Sacred Sex and the Goddess and God of Beltane

An article from the OBOD website library by Maria Ede-Weaving…

Irina Karkabi

Lady of the earth’s desire and the earth’s yielding, of the sap rising and the embrace of longing, as the kiss of the sun awakens you, we too are awakened to the yearning of our bodies and souls. As you unfurl each petal, you release the scent of bluebells, may and apple blossom – this is your love song, your call to union – and we too must answer.

It is hard to resist loving this time of year, everything feels gloriously alive and renewed; the blossom abundant; the green of the trees that special shade that our eyes seem magnetically drawn to. The colour of bluebells has an equally mesmerising effect, as if we are thirsty for it, that rare, vivid, unearthly blue that dissolves and overwhelms our defences with joy.

Beltane is the festival of the Sacred Union of the Goddess and God. It’s a deeply joyous affair, celebrating sexuality on many levels, its rites ultimately honouring our striving for that union of the Divine Masculine and Feminine deep within us. I always think of it as exploring that magical process when we truly open to another – just as the blossom to the bee – and in the surrendering of that boundary become something more than ourselves. Love and sex bring us some of our most profound experiences; some ecstatically joyous; others deeply painful – but at best they open us and let the mystery of another’s being flood into that intimate, hidden space, changing us.

I have always been very interested in the spiritual dimensions of sex. From very early on, I had an inkling that sex had the potential to be a gateway to God which was rather strange considering my early experiences of it, which at best were rather empty, superficial teenage fumbling, at worst humiliating abuse. Even at the lowest moments of the abusive relationship in my teens, when sex really did feel like the sharpest and most brutal of weapons to my young psyche, I knew deep down that in its purest form it could be a profoundly connecting and intensely spiritual act. What my early experience taught me was that it takes a great deal of courage to let sex work on you in that way because such an experience demands a mutual surrendering; a letting go of all that keeps us feeling safe; a stripping away of those masks that hide our vulnerability. In abusive relationships you have a dynamic where that surrendering is being actively forced upon one party by another; the enforcer does their utmost to surrender nothing – they control the surrender by force or coercion and vicariously experience it for themselves whilst retaining a sense of power. Such an approach is mainly about power – it’s not even really about sex. Sex becomes an enticing setting because it is potentially where we expose our greatest vulnerability.

Sex can be the most meaningless of acts, a superficial if pleasurable sensation; it can be a battlefield, the most painful wedge of separation between two people; it can also be a gateway to another’s deepest being, a connecting force between the soul of one to another; it can bring an intensity of emotion and feeling that blows life as we know it apart – all known signposts gone – and from this intensely vulnerable and alive place, a new potential of being can be born. Spiritual sex, sex that engages the body, mind emotions and soul surely takes us to the Divine within, shows us most vividly a glimpse of that Divine Union that we strive for within us, the union that Beltane is ultimately about…(to read the complete article click here).

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