America has rediscovered the occult. As if possessed, we rummage through the shelves of our psychic lost-and-found department looking for parcels of wisdom that we mislaid a few centuries back. Bookstores that cater to the occult have sprung up on corners that were once the sole province of porn shops--and the juxtaposition is no coincidence. As the haunting images on these pages eloquently attest, the mystical and the sexual have been interwoven since time immemorial. They have also shared the allure of the outlawed--but never more fashionably than today. From Rosemary's Baby to The Devil in Miss Jones, scriptwriters have exploited the age-old alliance of the erotic and the occult. People are still lining up around the block to see The Exorcist.
Time magazine eventually realized what was going on and devoted a cover story to the return of Satan, claiming that the occult was a substitute religion for the masses. The article even tried to give Playboy credit: It quotes Jesuit theologian John Navone as saying that the modern Devil is "more often a type of magician playmate, the product of a Playboy culture rather than the malign personal being found in the Scripture. These cults tend to use the Devil for a type of arcane amusement."
The occult, of course, is far more than a source of arcane amusement--and has been so for a lot longer than Playboy's been around, or for that matter the Devil, who is a fairly recent invention of the church. Most of what we label occult stems from early religions whose concerns were life and death, not good and evil; mortality was the issue, not morality. They taught that our bodies were temples in which we celebrated the creative forces of the universe. Sex became the language of the rituals used by the fertility and Earth Mother cults; the erotic was seen as a sacrament, a reaffirmation of man's animal nature.
During the Middle Ages, recoiling from this sort of Dionysian abandonment to the pleasures of the flesh, the priesthood of the Christian church took up arms against its atavistic rivals and proceeded to take the R out of celebrate. They evolved a spirituality based on denial, pain, guilt and suffering; the body and all its functions were considered impure; the concept of shame was invented and applied to that which had been held most sacred--the union of male and female. Satan was made the political fall guy; theologians defined, then decried his dark purposes and persecuted those who followed them--and some who didn't. When Christianity associated sex with sin and the sinister, a significant aspect of human experience was forced underground.
If an open-minded study of the occult can take us beyond the caricature of evil painted by the Devil's detractors--or his advocates--perhaps it can also help us bring our own sexuality out of the darkness and back into the light, where it all began.
