T he reviewer will be the first to admit that he wasn’t too aware of the sexually charged history of Christianity.
      Sure, he had gone to Sunday school a few times, and he had attended Christian-themed weddings and funerals, but the history of the religion had always evaded him.
      But with Arthur Versluis’s book, The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism, the reviewers’ eyes were opened to this ‘secret history’ of lascivious sex and heresy within Christianity, and boy, did he enjoy it.
      Starting with a rundown of what ‘Mystery’ is, Versluis takes us on a tour of the Pagan and Greco-Roman ideas about sexuality and magic. He makes a very good point of showing what a major change the organisation of Christianity brought about.
      The Pagans and Greco-Romans held strong to the idea that transcendence of the soul could be brought about through communion with nature, the Physical Realm.
      Massive bonfire parties on the Solstices, celebrating the interconnectedness of the earth and the heavens. Orgies presided over by Pagan Priestesses, and parades through settlements with a giant phallus at the head of the procession, make for very interesting reading, and helped this reviewer think of how far we have come as a species in terms of intellectual accomplishment, while the celebration of humanity’s connection with nature is now seen as ‘quaint’, ‘simple’ or just ‘hippy’.
      The Greco-Romans kept a lot of the Pagan ideals even when coming up with modern philosophy. They continued to celebrate the phallus and depicted it on vases and many statues. Even road signs of the times we supposedly shaped like an erect phallus! ‘Showing the way’, indeed.
      But things started changing after the Council of Nicea in CE 325, in which Christianity as we know it (in some sense) was formed.
      Christianity, for the first few hundred years of its existence, was a conglomeration of older, Pagan ideals mixed with the original ideas of the Christ, particularly Gnosticism.
      Gnosticism took on board the idea that ‘the material world was a realm of suffering and ignorance’. The idea of the Christ, God as Man come from Heaven, represented the idea that transcendence of the soul was something beyond the physical world, beyond nature, as the Pagans believed.
      Versluis explains that the Western world was forever changed by the 13th century. Gnosticism had been forced underground by the powerful Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches (although Versluis points out that the E.O. Church was kept more open to the mystical side of Christianity, while the Catholic Church turned more exclusionist, and relied heavily on the suppression of sexuality).
      But this didn’t extinguish the basic human need to explore, both with the body and the mind, as Versluis explores some of the well-known Sexual Mysticism groups of the last 2,000 years.
      The highly-aesthetic Cathars of Provence in France, who nearly succeeded in battling the Catholic Church for control of Europe in the 12th century, the Bogomils, who taught that for one to be truly blessed, must be baptised twice. The first baptism one receives, the Bogomils claimed, only purified the body, while a second one, later in life and by a group of fellow initiates, cleanses the soul and brings higher spiritual-perception.
      Versluis doesn’t bog himself down in the ancient groups, and casts a brighter light on the more famous groups of the last 200 years, which come across a lot clearer in their intent and practices, most likely because more information is available and wasn’t burned, hidden or lost.
      Thomas Lake Harris, the English born leader of the Brotherhood of the New Life, an early, America-based sect, and Alice Bunker Stockham, one of the first successful sex therapists who wrote frank books on sexual advice such as Karezza (1896), are given their own chapter, which then leads into the 20th century.
      Denis De Rougemont’s 1938 book, Love in the Western World, is given worthy praise, with Versluis explaining how it is an important piece of “historical recovery” in the terms of love and sex. Rougemont shows how the influence of Manichaeism spread into Persian ideas of ‘courtly love’, while the Troubadours were the first to spread the ideas of modern ‘love’ in medieval Europe.
      Alan Watts, known as the first Westerner to popularise Eastern traditions such as Buddhism in America, is revealed to be much more by Versluis. Watts’ 1958 book, Nature, Man and Woman, is claimed by Versluis to be one of the first and most popular telling’s of ‘Western Sexual Mysticism’ as history. With Watts also introducing Tantra and Taoism to the Western masses, this mixing of East and West has lead us to the current New Age movement.
      The book is rounded out nicely with the chapter ‘The Secrets of Sexual Mysticism’, which was featured in New Dawn No. 109, July-August 2008.
      Versluis presents the information in an easy, academic tone. An underlying sadness is present over the earlier chapters, in relation to the all-powerful Christian Churches laying waste to ‘heretical’ sects and other former belief systems, but the later chapters bristle with modern insight and left this reviewer pondering on the jagged past and unseen future sexual mysticism.
      In conclusion, The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism is an insightful history of the role of human sexuality in the shaping of ideas and cultures.