Bridal Chamber Ritesfor Your Life
Intro Lesson: Why sacred sex? Read this article by BarryLong,MakingLove, Sexual Love, the Divine Way and design a set of questions (exercisetoo if you can) for it. If you’d rather answer someone else’s questions,click here. Personal note fromDiakonissa Deborah: I found certain statements in this article very freeing;I hope folks will take this information to heart and not be put off by the”this is the answer to all the problems in the universe” thing.
Bridal Chamber Rites for Your Life:
Part A. With flesh-partner |Part B. Solitary.
PartA: Sacred Marriage Rites & Techniques with aFlesh-Partner
Part A is UNDER CONSTRUCTION. Feel free to write a lesson ON ANY OF THE AREASLISTED below for EXTRA CREDIT
- The Great Rite in Wicca. History & Practice
- Sex Magik Rites in High Magick (only those that focus on sacred marriage theme)
- Kabbalah Sacred Marriage rites, (example: anointing bedpost before sex, etc. as described in Patai’s Hebrew Goddess)
Note: Anointing: During coitus the woman first anointsthe man, then he anoints her. Messiah means anointed one.
Priestesses of Magdala: You are married to Yeshua as St. Catherineof Sienna was (see painting above called the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherineof Sienna, where baby Yeshua gives her a wedding ring). Priestsof Magdala: You are married to Mary Magdalene, in the mystic marriage.
Sacred Marriagerites working Alone,Solitary
The divine lover is spirit without body
The physical lover is body without spirit
The spiritual lover possesses spirit and body
-Ibn Arabi
quoted in Leloup’s Gospel of Mary Magdalene p. 18
You may not have a spiritual or physical lover, but you can certainly createand cultivate a relationship with a divine lover.
Historically women were objectified, turned into mere objects of the materialrealm– an understandable but unfortunate result of the feminine being identifiedwith the material, physical, sensual and emotional (soul) realm whilethe masculine is identified with the mental and spiritual. Each human,whether male or female, is actually made up of all four elements, mind, body,spirit and soul. Anyone can therefore experience the sacred marriageworking all alone.
EXERCISE: We read in the Holy Marriagein the ancient world lesson that in the ancientworld a certain woman lived physically alone in a great bedchamber at thetop of a Temple. She embodied the physical, material, Sacred Feminine. Her partner was the spiritual Sacred Masculine, manifesting withouta flesh body. She kept herself for Him and awaited Him at all times. He would come on special occasions, and sometimes just for the pleasureof it. She was considered the Bride of God. Solitary priestesses,you can “mate” with Him, too. That’s the task in this exercise! — Imagineor visualize your merging with Him. No blushing, now… Your sacredmarriage act with Him brings fecundity and life to the land and all itsinhabitants.
Advisory from Diakonissa Deborah: This exercise may need furtherexplanation for some. Donald Tyson, who wrote Tetragrammaton, alsowrote a book on Sexual Alchemy, where he explains how to have sexwith divine beings. Perhaps someone can get that book and help provide moreinfo for this exercise. I think exercises like this should be recommendedfor everyone, married or not, because the idea is to become more integratedin ourselves. I do understand the need for careful explanation–this willrock a lot of people’s worlds! The church has separated the physical fromthe spiritual for so long that it seems evil.
Attention male priests: this Temple-on-high bedchambervisualization may not work for you since you are the physical being ratherthan the divine lover arriving from on high. You should instead visualizethe Sacred Feminine as the Earth Goddess or some other form you feel comfortablewith (yet inspired by) and rendezvous with Her. One idea is to do thecomplete opposite of the Temple-on-high visualization. Picture yourselfin an earthy place — a grotto in a dense forest or a rose garden next toa waterfall, for example. You live there alone. This is yourlife, serving and reserving yourself for a divine beloved. See thegreat bed of soft moss where you the priest await the coming of the GreatGoddess. Your sacred marriage act with Her brings fecundity and life to theland and all its inhabitants.
There is a sacred marriage between a male priest and a Teutonic earth goddess,Nerthus. Nerthus’ image — or sometimes just her “essence” hidden ina special symbol — was carried around in a sacred wagon that only the priestwas allowed to touch (or look inside). A white cloth would cover thesymbol. When not in procession the wagon and statue were kept in agrove on a sacred island usually in the middle of a lake or large pond, nota sea island. The priest would realize when she arrived to her sanctuary,the grove, and knew when she had mounted the sacred chariot. He wouldthen take it out among the people, pulled by oxen with the sacred symbolinside it. Perhaps the symbol was an anchor for her presence. Afterbeing thus taken about and “meeting” with the people, Nerthus would depart. Then the chariot and the white cloth that covered it would be cleansedin the waters of a sacred lake. Because of Tacitus’ report (see below),some believe slaves would do that cleansing and then would be drowned afterward. But it is far more likely that the priest would do all thosecleansing-of-sacred-objects functions as part of his clergywork, his sacredorders.
Jakob Grimm on Nerthus
In almost all tongues earth is female in gender and, in contrast to the father sky surrounding her, regarded as the mother who gives birth, who brings forth fruits. Nowhere is her maternal quality expressed purer and simpler than in the oldest information which we possess in the Germania of Tacitus about the goddess Nerthus. Writes Tacitus: “The German peoples as a whole honor Nerthus, who is Mother Earth, and believe that she mixes in human affairs and comes journeying in a wagon among her people. On an island in the sea lies an inviolate wood sacred to her; her wagon stands there, veiled with a cloth, and only a single priest may approach it. The latter knows when the goddess appears in the wagon. Two she-oxen pull it away and the priest devoutly follows. Wherever she condescends to come and accept hospitality, there are days of rejoicing and weddings, no war is fought, no weapon reached for, every iron object is locked away. Only peace and calm are then known and desired. This lasts until the goddess has sojourned long enough among humans and the priest leads her back again into her sanctuary. Cover and goddess are washed in a remote lake. But the servants who perform are afterwards swallowed by the lake. A secret terror and sacred uncertainty are therefore always spread over this, which only those who die immediately afterwards witness.” [Image: Earth Mother Nerthus on her chariot/wagon.]
The widespread worship of the productive, nourishing earth also occasioned a variety of names among our forefathers, in the same way as the divine service of Gaia and her daughter Rhea mingled with that of Ceres and Cybele. The similarity between the cult of Nerthus and that of the Phrygian mother of the gods, Cybele, seems to me worth noting. Lucretius describes the peregrination of the magna deûm mater [great mother of the gods] in her lion-drawn car through the lands of the earth:
Adorned with a turreted crown, the image of the divine mother is carried through wide lands with awe-inspiring effect … When first borne in procession through great cities she silently enriches mortals with a wordless blessing; they strew all her path with brass and silver presenting her with bounteous alms, and scatter over her a snow-shower of roses, overshadowing the Mother and her retinue of attendants. (Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 597-641)
Ammianus Marcellinus, XXIII, 3: “There [at Callinicum in Mesopotamia], on the twenty-seventh of March, the day on which at Rome the annual procession in honor of the Mother of the Gods takes place, and the carriage in which her image is carried is washed, as it is said, in the waters of the Almo, he [Emperor Julian] celebrated the usual rites in the ancient fashion.”
Nerthus is likewise, after she has been driven around the land, bathed in the sacred lake on her wagon, and I find it recorded that the Indian Bhavani, Shiva’s wife, is also driven around on her festival day and bathed by the Brahmans in a secret lake.
— Jakob Grimm, Germanic Mythology, trans. Vivian Bird. First published in 1835.
Read the verses at thisNerthusHarrow, an online shrine to her where you can even post an “offering”. The picture above right shows her in her sacred chariot or wagon. Iam struck by how greek she looks and even moreso how greek looks her priest.He is wearing full greek orthodox clerical robe and head-dress! It is alsointriguing that the wagon was not to be touched, reminiscent of the Ark ofthe Covenant in ancient Israel.
Pictured on the right is ANOTHER GODDESS & MORTALMAN sacred marriage couple. The marriage of Venus and Anchises produced ason, Aeneas, the hero of the famous Aeneid tale. Notice in the painting Anchisesis waiting for his goddess in a grove of trees.
