she reassembled his body and constructed an enchanted golden penis to replace it, with which she was able to conceive the sky god Horus.
“It’s a dead man’s party, who could ask for more? Everybody’s coming, leave your body at the door…”
One ancient Athenian festival, the Anthesteria, bears a striking similarity to modern Halloween even though it was celebrated in early spring. It was a 3-day festival of Dionysus honoring the dead, during which spirits walked freely among the people, but it also involved the mother of all open bars as wine casks flowed and men held drinking competitions. Predictably, things would get a bit wild, and the second of the three days in particular was full of sex parties. This was also the day that the basilinna, the wife of the archon or ruler of Athens, would be taken to a bull shed and ritually married to Dionysus, with either her husband or a priest masked and getting down with a little sexy roleplaying as the god for the purposes of performing the hieros gamos (or “sacred marriage”) and yes, consummating it. Many cultures have a version of hieros gamos as a ritual or magic practice to ensure the fertility of the land, but in this case it had the added purpose of preventing the need to sacrifice anyone…because Dionysus would rather chill than kill.
(Dionysus, by the way, is WAY cooler than the drunken frat boy you probably think he is. He’s genderfluid and rather nonbinary, he’s at least as polyamorous as all the other freewheeling Greek deities, and he’s queer—he once made a promise to a male worshiper that he would have sex with him when he returned from his travels, but on discovering that the worshiper had died while he was away, he kept his promise by having anal sex with a tree that grew over the worshiper’s grave. At the same time, in Euripides’ play The Bacchae, the seer Tiresias says that even in the wild Bacchic rituals of Dionysus, a chaste woman can safely attend without giving up her chastity.)
That’s right—Dionysus, the stone-hottie party god of wine and instigator of the original Girls Gone Wild, makes it a house rule that CONSENT IS SEXY and NO MEANS NO.
The original burlesque act
Amaterasu Omikami, the solar deity of the Shinto religion, figures in an ancient tale where she’s so infuriated by the pranks and torments of her brother Susano-o the storm god that she seals herself in a cave and refuses to come out, leaving the world in darkness. None of the other gods succeeds in luring her out, until finally Ame-no-Uzume, the goddess of revelry and mirth, upends a barrel to create a little stage. There, she performs a bawdy, satirical striptease, playing with her breasts and genitals and causing the other gods to laugh so hard that finally Amaterasu emerges from sheer curiosity. She’s then dazzled enough by the sight of her own beauty in the mirror that’s been set up right outside the cave, that she comes out and shines again.
The Power of a Vulva Clown
Interestingly, that’s not the only time that the world is saved from some terrible fate through seductive dances and bawdy striptease! A similar story from ancient Greece’s Eleusinian Mysteries centers on Demeter’s inconsolable grief when her daughter Persephone is living in the lands of the dead with Hades, and the world is barren with winter. No one can lift Demeter’s spirits enough to return the world to life until she’s visited by the raunchy and completely liberated divine fool, Baubo. Baubo gets Demeter drunk and cheers her up by putting on a one-woman comedic sex show, including flipping up her skirt and playing with her vulva. She’s usually depicted as a chubby belly, butt and vulva on a pair of legs with her face right above her labia. Check out the hilarious doodles drawn of her by Adriane Schramm in the Vice article that also coined the delightful term “vulva clown”, which incidentally is a job title I am contemplating putting on my next business card.
Great Halloween costume idea, or THE GREATEST Halloween costume idea?
Another dead guy with a metal dick gets you pregnant
Maybe less “sorcery” than “superstition”, but still paranormal enough to make this list is one Victor Noir, among the more notorious residents of Pére Lachaise cemetery in Paris. He was a journalist killed in a pistol duel in 1870, but inadvertently began a second career in death as an accidental sex magician. The life-size bronze statue of him that lies atop his grave appears to be pitching an eternal tent, and it’s become tradition for women to kiss the statue’s mouth and rub its crotch, and sometimes even to get astride and outright hump him, in order to attract love, improve their sex lives, or get pregnant. His bulge and mouth, as a result, are bright and shiny against the verdigris of the rest of the statue. Authorities tried briefly in the early 2000’s to fence off the statue in order to preserve it from erosion, but soon tore the fence down, claiming that there was a huge outcry from women determined to protect their right to give old Victor a handy anytime they needed a bump (so to speak) in their love lives.
Witches: Inventors of Sex Toys?
Countless words have been written about the image of the witch throughout history and how that role overlaps with fear and hatred of feminine sexuality and liberation (even today!) So much of what was recorded throughout time about supposed practices of witches has to be taken with a big handful of salt, considering how much of it comes from testimony given under torture or the propaganda of religious and political leaders. Still, a lot of historians think there’s pretty good evidence that the origin of the whole “flying on a broomstick” image is a metaphor for a practice of using a broom or whisk handle as a dildo, smearing it with psychotropics mixed in a lube that would be absorbed through the mucous membranes for an orgasmic trip. Hey, you say “communing with the Devil”, I say “having a healthy appreciation for masturbation, if not for body-safe materials”.
Medieval art and writing was also obsessed with the idea of witches being able to steal penises and either keep them as pets, where they apparently got fed a special phallic kibble of grains and wriggled around like puppies in a box together (which sounds frankly both adorable and horrifying), or hanging them on trees. In the minds of medieval monks who drew a lot of these proto-web comics, witches would fight over who got to take down and play with the tree-penises, and sometimes a lucky victim of penis-theft would be allowed to come back and pick out a new phallus to strap back on. So, when you’re decorating for Halloween, just remember that dildo trees are entirely in keeping with the season.
Uncle Aleister, the Victorian Sex Beast
No blog post about the intersection of sex and occultism would be complete without talking about the magic-oriented secret societies of the late Victorian age, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and the Abbey of Thelema, which had a common thread in the infamous Aleister Crowley. At the same time that Freud was deciding what type of orgasms are “mature”, Crowley was devoting his life to the study of sex magic, with the idea that masturbation, consuming sex fluids, and practicing homosexuality were all enormously powerful magical tools by which he not only rebelled against Victorian moral and political structures, but intended to bring the entire cultural structure crashing down.
He was a champ at shameless cultural appropriation—many of the practices of the O.T.O., of which he was a member, were taken from the system of sex magic created earlier in the century by a free man of color named Pascal Beverly Randolph; and Crowley himself is almost single-handedly responsible for the New Age idea that “tantra” is nothing but a way for Sting to have an eight-hour orgasm. But love him or hate him, his ideas and writings about sex and sex magic have had a huge influence on modern Western ideas about sex and sexuality in general. And if you’ve ever dabbled in any kind of spiritual sex practice or any neo-Pagan or magical practice such as Wicca, witchcraft, ceremonial magic, or hermeticism, you’re encountering the direct descendants of Crowley’s various secret societies.
Apparently ghosts make for horny groupies
Google “celebrities who have had sex with ghosts” and you’ll turn up all kinds of stories and interviews with famous people who claim they’ve knocked boots with things that go hump in the night. Bobby Brown, Lucy Liu, and Anna Nicole Smith all have their spectrophilia smash stories, but my personal favorite is Ke$ha’s interview with Jimmy Kimmel where she declared that her vagina was haunted. Just goes to show, kids, that you should never use the cursed vibrator you bought from that creepy mysterious shopkeeper at the sketchy adult store. The restless spirits of the dead are not a body-safe replacement for a rechargeable-battery dual motor.
Sex magic is alive and well and probably happening in your own neighborhood
As both a witchy woman and a sex educator, I can tell you from personal knowledge that there are many, many people currently practicing a variety of so-called “alternative” religions, spiritual paths, and occult traditions that involve some form of sacred sexuality, ritual sex, and sex magic—everything from privately using orgasm as a means of focusing powerful, primal energy into an intention, to celebrating the fertility festival of Beltane, to using esoteric breath and energy work to achieve deeper intimacy or personal self-healing. There are BDSM kinksters incorporating ordeal work into their spiritual or magical practices.
You’ll find a constant overlap among sex-positive feminists, sex workers, burlesque performers, queer activists, and other marginalized sex-positive communities with witchcraft, Pagan or diaspora religions that include occult practices, and various magical traditions, both because of shared political leanings as well as a very long lineage of oppressed people and outsiders turning to magical practice in response to being culturally or socially disempowered. If you live in an urban area, you’ve probably met at least a few—but you might not even have realized it, since they come from all walks of life and are pretty normal folks in most respects. (Don’t be too disappointed—some of us do look like refugees from The Craft and go about our lives as happy weirdos.)
So the moral of the story today is that if you’re planning to dress up in a racy costume and get yourself some tricks and treats this Halloween, you’re still probably not going to get half as freaky as some of the eyebrow-raising (among other things) myths and urban legends out there. Get your shivers from the spooky and the sexy this holiday, be safe, and have fun. Next year, maybe I’ll tell you everything I know about the mythological monsters that want to have sex with you. HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
