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:
“My gentleman gives the law where he is; he will outpray saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good company for pirates, and good with academicians; so that it is useless to fortify yourself against him; he has the private entrance to all minds, and I could as easily exclude myself, as him.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcæ, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)