While many of the large, modern universalizing religions, such as Christianity and Islam, have separated themselves from sex and sexuality and do not incorporate sexual acts into their ceremonies, this is not the case for all religions. In many religions, fertility and fertility rituals were, and sometimes still are, an important component. Human beings have always recognized the correlation between sexual intercourse and fertility and have incorporated it into the fertility rituals. Discussed below are a few of the ways in which sex and sexuality have been incorporated into religion.
In many agricultural societies, people see a parallel between planting seeds in the ground and sexual intercourse. In the spring, at the time of planting, people will engage in sexual intercourse in the field in order to encourage a good harvest. While most of these ceremonies are private in that there are no observers, in some instances there may be more public ceremonial sex. The Great Rite of some of today’s Wiccan groups, a ceremony involving sexual intercourse within the sacred circle, appears to have ties to these ancient agricultural rites.
In many of the pagan religions of Europe and Southwest Asia, it was not uncommon for sexual intercourse to be incorporated into ceremonies, particularly those regarding fertility. At times this would involve sex in groups: the English word “orgy” comes from the Greek “orgia” meaning secret worship.
In Europe, May Day would be celebrated as a sexual frolic around a giant phallic symbol, the May Pole. People would decorate this symbolic phallus and dance around it.
Religion is, of course, involved with symbols. Archaeologists, art historians, museum curators and others often find that they have to deal with symbolic depictions of the penis (often shown in the erect state) and the vagina. Ian Shaw, in his Ancient Egypt: A Very Short History, writes:
“Many Egyptologists, brought up almost entirely in the Judaeo-Christian religious traditions, have, academically speaking, averted their eyes from this phallocentrism, regarding it, consciously or subconsciously, as somehow inappropriate in a religious context. Broadly speaking, this lead many scholars to attempt to downplay such episodes as the descriptions of Atum’s act of masturbation in order to create the next generation of deities (in the absence of any goddess with which to procreate).”
Looking now from Ancient Egypt, which is in Africa, to Ancient Scandinavia, in Europe, there is rock art depicting ceremonial sex. The art shows male figures, sometimes wearing shamanistic headdresses, copulating with females. Fertility was an important part of the ancient Scandinavian religion. The Norse goddess Freyja was the embodiment of female sexual power and her brother Frey was the god of male potency.
Changing focus from the ancient worlds of Egypt and Scandinavia, to North American Indians in the nineteenth century, American explorers such as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and fur traders from Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company encountered the sexual ceremonies of the Missouri River Indians. The Buffalo Calling Ceremony was found among the river village people in the American Dakotas – Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara. The purpose was to insure a good buffalo hunt. As a part of the ceremony, the wives of the younger hunters would court and have sexual intercourse with the older men. The spiritual power of the older men could thus be transferred to the younger men, as the women would then return to their husbands with some of this power.
Sexuality was also portrayed in the Mandan Okipa ceremony, a four-day ceremony to ensure that the buffalo remained plenty and that catastrophes be averted; it reinforced the relationship between the supernatural and the people. The ceremony reenacted the creation of the earth and the history of the Mandan people. Among the Okipa dancers was The Foolish One, a male clown who was painted black with white spots and other designs. The Foolish One wore a carved wooden phallus which represented those who did not respect sacred things. According to Tracy Potter in Sheheke Mandan Indian Diplomat: The Story of White Coyote, Thomas Jefferson, and Lewis and Clark:
“He had a buffalo’s tail and enormous genitalia. Two pumpkins hung below a giant fake penis that was connected by a thin piece of sinew to an eight-foot-long rod he carried. He used the rod to raise the member.”
When The Foolish One approached the sacred cedar post, he was driven off by the pipe of Lone Man and he was then driven from the village by the women. His genitalia were wrapped like a doll and paraded around the plaza.
Among the Cheyenne in the Northern Plains, the Sun Dance traditionally involved the offering of the “Sacred Woman” (the pledger’s wife) as a sexual offering to the instructor. This offering represented a supernatural channel for the rebirth of the people and the world. It was also a way of transferring spiritual power from the instructor to the pledger.
In the American Southwest, on the sacred trail from the Hopi villages, there are a number of shrines at which rituals are conducted. At one shrine there is a smooth sandstone boulder with a small black stone shaped like a vulva with a hole about two inches in diameter. At this shrine to Salt Woman, the men simulate sexual intercourse with the cavity. According to one elder:
“this is not a dirty trick as the Christians have called it, neither is it the worship of a stone image, for we know that the Salt Woman is a living goddess, and that intercourse with her means life.”
Rocks which have been shaped to symbolize a vulva are also found in other parts of North America. In 1821, a Spanish group inspecting mission lands between San Diego de Alcála and San Juan Capistrano in California came across a large stone which was sacred to the Indians. The Spanish priests ordered the rock to be destroyed. However, the rock was not destroyed. The rock was a woman’s rock or a fertility rock: a large granite monolith that is vulval in appearance and used by women who wished to become pregnant or who were pregnant and wished an easy childbirth. In the eyes of the Spanish, the site was of “venal nature” and was therefore sinful.
Not all ceremonial sex was/is heterosexual. Among the Sambia in New Guinea, boys were traditionally trained to be valiant warriors. During their initiation into manhood, boys had to acquire jurungdu, a crucial substance which would give them muscle, bravery, and other things important in the life of a warrior. Jurungdu was concentrated in semen and thus the boys would engage in homosexual acts during the initiation.
From the viewpoint of many of today’s religions, sex and nudity are closely intertwined and public displays are banned. Yet, many religious rituals were—and still are—performed skyclad (i.e. nude). This ranges from the ceremonies of many modern Wiccan groups, to traditional Native American sweat lodge ceremonies. In these ritual contexts, nudity is not seen as being associated with sexual activity.