What is the Great Rite?

[Fae Oonagh]

What is and what is not Sacred Sex

Sacred Sex can be a positive act as well as a negative act.

Modern pagans are puritanical about sex in many groups, which is a carry-over from modern headlines of sexual abuse, AIDS, and Christian upbringing. But in reality sex is just a part of nature. But that doesn't mean you can use it in a group setting without accountability.

Sexual energy produced by the physical union between two people can be either a part of the act of love or just lust. Sexual energy is more than just physical gratification, it can be a ritual, a way of symbolizing the God and Goddess joining to form the Great Spirit.

But it can also be misused. Sexual harassment or abuse is a misuse, regardless of how it's applied. Sexual initiation demanded even though the student is uncomfortable with the act, is misuse. The act of rape is more than a misuse, it is a felony, and a spiritual abomination within the pagan world. It is a desecration of a woman.
Sacred Sex and Ritual

Sex and Ritual in some traditions are synonymous. It is not performed just to have sex. Combining the concepts of the sexual act and the Great Spirit was an appropriate thought by early humans. They did not understand the connection between sex and conception. Early humankind revealed sexual rituals through cave paintings which depict these acts.

The Venus of Willendor found in a French cave, is a good examples of the reverence early humans had for women and their ability to give new life. This miracle of life was seen as a miracle given to women by the Goddess. A woman who was fertile was considered to be favored by the Great Spirit and revered within her tribe.

When early man realized it took two to create life, the pendulum slowly switched from focusing on the matriarch to the patriarch. As long as a woman could bear children, she still held great power within her tribe. When she grew older and less fertile, she often chose her successor. But her singular power shifted to be shared by with a deserving male of the tribe.

Sacred Sex, which molds the power of creation and ego into skillful means cutting through delusion, requires careful preparation. We don't expect someone who just wants to play around now and then on a keyboard to become a concert pianist. We don't expect someone to be able to get up off the couch one day and run a four minute mile. Great tasks require great effort.

With Sacred Sex we are taking the mind and body as cauldron, feeling, ego, elements and world as alchemical ingredients, and imagination informed by divine power as catalyst; and we are accomplishing the great magical task of alchemical transformation. The base metal of dualistic view becomes the infinitely valuable gold of pure and luminous awareness. Sacred Sex is a path of tremendous power. This power is not easy to use without getting burned by it. Yet, at the same time, it is a path of great joy.
If you're going to use pleasure and personality as the path, you have to be careful not to self-destruct. In working with an advanced practice such as Sacred Sex, powerful energies of psyche, nature, and the subtle realms are harnessed. When such a powerful practice is introduced into one's system through authentic empowerment, it is not something to be taken lightly. Let's say you re going to bring anger into the path. It's a razor's edge between liberating anger into the wrathful compassion of mirror like wisdom and just becoming an arrogant, self-righteous prig. With Sacred Sex, either you are actually transforming your mind stream into this wisdom-being of great wrath and power, or you are just dressing up your egoistic anger in the deity's clothes. If Sacred Sex is misused, the divine becomes a demon.

When you work with the Sacred Sex path, you are playing with a live wire. It's charged not with electricity, but with the power behind creative force. Sacred Sex practice deconstructs and constructs reality, as play, until the essence of reality becomes obvious. Through the practices, private non-realities interface with the public non-reality until you realize the true nature of both. You use illusion to cut through illusion.

With Sacred Sex you are not getting somewhere; you are just waking up to the true nature of things as they are. The colors inherent in clear light are not other than the light. The display whereby Being presents its limitless mystery is not other than the birthless and deathless pure mystery from which Being comes.

Some groups teach that delusion is only an illusion and all that you need to do is understand the illusion to be free of it. Because all you need to do is understand, then all the master has to do is explain the truth to you, and all you need to do is listen and you will "get it".

In truth understanding is a whole body act. You must understand with the cells of your body, your mind and your feelings. Listening involves a profound action of the entire self. This action is what Sacred Sex is. The Sacred Sex Spiritual practice is the act of listening to the teaching with the whole body.

Sacred Sex is a spiritual path whose goal is union with the divine through ecstatic sex. This path is based on the philosophy of sensualism: the idea that in order to transcend our physical existence, we must first fully experience it. Sensualism teaches that the experience of the physical world with complete awareness leads to communion with Divinity. This is different from hedonism, which is mere indulgence in physical sensation and which encourages blind attachment to the physical world rather than conscious understanding of it.

Sacred Sex also describes the human body as a microcosm which reflects the larger whole of the universe, and suggests that self-knowledge leads to an understanding of the workings of the cosmos. As above, so below.

History of Sacred Sex

Throughout history the "sacred prostitute" or priestess was seen as a holy person and these priestesses provided a service of the Goddess. A man could enter the temple with an offering, and request the services of a Priestess within.

He wished to gain the favor of the Goddess, or obtain an extra bit of fertility for his fields, or herds of sheep, cattle or camels. In having sex with the Priestess he would feel blessed and honored, and go home full of confidence.

To a great extent the myths of the Greeks is to a greater or lesser extent concerned with sex. The Greek pantheons constantly sought out human partners who's conceived children became demi-gods. These myths had both a good and bad side of their tale. On one hand, divine unions were seen as gifts from the Gods and often became ritualized. They became honored experiences even if they didn't yield a child. On the other hand some tribes such as the Samothraki, involved the sacrifice of young men at one point in their history. Some Priestess would lay with a young man and to ensure she would become pregnant, she carried a very sharp, leaf-shaped knife which she used to take the life of the man she lay with. Sacrificing his life would ensure his essence was transferred to her womb.

There is even evidence of Sex and the Goddess in Biblical Times. It is held by some historians that the Hebrew God Yaweh was originally a phallic deity. In fact it is an accept historical belief that the Hebrews were not always a monotheistic society. Phallic pillars were set up for worship in many of those early Hebrew villages, along with images of the Goddess Anat or Anath. Even today, the lineage of the faith is passed through the feminine side of the family. If a Jewish woman marries outside the faith, her children can be counted as Jewish, but if a man marries outside the faith it's not straight forward.

All this began to change after the fall of Rome and with the rise of Christianity. Sex began to be denied both as a source of magikal power and of pleasure between partners. Where as sex was seen as a gift from the gods, it was now a sin and to find pleasure was an influence of the Devil. By this time, women were seen as the temptress who could drag a man down into the pits of hell and the only way to keep her from having that control, she must be subservient to her husband, brother, or even her son. Her sole value became her ability to bear children which quickly became a bargain point as a bribe or a prize of war.
What is the Great Rite

The Great Rite is probably the most famous or infamous of the pagan rituals. It is a ritual of sexual intercourse that pays homage to the polarity of male/female; god/goddess, priest/priestess. This polarity exists in all things in the universe expressing the physical, mental, spiritual and astral union between a man and woman as representatives of the God and Goddess.

To many the Great Rite is the Sacred Marriage which is the union of the God and Goddess into the Great Spirit. It's the crown of the spiritual trinity, whose base is the God and Goddess. This concept is nothing new and dates back to Neolithic periods. Ancient kings required sexual union with a priestess representing the Goddess, in order to rule.

The Great Rite is always performed within a Magik Circle between the High Priest and Priestess. It is sometimes also performed at seasonal festivals, and especially handfastings between newly married couple.

It is used in a third degree or level initiation into a coven (such as 3rd degree initiations in the Gardnerian and Alexandrine traditions). This represents the inner marriage of the soul and spirit, ego and self. It is a gateway to becoming a whole being. In these initiations, the Rite is performed between the initiant and the High Priest, or High Priestess. This is sometimes done "In token", which is symbolically using ritual tools, such as an athame inserted into a chalice, or it is performed "in true", as a sexual act.

When the rite is performed "in true" it is typically conducted by a couple who are already intimate partners or between coven members who are comfortable with the rite. An open portion of the rite is performed within the circle in front of the coven, and the intimate union is performed in private. Gerald Gardner had the Great Rite performed with the coven watching. He also favored ritual scourging as part of the rite, a practice which has fallen out of favor with some groups. Other covens performed a portion of the ritual with everyone watching and then those forming the circle would turn their back on the couple in the center. Others had the circle members walk backwards out of the sacred space, then turn and file out clockwise leaving the couple in private but within the circle. Others still open a section of the circle and allowed the couple to exit to their own private space, which is typically a circle that was earlier prepared by the couple.
To summarize: the Great Rite is a sexual means of connecting the participants to the Godhead as well as the tradition.