Finally a religion I can get behind, one that believes
Sex is a holy, sacred and divine healing force at the core (of) our beings. Once we embrace this force instead of deny it, we become successful, happy and powerful manifestors.
The Phoenix Goddess Temple offers
classes, Socials and Spiritual gatherings based on Tantra, Sacred Sensuality, Sacred Sexuality, Divine Feminine…, Awakened Masculinity, and much much more! The classes are open to men and women, 18yrs and up.
I’m ready to even get up and go to this temple come Sunday morning, but alas, the police have shut it down. According to the Phoenix police, the temple was in fact a brothel. Maybe it was the “Naked Life Coaching” sessions or even the Sunday services that offered “divine communion with the Goddess” that according to the Phoenix police included
male and female ‘practitioners’ working at the Temple … performing sexual acts in exchange for monetary ‘donations,’ all on the pretense of providing ‘neo tantric’ healing therapies.
Or maybe it’s that the high priestess, Tracy Elise, ran a suspected brothel in Seattle that was shut down in 2009. According to one of the religious leaders at the temple, Alex Averill, 23,
Do I have sex with seekers? Well, I’m not going to even fully answer that question because it’s sacred information.
But really, I am not at all clear that priests and priestesses having sex with congregants is in fact the same as prostitution. According to the Temple’s announcements in various local sources, they had a suggested donation and a sliding scale one at that. Doesn’t sound like they were demanding fees for services. Also, why is it okay to offer someone bread and say it’s the body of Christ and will give you eternal salvation but not offer them your own body and say it will offer you access to the sacred here on earth?
And how come certain religions can more or less demand that believers tithe their income or face eternal damnation, but a suggested sliding scale for some access to a little Chakra action is prostitution?
Which leads me to the real question. What is religion? If we turn to one of sociology’s founders, Emile Durkheim, we might say that religion is a set of elementary forms that mark the scared from the profane. In this sense, a variety of rituals, costumes, acts, and utterances might be used to create a religious experience that is markedly different from the profane world.
Okay. So you walk into the Temple and sex, an act that occurs in the profane world, is transformed into Sacred Sexual Acts through certain utterances, costumes, and rituals. In the home sex might be down and dirty involving lots of profane utterances. In the Temple, sex was no doubt marked as a ritual entirely separated from the everyday. In other words, it probably wasn’t about the money shot. Now you walk into the Church and you eat some bread and drink some wine. Again, you do this in the profane world all the time, but in the Church, through a series of rituals—like kneeling—and utterances—”this is the body of Christ”—this profane act of consuming bread and wine is transformed into the metaphysical space of Holy Communion.
Why would one of these acts constitute religion and the other prostitution? Why could sex not be an everyday ritual that is transformed into a vehicle for moving us from the profane to the sacred?
And if it can be, why can’t there be a Goddess Temple in my neighborhood so I could finally become a true believer?