In her book, Growing Up Without The Goddess, Sandra Pope’s rich descriptions are palpable contrast to the stark abuse that wove itself through her life. The imagery draws the reader into a world at once beautiful and terrifying. Following the paths she walked, each turn vivid as she plays among the trees and streams, the reader is caught up in the wonders of childhood, only to be confronted — suddenly, unexpectedly — with the need to flee combined with a morbid curiosity that compels her to continue.

Those who have suffered abuse should be aware this memoir contains many scenes that might trigger painful memories. But if the reader is able to continue, there is much to learn. Pope skillfully weaves the abuse of women and children to the deprivation we suffer without the sacred feminine.

While we enjoy the lush hillsides of her youth, Pope struggles to access her inner torment years later via meditation:

“The landscape shifted. It was barren, as if it had been burned, as if someone had deliberately torched it. A hilly, brown earth stretched out before me, and through it wound a single charcoal-blackened path, the scorched ground of my psyche on which I found myself. It was not the place I wanted to be.

“I looked around for trees, for I have loved them all my life. There were none alive. A single burned one appeared on the far horizon.Its trunk was black, and it had three darkened limbs that had escaped total annihilation, though each one had lost its grace. No undulation of branches there. No lovely limbs lifting themselves to heaven to pray. Just pointed, amputated stumps of limbs where branches had once bobbed into tendrils and tendrils had put forth leaves.” (pp. 6-7)

Still innocent, barely beginning to understand the abuse of her body, Pope struggled through her teen years, grasping tight to the rigid sexual mores of Christianity while knowing there was something amiss. Why did her aunt’s teaching leave her cold and alone, forcing her hide her shame even while being pushed into relationships she did not want and could not comprehend:

“I was Rumi, in great grief, holding onto a pillar and swinging himself around it, mourning the loss of his beloved and speaks spiritual truth poetically and spontaneously that others wrote down as he twirled. I was in the center of my own self, somehow returned there, opened to a spiritual experience that denied the dirtiness of everything “slut” signified.

“I was spiraling inward to the ancient center of my being, like a pilgrim walking the great labyrinth at Chartres, like a Tibetan monk sandpainting a mandala, like a Druid finding her way to the center of the Celtic cross where everything was magnified and glorified, aliving prayer to “‘Our Mother-Father Who Art in Heaven.” And there I remained in my own divine center, entering there through my own divine body, the same body that she taught was dirty, that the church taught was defiled, and I believed that with my mind, while my center split open into a place of light and love, as I followed the only route I knew to get there, and wondered, even then, at fourteen, what was wrong with me that I could only find glory that way.” (pp. 242-3)

The splintering caused by her blossoming sexuality which defied Christian teachings followed her into adulthood, where she tried hard to embrace the Christian ideal of womanhood:

“Suffice it to say that through every man I met, I sought spirit, I sought salvation and I sought God. I began every relationship by falling in love, believing that this could could hold me, could transform my story, and could erase my past. I embraced his ways, his hobbies, his family, his friends. I told my story again and again — victim, lost child, motherless child, fatherless child that I was. And some of the men held me for a season, but for sex, which always felt so initially bonding, eventually became bondage — the kind of experience where the body is present but the spirit has fled. I always left — broken. I wanted to know why. But wasn’t my story enough to explain my brokeness?..No, that was not enough.

There was more. My body, not as object but as spirit blended with matter, knew there was. I, the Holy I, the body and spirit, through which Soul could move, knew there was. The missing part of my story felt present and real to me like an amputee feels the presence of an absent limb. I began to search beyond Memory.” (p 337-8)

She wandered many years, searching. Her search eventually arrived on the doorstep of Mary Magdalene. Through the Magdalene, she met Tamara and received messages that brought her closer to fulfilling her Self as part of the sacred feminine:

“‘You too,’ she assured me, ‘are the Divine Feminine, and even when you didn’t recognize her, she was present in you, and, yes, you were a degraded version of her. What else could you be while she was in exile, in exile from your own heart and mind and in exile from every molecule of your body, which is her body, too? But as you have worked to come to consciousness about your own wounding, you have released her too, for she was wounded every time you or any other woman was degraded and wounded. You are restoring and healing her as you restore and heal yourself.’” (p 387)

These words brought the reader full circle, reminiscent of a short entry in the beginning:

“I began as a single egg, formed within one of my mother’s ovaries when she was inside my grandmother’s uterus. My matrilinial heritage was clearly set before my singular identity was formed when my father’s sperm colonized that egg nineteen years after my mother was born.” (p.9)

Our genes — our pattern for life — reside within the ovaries of our foremothers, passed down through the generations to define us before we can define ourselves. So too is the sacred feminine, flowing through our ancestral memories, patiently waiting to be born again so as to enrich our lives.

“To your man’s body, your belly will rise, for he shall be eager above you.” Genesis 3:16, as written by the original author, known only as J (for Jehovah). Compare this with the traditional version from the King James Bible: “And thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Very different meaning, wouldn’t you say? A vivid description of the sexual act vs. women being submissive to men?

In order to understand Genesis, people must first understand the author and her intent. Yes, her, according to Harold Bloom in “The Book of J.” Biblical scholars believe the OT has several authors, just like the NT, and have named one of them “J.” J is the primary author of Genesis, but her writing was later edited or redacted by others. Bloom attempts to reconstruct J’s version by sorting through the various styles found in Genesis and by using David Rosenberg’s interpretation of Genesis as written by J

Bloom’s reasons for believing J is a woman are too long to include here, but here is his introduction of her: “For reasons I will expound, I am assuming that J lived at or nearby the court of Solomon’s son and successor, King Rehoboam of Judah…My further assumption is that J was not a professional scribe but rather an immensely sophisticated, highly placed member of the Solomonic elite, enlightened and ironic. But my primary surmise is that J was a woman, and that she wrote for her contemporaries as a woman, in friendly competition with her only strong rival among those contemporaries, the male author of the court history narrative in 2 Samuel.”

According to Bloom, J was a fiction writer. “…whether we speak of the Hebrew Bible or of the Old Testament, we are speaking of a work that takes as its original the writing of J….Yahweh, in the Book of J, is a literary character, just as Hamlet is. If the history of religion is the process of choosing forms of worship from poetic tales, in the West that history is even more extravagant: it is the worship, in greatly modified and revised forms, of an extraordinarily wayward an uncanny literary character, J’s Yahweh.”

Bloom continues, “The largest assumption of nearly all writers on the Bible is that it is a theological work, as well as historical and literary. J was no theologian, and rather deliberately not a historian….J tells stories, portrays theomorphic men and women, links myth to history, and implicitly utters the greatest of moral prophecies to post-Solomonic Judah and Israel. Yet J is something other than a storyteller, a creator of personalities (human and divine), a national historian and prophet, or even an ancestor of the moral fictions of Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Tolstoy. There is always the other side of J: uncanny, tricky, sublime, ironic, a visionary of incommensurates, and so the direct ancestor of Kafka, and of any writer, Jewish or Gentile, condemned to work in Kafka’s mode…….J’s cognitive power is unmatched among Western writers until Shakespeare, yet J, converted to the official uses of the rabbis, priest, ministers, and their scholarly servants, is made to wear black cloth, hardly appropriate garb for that ironic and sophisticated lady….”

Bloom discusses how J’s brilliance and intent were glossed over and hidden by later editors and redactors. They also changed the meaning of much of her work. Bloom does not champion women in his interpretation but much of it favors women, including J’s use of women as heros and men as fallible. (Her version of Yahweh is also fallible.) We’re all familiar with Judaic and Christian teachings about Eve, especially God ordering her to be submissive to Adam and being punished for causing the downfall of mankind.

Bloom’s concept is far different. Bloom views Eve as Adam’s equal, perhaps even as superior because she was the only creature in Eden to be made from an animated being rather than clay. J’s tale of Adam, Eve and the serpent does not contain any evil, per Bloom, only mistakes by Yahweh for leaving them vulnerable, then becoming jealous because they may have stumbled onto knowledge that would make them divine. “Let us begin by dismissing all Pauline and Augustinian interpretations that find here the vision of a fall, a vision that began in late Judaism in texts like 2 Esdras. J never speaks of a fall from a higher to a lower level of being. The man and the woman suffer terribly in J, but they are not degraded to a lesser level of being. J does not see their fate as a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ but as a seriocomic mishap for which they are only barely responsible. ‘When we were children, we were terribly punished for being children’ might be called the essence of J’s story.”

J was a monist. Per Harold Bloom, in The Book ofJ, “…denigration of the human is alien to J’s spirit. Adam is fashioned out of the adamah, or red clay, as a tribute to the earth, and so as a tribute to humankind. There is no “Fall” for J, as we are about to see, because for J there is nothing fallen about nature, earthly or human….There is for J no split between body and soul, between nature and mind.

For J, Eden was not a locale but a state of being. “….an earliness now forever forsaken….Paradise is always ‘there,’ and our knowing is ‘here,’ but our being is split off from our knowing and so it is possible that we still abide in Eden….The cost of remaining in Paradise fully was ‘not knowing good and bad,’ and here the difficulties of understanding J have been enormous, since so many thousand of exegetes have read J’s ironic narrative as a story of sin or crime and its appropriate (or incommensurate) punishment.”

J does not view the serpent as evil but playfully offering Wisdom to Eve (with Adam at her side and just as curious) “Again the normative misreading has reduced this issue to the knowledge or consciousness of sexuality, but J has too healthy a view of human sexuality for such a reduction to be relevant or interesting. Good and bad is no less than everything, freedom and the limits of freedom, self-knowledge, angelic, almost godlike. When you know yourself, you know your own nakedness, but the consequent shame has no sexual overtones, difficult as normative tradition has made this to acknowledge. To open one’s eyes is to see everything, all at once, and so to see oneself as others might see one.

Yahweh’s reaction is in line with this view. He is alarmed that Adam and Eve will become his equal by eating from a second tree: “‘Look,’ said Yahweh, ‘the earthling sees like one of us, knowing good and bad. And now he may blindly reach out his hand, grasp the Tree of Life as well, eat, and live forever.” This verse makes it clear we were created mortal, that being mortal is not a punishment or a fall from grace. Further verses make it clear the expulsion was to block their access to the Tree of Life, rather than to punish for sexual sins.

The Book of J is a lively read that is thought provoking. It is refreshing to read a new interpretation of Eden. It brings the reader back to the innocence Eden should evoke as Adam and Eve frolic in their new setting.

A complete reconstruction of J’s original version is included in the text.

Auguste Rodin

Under the Grand Portico Philae by David Roberts

Sand sifting through fingers evokes a provocative timelessness. Mud squishing through toes brings a delicious joy on a Spring afternoon, as does the early flower or the song of nesting birds. Yet when was the last time you paused long enough to enjoy the treats created by Mother Earth?

If you are like most, it has been too long. We tend to ignore the seasons created by the soothing revolutions of Mother Earth because we have let ourselves become dominated by time as created by mankind. In Your Mythic Journey, Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox remind us of the reason we varied from Nature’s time schedule. “Time runs on and on with never a pause or variation, but human time is broken into manageable units. We create minutes, days, weeks, months, and years to punctuate the unbroken flow. We mark the beginning, middle, and end of things to find ourselves in time…Our inner time sense records intensity and importance rather than duration: an October afternoon of love among the dunes may be written larger in memory than all the weeks surrounding it.”

Despite our crude attempts to master time, our memories are consistent with seasonal time, ignoring our moment by moment obsessions. We lay upon Mother Earth’s mantle to watch the clouds drift by, and time ceases to exist. We become aware once more of our relationship to the natural ebb and flow of life and the sensuous feel of Mother Earth beneath. She nourishes life itself, providing all we need to exist, including peace and inspiration.

John Muir was quoted by Frederick Turner in Rediscovering America, “Let Children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and stream of our blessed star will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life…All is divine harmony.”

By retreating daily into the wonders of Mother Earth, perhaps in a backyard garden, perhaps a walk in the wilderness, we open ourselves to a satisfying opportunity to create, to be at one with the Universe. Julia Cameron, in The Vein of Gold, wrote, “Guidance comes to us most clearly in solitude. It is called ‘the still, small voice’ because we must quiet our minds and our lives enough to hear it….Increasing and regularizing our times of solitude and quiet increases our ability to receive guidance. One way to think of it is that we are creating a sort of spiritual clearing. I have a centering song which goes:

In the center of your heart
Is a still small part,
Like a meadow in a forest made of green
In the center of your heart,
Is a still small part,
And that is where your soul must go to dream

That stillness is Nature herself, devoid of the relentless tick of man-made time, swathed instead in the gentle turn of the seasons. That stillness, that rhythm is home for our mortal bodies and our immortal souls. Pamela J. Free, in Come Home to Your Body, spoke of shedding limitations. “Home is the place where we remember we are immortal, boundless, limitless, and able to live our lives with a sense of peace and wonder.”

Within each grain of sand are the building blocks of life. As each shifts, combines or changes, it unleashes powerful forces — capable of destruction — yet more often raising us to dizzying heights. It would be a shame if we missed the experience simply because we were to busy to celebrate Mother Earth.

Shakti: Realm of the Divine Mother
Author: Mataji Devi Vanamali
ISBN: 9781594771996
Genre: Goddesses, Hindu
Publisher: Inner Traditions
Price: $ 19.95

In the Devi Gita, Devi says:

“I am the intelligence from which the universe emanates and in which it abides. The ignorant believe me to be nothing more than Nature or Prakriti, but the wise experience me as the true self within. They glimpse me in their own hearts when their minds become as still and clear as an ocean without waves. The supreme wisdom is that which ends the delusion that anything exists apart from me. The fruit of this realization is a total lack of fear and the end of sorrow. When one understands that all of the limitless universes are but a fraction of an atom in the unity of my being, that all the numberless lives in the universes are the wisps of vapor in one of my breaths, that all triumphs and tragedies, the good and the evil in all the worlds, are merely games I play for my own amusement, then life and death stand still and the drama of individual life evaporates like a shallow pond on a warm day.

“This world you are experiencing now is nothing but my power. The only remedy for your ignorance is to worship me as your inner-most self. Surrender yourself to me with one-pointed devotion and I will help you discover your true being. Abide in me as I abide in you. Know that even now at this very moment there is absolutely not difference between us. Realize and be fulfilled this instant.”

Who is Devi? She is the Hindu Divine Mother, filled with light and the essence of all creation. According to Vanamali, Vishnu spoke of her as “She is the cause of all causes. She is the eternal Brahman as well as that which is non-eternal. She is the power of will of the supreme. It is she who creates the cosmos and displays it to the Paramatman (the supreme soul or Brahman).”

She is also Shakti, the sacred feminine paired to the sacred masculine.

“Shakti is synonymous with the Devi, the Divine Mother or divine power that manifests, sustains and transforms the universe. Our first and primary relationship to the world is through the mother, the source of love, security and nourishment. Extending this relationship to worship of a cosmic being as mother was a natural step found not only in the Shakti cult of Hinduism but also in ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Babylonian cultures.”

Vanamali is thorough in her explanation of the complexities of the Hindu concepts of life and the divine. Her exploration of Hindu mythology brings the Goddess and her realm to life, revealing Her to be the creator behind the mask of all other deities. Vanamali’s thoroughness demands an equal dedication to reading her chapters in sequence the first time through and is coupled with the need to reread passages in to allow their full importance sink into the psyche. Shakti: Realm of the Divine Mother is worth the effort, leaving the reader with a deep appreciation for spiritual nuances that our Western religions often overlook.

Too often, our sources of information about the Hindu Great Mother arise from Western authors. These authors, no matter how sincere, tinge their works with Western ideas. Vanamali moves us past that blockage. Her understandings are authentic and innate, steeped in the cultural frame she’s lived amid. Vanamali takes us beyond the superficial into a deep understanding of the divine balance between Shakti and Shiva.

Shakti and Shiva, Devi Jagadambi Temple by Richard Ashworth

“…the male and female are eternal principles involved in the projection of the universe. They are never separate. Fundamentally, they are one, as gold and ornaments made of it are one. This two-in-one existence came to be known as Purusha and Prakriti or Shiva and Shakti. It is something like the dynamo and the force that charges it; one is powerless without the other. Shiva and Shakti are polar opposites, inseparable but having a varying relative predominance under different directions. But in the unmanifest, each aspect of the one reality is only a potential. It is merged in the pure consciousness with the other and is indistinguishable from it.”

Shiva and Shakti are represented by triangles, one pointed down, the other up, one seated in the lap of the other. This symbol is also the root of the Star of David and signifies cosmic union.

Cosmic union lives within our Selves, as do Shakti and Shiva. When we wed our polar opposites, we generate our spiritual energy and solidify our natural union with the cosmos. Shakti: Realm of the Divine Mother allows us to glimpse the power of this union outside of our Western traditions and shows us an alternate path toward spiritual satisfaction.

Catholics (RCC) are in an uproar over Playboy’s Mexican edition featuring Argentinean model Maria Florencia Onor draped in a white head cover that trails down her body, revealing a portion of her left breast. Her hands pantomime a mother holding her infant to her breast. The headline, “Te adoramos, Maria,” means “We love you, Maria.”

Father Albert Cutie told CNN’s Rick Sanchez, also a Catholic:

“Listen, there’s no doubt that she’s a beautiful woman. But a stained-glass window and the veil that looks like that, certainly there’s a reference to Mary. Whoever tells you there isn’t is simply being hypocritical or not very honest….I think that they timed it not only with the Virgin of Guadalupe…but also with the month of December. How many nativity scenes are out there this time of the year? How many times is Mary a central figure in this whole celebration? And this is offensive. This is very offensive. It’s blasphemous.”

I wish Playboy had admitted the obvious connection to Mother Mary. Why apologize? As Esther Cepeda wrote:

“Those crazzzzy Mexicans, putting the sacred Virgen on the cover! ‘Ol Lupe made Miss December – now there’s a novel way to say Feliz Navidad!…Playboy: ignore the naysayers and save us from the ridiculous excuses. If you’re going to give the Mexican people an alternative to getting their religious miracle on, just own it….Dude, you put a heavenly hottie on the cover to generate buzz and you got it – don’t act like it’s all some cosmic coincidence that the puritans among us took it to mean that if you buy the magazine you can pretend you’re Juan Diego sneeking a peek at what’s under the Virgen madre’s hood. Ay dios mio!”

Setting aside the disputed legends of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Cutie’s statements are still troubling. His assumption that the RCC controls the imagery of Mother Mary should not be allowed to stand. The RCC does not own Mother Mary, her son, Mary Magdalene or any other Biblical figure. Their insistence upon Mother Mary’s recognition as nothing more than an asexual virgin — a myth that first appeared nine decades after his birth — has denied her greatness and harmed women the world over.

Why is a woman’s breast, made for feeding her child, “blasphemous” when related to Mother Mary, especially when the church once promoted her image as a nursing mother? Before the cross of death became the symbol for their church, Mary’s exposed, life-giving breasts were the desired symbols of the RCC. By ignoring that reality, Cutie is practicing the very hypocrisy he condemns.

According to the Louvre, where it now hangs, “[Madonna with the Green Cushion] is one of Andrea Solario’s masterpieces…It is not known who commissioned the work, but in the 17th century it was found in the Cordeliers convent in Blois, where Marie de Médicis purchased it for a large sum.”

In God’s Love, Mother’s Milk, Margaret R. Miles, Dean of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, discussed the impact of her portrayal as the nurturing mother and the gradual change that led to the sexualization of a woman’s breast:

“Consider, however, another visual expression and presentation of God’s love for humanity. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of late medieval and Renaissance paintings and sculptures depict the Virgin Mary with one breast exposed as she is nursing or preparing to nurse the infant Christ. The origins of the image are disputed, but whatever its origins, depictions of the lactating Virgin acquired new meaning and new urgency in mid-14th-century Tuscany. In communities under siege from plague, wars and malnutrition, the Virgin’s breast was a symbol of God’s loving provision of life, the nourishment and care that sustain life, and the salvation that promises eternal life.

“In many of these paintings of the nursing Virgin, Christ twists around to gaze at the viewer, making eye contact that establishes the viewer’s identification with Christ and invites the viewer to share the nourishment of the Virgin’s breast….What happened to the nursing Virgin as symbol of God’s loving provision for humanity? The short answer is that changes in society and religion in early modern Western Europe secularized the breast. In the 15th and 16th centuries, representations of an exposed breast became increasingly realistic. No longer the cone-shaped appendage that emerged at shoulder height from a slit in the Virgin Mary’s garment, her breast now resembled the engorged nursing breast.

“Moreover, by the end of the 15th century, exposed breasts were no longer exhibited exclusively in maternal contexts. Mary Magdalene’s naked breasts signified her penitence, extending the meanings of the religious breast…By the 16th century, paintings of the nourishing breast of the Virgin and Mary Magdalene’s penitent breasts were only two among many contexts in which breasts were seen in art….By 1750 the public meaning of naked breasts was large ly medical or erotic. I have not been able to find a single religious image of the breast painted after 1750. By that time, it was impossible to symbolize God’s love by depicting a nursing Virgin.”

Mary Magdalene Erhart, Gregor

Many of the artists who portrayed Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene either partially or fully nude were sponsored by RCC officials. Pope Gregory XV was the patron of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri who painted Magdalene in the Desert (1622)

Titian used a strong erotic presence in his interpretation of Mary Magdalene, who has tears in her eyes as she gazes up to heaven.

Gregor Erhart’s nude statue of St. Mary Magdalen (1510) was suspended from the vault of the church of St. Mary Magdalen in the Dominican convent of Augsburg.

Alexandra, in Seeing the Spiritual in the Sensual provides an alternative explanation for the change in artistic portrayals.

“There is one word that describes these images better than “devotional,” and that’s “titillating.” The Magdalen became an excuse to portray the female form without the inappropriateness of a common nude. But it wasn’t just about showing naked women. The late 16th century was the time of the Reformation, when the Catholic church was losing the faithful to the new Protestant faiths right and left. The Counter-Reformation sought to bring them back any way they could, and one way was by selling sex along with piety. Dramatic, often scandalous images cropped up. Some of the first “shock” art appeared at this time, as artists experimented with new and dramatic ideas and images. While some found this new art offensive, most were drawn to the power of the imagery.”

Mary Magdalene by Titian

If the RCC used nude paintings and statues to lure people, isn’t it duplicitous to scream “blasphemy” when Playboy does the same? The Playboy photo certainly isn’t lewd, especially in comparison to Renaissance portrayals of Mary Magdalene, which the RCC proudly displays. The idea of Mother Mary with her breast exposed to nurse her baby isn’t new either. And that’s the crux of the problem. The two most powerful women in Yeshua’s life were reduced to a falsified sexual status by sex-phobic early Christian fathers. Both deserve to be liberated. We deserve their rightful recognition.

Women are still suffering the repercussions caused by changing their breasts from a symbol of God’s love to a sexual display for titillation. Miles called for women to reclaim their breasts as spiritual imagery as a way to reclaim respect for our bodies:

…the value of the nursing breast as a symbol of God’s provision might need to be reconsidered in our own time, a time in which the technological capacity for, and interest in, objectifying women’s bodies contributes to eating disorders among young women as well as to rape. Understanding the complex social, religious and technological factors that resulted in the eclipse of the nursing Virgin could prepare the way for a critical recovery of this symbol. In societies in which violence is rampant on the street and in the media, the nursing Virgin can perhaps communicate God’s love to people in a way that a violent image, the image of one more sacrificial victim, cannot.

But the changes need to reach further than our breasts. By defining both Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene via their sexual status, we are also denied our right to fully enjoy our sexuality. Like the asexual virgin, Mary Magdalene’s “penitent sinner” or “prostitute” imagery is false. Both were revered leaders in Yeshua’s ministry. Both were dynamic, exicing women whose complete lives are inspirational.

Neither of these glorious women were Christian. Their religion was Judaism. Even though their society was fiercely patriarchal with a heavy suppression of women, the sacred need for sexuality is displayed throughout the teachings of the ancient rabbis. Jonathan Margolis, in O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, quotes from rabbis who affirmed the need for marital sex in order to fulfill Mary and Joseph’s obligations to God in marriage:

“In scriptural matters, knowledgeable interpretation is all. And viewed through knowing eyes, the Jewish Torah and Talmud emerge as little short of practical marriage manuals. The early Jews believed one should enjoy the pleasures of life, sex included, with some rabbis holding that at the last day people would have to account to God for every pleasure they had failed to enjoy.

“‘In Ancient Jewish thought sexual congress is a metaphor for God’s creation of, and interaction with, His world.’ Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes in his book Kosher Sex. ‘Sex is said to bring about the celestial unity of masculine and feminine energies…Since our world was created as an arena to demonstrate the unity of God, no other act demonstrates this better than the physical union of male and female, strangers who become lovers, and lovers who are also friends.

In Alchemy of the Word: Cabala of the Renaissance ,Phillip Beitchman, agreed: “Additionally, every Friday night the practicing cabalist is enjoined to have intercourse with his wife, because at that time she has become Shekinah, God’s female emanation: ‘Students of the Torah…make themselves ‘eunuchs’ during the six days of the week for Torah’s sake, and on Sabbath nights have their conjugal union, because they apprehend the supernal mystery of the right moment when the Matrona (Shekinah) is united with the King…..Intercourse on Friday night is not only indicated but rather enjoined and indispensable, a form of welcome to and congress with the Shekinah, who is partial to the beginning Sabbath and who descends to inhabit the body of the man’s wife. Sexual experience, about which The Zohar is particularly insistent and emphatic, is also generally a rite in Cabala…’”

If she was the divinely-ordained mother of the only begotten son of God, would not her obedience to Him be even more important than the average woman? But the the rabbis didn’t stop with the importance of regular sexual relations. They declared the sex act and orgasm as the woman’s right, per Margolis:

‘Long ago, well before Christianity enacted legislation forbidding its clerics from marrying or having sex, the ancient Rabbis were giving explicit sexual advice to married men and women as to how they could enjoy pleasurable, yet holy, intimate relationship. The Rabbis made female orgasm an obligation incumbent on every Jewish husband. No man was merely allowed to use a woman merely for his own gratification.’ The Bible, he points out, conceives sex within marriage as the woman’s right and the man’s duty, while the Talmud, later, a mere 2,000 years ago — declared that a woman’s sexual passion is far greater than that of man. Later still,, Nachmanides, a thirteenth-century Jewish scholar, explained in his commentary on the Bible that when God said Eve would long for Adam after eating from the tree of knowledge, her craving took the form of an exceedingly great sexual desire for him.”

Female orgasm an obligation on her husband? Great sex as a woman’s right? Amazing concepts when viewed through the dysfunctional lens of Christianity which condemns our sexuality except for procreation.

In Sexuality Sacred? A Biblical Connection, Renata Alexandre, a pastor in the United Methodist Church, commented upon the importance of our sexuality is in regard to the Divine :

“We render a great deal of power to our sexuality, for it connects our bodies and minds, making embodied experience intelligible for us. Foucault depicts our sexuality as that which has become more important than our souls. Our history does not depict a sexuality that is a ‘knowing’ such as the ancient Hebrew mind-set might describe. Yet, there are currently instances of our recognition of sex as wholeness.

“Effective egalitarian power requires a differentiation between females and males, rather than a barrier placed between them. Instead of seeing partners as a threat to our power, we must see each other as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” The failure to ‘know’ causes an inability for members of a couple to sense the work of the sacred between and among them as they move through out their dai ly lives. Egalitarian power must be shared, not hoarded by one member of the partnership. Failure to share power places energy in keeping one’s power intact rather than allowing energy to flow freely from one person to the other.

“In focusing on male sexuality, James Nelson discusses relational power that is shared between partners. It is a power that is integrated, just as the ancient Hebrews integrate the differentiated bodies of male and female through the desire for unity. He states, ‘People are enhanced by this kind of power, mystery is affirmed, interdependence is celebrated.’”

Thus, if the beliefs of Mother Mary, Yeshua and Mary Magdalene had not been hijacked by the misogyny of churchmen who later formed the RCC, all women would have benefited through the centuries. How different our world would be. No Victorian ancestors who gritted their teeth and “endured” it for “God and country.” No shame and guilt heaped upon a wife who wants to have her sexual appetites satiated. Instead there would be joyous celebration for any woman who treasures her inherent sexuality.

We should tell Christians who try to restrict women’s sexuality what Esther Cepeda said to Playboy. “Dude, you put a heavenly hottie on the cover to generate buzz and you got it – don’t act like it’s all some cosmic coincidence.”