The Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell...

From A Brief History of Drugs, by Antonio Escohotado (tr. by Kenneth A. Symington):

... shamanism [is] an institution ... having the objective of administering techniques of ecstasy, where ecstasy is understood to mean a trance that erases the barriers between sleep and wakefulness, sky and the underground, life and death. Taking some drug, or giving it to another, or to the whole tribe, the shaman builds a bridge between the ordinary and the extraordinary, which serves for magical divination as well as religious ceremonies and for therapy.

I've been thinking of the way altered states of consciousness are traditionally seen as opening a gateway to the 'other world' ( i.e. the dream world or the spirit realm, or whatever), which can then be passed through in either direction (that is, the participant can go on a journey in that other realm, or they can be possessed by what comes from it).

The erotic can be seen as an analogy to this, imho: erotic arousal as possession by Eros, and the introduction of sex into a situation as shifting things into another - altered - reality. Arousal is a physical state, but also an altered state of consciousness analogous to that experienced through drugs or other means. It's also parallel to the rush people get from adrenalin, and from crisis. Maybe it's the same thing?

In Chris Hedges' War is a Force that gives us Meaning, he talks about the way war creates a powerful sense of arousal, which isn't that far from sexual arousal. It's no surprise, he argues, that in war, violence is often sexualised and sex is often violent.

Like Hedges, Jonathan Glover (in Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century) also refers to Freud's notion that the human psyche is in a constant struggle between Eros and Thanatos - sex and death. That these two impulses are intertwined is a recurring theme in many religious traditions (very obviously in Hinduism).

While this might not be a very meaningful idea for psychology, it's a fruitful one for thinking about the role of pornography in culture. It helps us see why there are so many religious (or shamanic) rituals involving sexual arousal (farmers masturbating into fields before planting, Tantric cults, etc). And it adds some additional layers to our understanding of the Christian world's queasiness about both sexuality and intoxication (through drugs etc). If both involve an exchange with a pagan realm of spirits or magic (which Christianity tended to see as demonic), then they are extremely dangerous. More generally, the mainstream Christian tradition seems to me to involve a strong aversion to any kind of altered state of consciousness, viewing it as (at least) a loss of one's most important faculties or even (at worst) possesseion by demons. It's an element of paganism that has long been particularly repellent to many Christians - maybe because when Christianity reached Rome, it spread partly as a puritanical reaction against a perceived growing culture of decadence (though ironically, the early persecution of Christians was in part because their rituals were misunderstood as involving sexual immorality).

My suspicion is that this unease at any kind of irrational intoxication (including sexual arousal) has remained very powerful in our culture, and is part of what lies behind the modern Western prohibition of mind-altering drugs and our long history of suppressing pornography and constraining sexual practices. Of course, since the Enlightenment, we've increasingly favoured the Rational over the Irrational, which - while positive in so many ways - has shaped our views on mental health and madness, drugs, religion, sexuality and art. Maybe it's all tangled up together: Enlightenment philosophy, the Christian rejection of pagan mysticism, post-Reformation puritanism, modern morality, the medicalisation of how we see the mind and body, etc...

However, Christianity (just like Judaism and Islam) has always included a powerful mystical tradition that coexists with that more puritan thread. Possession by the Holy Spirit, the trances experienced by many saints and nuns, the miracles and prophecies common in both the Catholic tradition and modern pentecostalist movements: all this is not that far removed from a shaman taking spirit journeys on Ayahuasca in the Amazon, or sending his patients on a healing drug-induced trip. Or, for that matter, Tantric rituals involving sexual arousal.

One key to all this is the word ecstasy, which is used to describe the spiritual experience of the divine (just as Escohotado uses it in the quote at the beginning of this post); a state of overwhelming sexual pleasure; and the illegal drug MDMA.*

So: might it be useful to think of pornography as a kind of pagan ritual? As a summoning of Eros, opening a door to that other realm; as a sacrificial abandonment of the self that opens the gates of Heaven and Hell, unleashing a powerful, elemental, divine spirit...

But beware; as any old Shaman - not to mention Freud - could tell you, elemental spirits are not always benign.

Anyway: at this stage, I'm just throwing ideas around, and gathering material. We'll see where it all takes us...

*In fact, (according to the documentary Ecstasy Rising), MDMA gained its street name from a religious studies student who subsequently helped to promote its use as a recreational drug; he chose the name initially as a reference to spiritual ecstasy.