Clearly God is interested in sex, or Satan would not be so passionately committed to its deconstruction. To destroy God’s created structures, the Evil One rips from the body politic the sexual distinctions hard-wired into creation to recall the deep truth about existence-the absolute distinction between the Creator and creation. The attack on these structures succeeds in convincing many that they, in themselves, are a detestable oppression, the very cause of social and human dislocation.

Writing during the “student revolution” of the 1960s, the Christian apologist, Francis Schaeffer perceptively sensed the deep religious inspiration fueling the liberation of sexuality. Specifically, he noted:

Some forms of homosexuality today…are a philosophic expression…a denial of the antithesis. It has led in this case to an obliteration of the distinction between man and woman. So the male and the female as complimentary partners are finished…In much of modern thinking, all antithesis and all the order of God’s creation is to be fought against-including the male-female distinctions. The pressure towards unisex is largely rooted here. But this is not an isolated problem; it is part of the world-spirit of the generation which surrounds us…the result of the death of absolutes.”

Schaeffer’s passing remark is surely correct. As we discussed above, at the heart of pagan monism is a mystical, unitive experience, a state in which distinctions disappear and opposites are joined. Androgyny, on the sexual level, reflects and confirms such an experience. Not everyone engaging in such activity thinks about the ultimate spiritual stakes. However, the link is explicitly established by influential pagan theorists in both the ancient and the modern world. Their explanations, though separated by vast distances and great periods of time, are strikingly similar and consistent, and thus independently testify to the coherent connection this paper seeks to clarify.

In the ancient Gnostic texts such connections can be detected. The Church Father Hippolytus, documents how and why the “spiritual” Gnostics did not hesitate to imitate pagan spirituality and sexuality in one form or another. He explains the Gnostic Naasene participation in the cult of the Goddess. “Because they claimed that everything is spiritual,” the Naasenes did not become Galli physically but rather spiritually: “they only perform the functions of those who are castrated” by abstaining from sexual intercourse. So, concludes Hippolytus, the Naasene Gnostics imitate the Galli, the castrated priests of Cybele. “For they urge most severely and carefully that one should abstain, as those men (the Galli) do, from intercourse with women; their behavior otherwise…is like that of the castrated.” The mythological story of the castration of Attis thus led the Naasenes to conclude that the image of emasculation was a symbol of salvation. Attis cut off his testicles in order to “break with the baser and material world and gain access to immortal life, where there is no longer either male or female.” These “Christian” Gnostics sought, through a deep form of spiritual androgyny, a close association with paganism’s understanding of salvation.

Of what does such “salvation” consist? The Gnostic Gospel of Truth enunciates the theory: “It is within Unity that each one will attain himself; within knowledge he will purify himself from multiplicity into Unity…” The Gospel of Thomas develops the practical consequences: “Simon Peter said to them: “Let Mary go away from us, for women are not worthy of life.” Jesus said: “Lo, I shall lead her, so that I may make her a male, that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself a male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Though on the surface less radical, and thus promoted as a Gospel on a par with the four canonical Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas is similarly driven by the androgynous pagan ideal. This Saying 114, being the last, doubtless represents the goal of the gospel, which is promised in the first-to “not experience death.” Here, apparently, is the road to salvation–the mystical attainment of an androgynous or sexless state. Saying 114 should be understood in the light of Saying 22: “And when you make the male and the female into a single one so that the male shall not be male and the female shall not be female…then you shall enter the kingdom.” Both these sayings suggest the “neutralization” of sexuality so that the ideal for Gnostics is to become, in this life, spiritually and ritually androgynous. Thomas is not a macho attack on women. It is a rejection of creational sexuality, a radical refusal of sexual differentiation, as presented in the Genesis account.

To become a true disciple, Mary must become a liberated Gnostic, untrammeled by the sexual distinctions of the original creation. She must become autonomous, and move beyond the bondage of her sex. As a spiritual androgyne, she attains mystical union with the All.

Having already noted the alchemical goal of a mystical/unitive hieros gamos, it is not difficult to follow the logic of a professor at a well-respected Catholic university who lends to the mystical pursuit of the alchemists a sexual twist. Professor Frederica Halligan perceives in the alchemists’ quest for “gold” a blueprint for the planet’s future. Halligan notes that the second of the seven stages of alchemistical meditation, called solutio, involves both a transformation of sexual energy and the destruction of the individual ego [the self]. This is a powerful mystical experience of pure monistic spirituality. For this Roman Catholic scholar, monism seems to present no problem. But the process is far from over.

The seventh stage, conjunctio, [“joining”] is a “new reality,” the final bringing together of all the opposites, producing “gold,” i.e., spiritual gold, i.e., “a tremendously deepened sense of the oneness of all….Unitive consciousness is awareness of the essential oneness with the Divine, that is, mystic consciousness….the unification of all the opposites within oneself.” Halligan’s final definition of the conjunctio is clear: “Beyond gender differences now, the mystics of both Eastern and Western traditions describe the bliss of abiding love.”

Mircea Eliade, both a remarkable researcher of the phenomena of pagan spirituality, as well as one of the architects of the new spirituality, explains the spiritual meaning of androgyny as “a symbolic restoration of Chaos, of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the Creation.” The androgynous being thus sums up the very goal of the mystical, monistic quest, whether ancient or modern: “in mystical love and at death one completely integrates the spirit world: all contraries are collapsed. The distinctions between the sexes are erased: the two merge into an androgynous whole. In short, at the center one knows oneself, is known, and knows the nature of reality.” Or again, according to Eliade, androgyny in many traditional religions functions as “an archaic and universal formula for the expression of wholeness, the co-existence of the contraries, or coincidentia oppositorum…. symboliz[ing]… perfection…[and] ultimate being….

The androgyne is thus the physical symbol of the pagan spiritual goal, which is the merging of two seemingly distinct entities, the self and God, and a mystical return to the state of godhead prior to creation. The joining of the opposites is the dissolution of creational distinctions and thus the destruction of creation’s hold upon human identity. Such joining brings a “liberating” recognition that the real self is “uncreated.” The solution to our angst, according to a feminist author, is healing through the sacred marriage, the hieros gamos. This is the marriage of the ego and the self, which gives birth to “a divine child.” “A woman gives birth to herself as a divine androgynous being, autonomous, and in a state of perfection in the unity of the opposites. She is whole.”

This sacred marriage expresses what occurs, in particular, on the moral plane. The pagan monist assumes guiltless responsibility for all his actions whether “good” or “evil” and thus, in an exercise of personal, autonomous power, joins the opposites of good and evil. The early American monist, Ralph Waldo Emerson welcomed this spiritual option with enthusiasm. “‘If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to this or that.” The deliberate act of power which defiantly declares evil good and good evil flies in the face of the Creator’s designs and in so doing jumps into the waiting arms of the Tempter. One may well wonder if this joining of the opposites is a possible implication of the Serpent’s word, “…knowing good and evil.”

The psychoanalyst, C.G. Jung proposed a similar interpretation. Under the influence of Philemon, a familiar spirit, Jung wrote his famous “Seven Sermons to the Dead.” Using colorful imagery, Jung disavows Christianity and endorses pagan spirituality. Employing the pseudonym of Basilides, a famous second century Gnostic heretic, Jung addresses the spirits of dead Crusaders who had failed to find salvation in “Jerusalem.” He succeeds in converting them to the Gnostic god, Abraxas, who is “both good and evil,…a terrible hidden god that humans cannot perceive. Abraxas is behind the sun and night,…the creator and destroyer of the world, truth and evil, light and darkness,…the ‘hermaphrodite of the earliest beginning,’…the operation of all the gods and devils, and is ‘the world, its becoming and passing.’” Jung ends his sermon with a call to look to the god within rather than to the Christian God of the Bible. Later, he would represent this experience as a series of concentric circles within a larger circle, and for the rest of his life he “pointed to the Indian mandala (circle) as the best symbolic representation of wholeness or completeness in an individual, or as the supreme God in which all opposites are contained.” In this regard, it is appropriate to recall the definition of the mystical goal believed to be in all religions, given by Yale professor, Louis Dupré, –“a state in which all distinctions disappear.”

On the sexual plane, the homosexual androgyne, according to Jung, affirms his power by willingly assuming his physical proclivities and thus joining what God has put asunder. Indeed for Jung, spiritual androgyny symbolizes “the integration of the opposites or the state of the individuation of the autonomous individual.” Therefore, homosexuals are (though some unconsciously or only partially) true pagan monists, who have succeeded in translating spiritual theory into physical reality.

Jung himself suggested that homosexuality preserved an archetype of the androgynous original person. That is why homosexuals can propose themselves to society as “shamans.” In the monistic tradition, the same religious claim is made for homosexuality as is made for androgyny. Since both androgyny and homosexuality function religiously in traditional paganism, they are clearly related. The same emphasis is found in Karl Heinrichs Ulrichs (1825-1895), often considered the “grandfather” of the modern “gay rights” movement. Ulrichs rejected all psychological and behavioral explanations of homosexuality and adopted a psycho-spiritual one. He believed a homosexual was a man’s body inhabited by a woman’s soul (vice versa for a lesbian). Notice the “spiritual” terminology. He called homosexuality a “third sex,” that is, a true expression of androgyny.

The more theoretical explanation of the phenomenon finds popular expression in our contemporary culture. Recently a gay leader at a Pagan Spirit Gathering in 1985 made the spiritual claim: “We feel there is a power in our sexuality…[a] queer energy that most cultures consider magical. It is practically a requirement for certain kinds of medicine and magic.” Another gay pagan confirms the spiritual dynamic: “It is simply easier to blend with a nature spirit, or the spirit of a plant or an animal, if you are not concerned with a gender-specific role.” One is clearly not concerned with any of the other creational distinctions either. The separation between humans, animals and plants has been eliminated and, at that point, full-blown, monistic union ensues. “Blending” is another way of speaking of spiritual union with the All.

Eliade, in explaining the religious function of the asexual priest-shaman, true hermaphrodites, who dress and behave like women,” notes that is precisely because “they combine the two cosmological planes–earth and sky–and also from the fact that they combine in their own person the feminine element (earth) and the masculine element (sky). We here have ritual androgyny, a well-known archaic formula for the…coincidentia oppositorum.” This interpretation is confirmed via different terminology and conceptuality in the massive work on the Goddess by the Wiccan scholars, Monica Sjoo and Barbara Moor:

Creative women and men in all ages have found rigid heterosexuality in conflict with being fully alive and aware on all levels-sexual, psychic and spiritual [emphasis mine]…It is as if, on all levels of our being, we are split into one half, and forbidden the other. We are split against ourselves, and against the “self” in the other, by this moralistic opposition of natural polarities in the very depth of our souls.”

The physico-theological mechanism seems to function as follows: androgynous persons, whether homosexual or bi-sexual, are able to express within themselves both sexual roles and identities. In the sex act they engage both as male and female, equally as penetrator and penetrated, the “hard” and the “soft” -and thus taste in some form or other both physical and spiritual androgyny. As in classic monistic spirituality, they have, on the physical plane, joined the opposites, proving and experiencing that there are no distinctions. Just as the distinctions inherent in heterosexuality point to the fundamental theistic notion of the Creator/creature distinction, so androgyny in its various forms eradicates distinction and elevates the spiritual blending of all things, including the idolatrous confusion of the human with the divine. This seems to be the very same logic that brings Paul to a similar conclusion already in Romans 1:18-27.

This seems to make sense theologically and theoretically. It is confirmed by contemporary gay thinkers. “Something in our gay/lesbian being as an all-encompassing existential standpoint,” says J. Michael Clark, professor at Emory University and Georgian State University, and a gay spokesman, “…appears to heighten our spiritual capacities.” Clark claims gays share the same sentiments as radical feminist theologians whose “religious impulses are being killed by [traditional] Judeo-Christianity…” Clark seems to be saying that the problem lies not with “mean-spirited” or “hateful” Christians, failing to be true, loving Christians. For gays the problem lies rather with the whole biblical worldview and theological paradigm. For this reason, Clark turns to Native American animism for an acceptable spiritual model. As Janie Spahr, the Presbyterian lesbian activist, stated with great candor: “Maybe we’re talking about a different God.”

Specifically, for Clark, the berdache, an androgynous American Indian shaman, born as a male but as an adult, choosing to live as a female, constitutes a desirable gay spiritual model, for the berdache achieves “the reunion of the cosmic, sexual and moral polarities,” or the “joining of the opposites.” How interesting that the Berdaches were known as “sacred Balancers,” unifying the polarities to “nurture wholeness…” This powerful spirituality involves the denial of distinctions, and the conscious assumption of all one’s contradictions and perversions. It turns out that one reigns divinely supreme over creational distortions.

We surely must conclude that sexual perversion and, in particular, the elimination of sexual distinctions, is not an incidental footnote of pagan religious history, of mere passing interest, but represents one of its fundamental ideological commitments. That the pagan priesthood would be so identified, across space and time, with the blurring of sexual identity via homosexual androgyny indicates, beyond a doubt, the enormous priority paganism has given, and continues to give, to the undermining of God-ordained monogamous heterosexuality, and the enthusiastic promotion of androgyny in its varied forms.

Conclusion

When, during the Sixties, theologians triumphantly declared the “death of God,” they fostered a rejection of the theism of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, as well as an abandonment of biblical sexuality. Theologian David Miller declared in 1974:

…the announcement of the death of God was the obituary of a useless single-minded and one-dimensional norm of a civilization that has been predominantly monotheistic, not only in its religion, but also in its politics, its history, its social order, its ethics, and its psychology. When released from the tyrannical imperialism of monotheism by the death of God, man has the opportunity of discovering new dimensions hidden in the depths of reality’s history.”

In this liberating list, Miller did not mention sexuality, but it is implicitly there–in the announcement, at the funeral of the God, of the rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome. At the time, this connection was not always obvious. The “Death of God” theologians were perceived as super-rationalist liberals intent on demonstrating that twentieth century Man had “come of age,” having outgrown the need of the “God hypothesis.” It took a generation for the implications of this to dawn. Mark C. Taylor, the postmodern philosopher, sees the implications with disarming clarity: “…the death of God [is] the disappearance of self [no predetermined norms] and end of history [no meaningful events]…[it] unleashes the aberrant levity of free play…purposelessness.” He develops the implications of this new freedom: “The lawless land of erring, which is forever beyond good and evil, is the world of Dionysus, the Antichrist, who calls every wander[er] to carnival, comedy and carnality.”

During this same post-death-of-God generation, radical feminism, in an incredible show of power, made sure God would die. In 1979 Naomi Goldenberg, a leading feminist, declared, (with no apparent conscious reference to the Death of God theology, as far as I can tell): “The feminist movement in Western culture is engaged in the slow execution of Christ and Jahweh.” Carol P. Christ announced one death-dealing method to bring about the undoing of God: “…using the titles Goddess and God the Mother is probably the only way to shatter the hold of [the] idolatrous male God on the psyche.” In other words, God and sex were inextricably linked even in death. Of course, in the same way, the resurrection of the pagan gods would give new life to sexual options. Radical feminist theology was read by many unsuspecting Church pluralists as a relatively innocuous religious version of the contemporary agenda of civil rights. On the contrary, it turns out that these theologians were proponents of a deep, pagan spirituality, which had nothing to do with rationalism, and very little to do with civil rights. After Patriarchy: Feminist Transformations of the World’s Religions looks both like the “lawless land of [pansexual] erring,” and like one more element in the progress of global syncretism. The agenda is captured in the title of a recent book on theology by a Roman Catholic scholar-When God Becomes Goddess: The Transformation of the American Religion. God does not have to die: he simply had to undergo a sex change. Unfortunately, he also had to change religion, and take up abode in the pagan pantheon.

At the beginning of a new millennium, we can begin to sense that such apostasy from God and from the biblical notions of gender is pagan to the core, and has produced in one generation, in “Christian” America, a torrential flood of the same spirituality and sexuality that has always characterized occult paganism. Understanding where such radical theology has always taken a society in its sexual practice will help us to see the necessarily close association between theology and sexuality, and the manner in which the one affects the other. In the last thirty years America has abandoned theism and embraced the spirituality of Eastern paganism. These same years that have produced the most radical social engineering in America’s history–the deconstruction of normative biblical heterosexuality and the revival and pagan idealization of homosexual androgyny.

There is a spiritual-sexual agenda in our Jungian, post-theistic, postmodern, pro-choice, non-judgmental culture. As we naively crossed the bridge into the third millennium to the tune of Lennon’s “Imagine,” full of hope for a new world “order” of unity and love, respect and democracy, we have brought across that bridge the agenda of the ideal, androgynous, sexually unfettered, New Man of pagan spirituality. At the very moment when the New Age gurus declare the imminent arrival of the Age of Aquarius, the eighteenth century theosophist Baader’s prophecy seems to be appearing–the return of the original androgyne. Might we be on the verge of witnessing the construction of an eschatological Sodom and Gomorrah, as the title of a recent pro-gay book, Reclaiming Sodom, suggests? The masses are rendered insensate with a constant diet of sexual degradation, while, at the same time, reassured by the spiritual and moral liberation that spiritual paganism offers. Although only the radicals may understand and believe monistic theory in its purest form, the entire society is inevitably affected. While the elite sometimes fail, as did Julian the Apostate in the fourth century A.D., in their success, they can wreak havoc on a culture. The deconstruction of the biblical God and biblical sexuality as a philosophical and ideological program is already deeply embedded in our collective unconscious. Some powerful leaders see the future as the brave new global world of sexual and spiritual pluralism, where liberty of self-expression in these areas is the essence of human progress. One could even imagine a society of pagan religious syncretism where bi-sexuality and homosexual androgyny would be the spiritual and social ideal, the sexuality of choice for those in power, while heterosexuality would be tolerated, considered inferior, and strictly controlled-for it has happened before.

Clearly God is interested in sex, or Satan would not be so passionately committed to its deconstruction. To destroy God’s created structures, the Evil One rips from the body politic the sexual distinctions hard-wired into creation to recall the deep truth about existence-the absolute distinction between the Creator and creation. The attack on these structures succeeds in convincing many that they, in themselves, are a detestable oppression, the very cause of social and human dislocation. This is relatively easy to do because such structures are necessarily are marred by sin. The result is dramatic. As in ancient Gnosticism, the patriarchal God of Scripture is eliminated from respectable “cutting-edge” theology, and even from polite campus speech in some evangelical schools, all in the name of Christ. Such a trade-off prevents many well-meaning Christians from seeing the essential goal of the sexual revolution as the subtle destruction of a theistic worldview. In the place of sexual differentiation, we are offered monistic, egalitarian androgyny as a physical, social and spiritual ideal. Thus many, espousing gender liberation in the name of Christ and the Gospel, only, too late, discover a culture “liberated” from the God who, in Christ, both created and redeemed the world. What is often not seen in the debate on sexuality is that we are also in the presence of two “Gospels”: the one, pagan, preaches redemption as liberation from the Creator and repudiation of creation’s structures; the other, Christian, proclaims redemption as reconciliation with the Creator, and the proclamation of creation’s goodness. In a pagan world, a truncated Gospel of personal salvation will no longer do. Sexuality within the context of creation must be announced as an essential part of the Christian message of reconciliation with God and glad submission to his good will.

Firmly engaged on a wild path of sexual deconstruction and androgynous experimentation, our self-liberating culture is like a little child alone in a small boat on a big lake. As it giddily strikes out into the uncharted waters of the twenty-first century, lured by irrational hopes of human progress, and ignorant of the costly experiments of the pasts, our youth-obsessed culture is tragically adrift from its Christian roots and cut off from its life-sustaining creational moorings.

The theosophist Eliade, one of most doughty proponents of the “new humanism,” nevertheless felt obliged to give a serious warning before he died in 1986. In speaking about “ritual androgyny” as both a “source of power,” but also as a fearsome possibility of great loss, Eliade offered this sobering admonition:

Every attempt to transcend the opposites carries with it a certain danger. This is why the ideas of a coincidentia oppositorum always arouse ambivalent feelings: on the one side, man is haunted by the desire to escape from his particular situation and regain a transpersonal mode of life; on the other, he is paralyzed by the fear of losing his “identity” and “forgetting” himself.”

Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.