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:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Freedom of speech is of no use to a man who has nothing to say and freedom of worship is of no use to a man who has lost his God.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)