Private Worship
A sex organ 'makes an admirable fertility symbol, and has been worshipped as such privately from time to time, or even publicly...gives dramatic promise of productivity and protection'. Such "worship" may only become more common in late modernity, as 'in our secular culture sexuality often replaces religion as a means of pursuing the meaning of life'.
Alan Watts maintains that 'when you are in love with someone, you do indeed see them as a divine being...through a tremendous outpouring of psychic energy in total devotion and worship for this other person'. A woman may 'want someone who adores me...like he was adoring my breasts with his hands'. A man (more ambivalently) may muse on 'the white breasts he worships; adores; is scared of; detests'. For Shakespeare, 'this is the liver-vein, which makes flesh a deity, a green goose a goddess; pure, pure idolatry'.
In the further reaches of chick lit, ' the male organ...becomes a tower of strength, a tree trunk in girth, the pillar that sustains the universe...a Pillar of Hercules, sustaining heaven' - evidence perhaps that 'the phallic religious tendency is alive in the modern and the civilized...a compulsive fascination' with what Jung termed 'the phallus as the quintessence of life and fruitfulness'. Correspondingly, the Western adept may borrow, in the quest 'to create a Sacred Space...names given to the vagina in the East, including Valley of Joy, Great Jewel, Pearl, Lotus Blossom, Moist Cave, Ripe Peach, Enchanted Garden, and Full Moon'.
Read more about this topic: Sexual Ritual
Famous quotes containing the words private and/or worship:
“If private men are obliged to perform the offices of government, to protect the weak and dispense justice, then the government becomes only a hired man, or clerk, to perform menial or indifferent services.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufacturers and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)