Gods of Sex: Pagan Spirituality Lands on Western Shores

Dr. Peter Jones, truthxchange, June 9, 2022

This irony is a warning for all Christians who are quite capable of similar sinful actions and who are constantly reminded that sinners in the hands of an angry God, including androgynous practitioners, can also know his forgiving grace if they turn to Jesus, God’s Son, confess their sin, and own him as their only atoning sacrifice.

The Gods of Sex
Why is the LGBTQ agenda now proudly affirmed as a valuable lifestyle choice? Why must kindergarten children be taught how gays think and act? Why does Disney risk losing the parents of their young customers by promoting the LGBT agenda in its movies? Why are there huge annual pride parades in so many large cities? Why are Drag Queens reading to children in our public libraries? Why is Baylor University (among other Christian colleges) happy to make its mark on Christian higher education by chartering Prism to create an LGBT student organization on campus?

In order to answer these questions, please allow me to go back a little in my own experience to show you the roots of the fruits we see so richly exhibited on the branches of paganism through which we walk today.

Pagan Spirituality Lands on Western Shores 

Homosexuality is but one option in what might be called “androgyny.” Embedded in the ever-thickening LGBTQ+ alphabet soup is a wide variety of sexual options, all of which erase the male/female distinction: homosexuality, bi-sexuality, transgenderism, a-genderism, drag, and cross-dressing, to name but a few. 

The open practice (one might say worship) of androgyny is a relatively recent development. I came to the States as a young European believer in 1964. I found a culture peppered with thriving Christian universities, seminaries, publishing houses, and television and radio stations. Churches were on every corner, pressing the truth of the Christian faith on the culture. Androgyny was nothing but an obscure word used by scholars of the Greek myths. There was no televised Ru Paul Drag Race; no eight-year-olds being encouraged to choose their own gender.^[1] But shortly after I arrived, this began to change, as the Cultural Revolution welcomed Eastern spirituality. 

Bob Dylan’s astute 1963 song caught the “eschatological” character of the cultural change— The Times They Are A’Changin:

Come mothers and fathersThroughout the landAnd don’t criticizeWhat you can’t understandYour sons and your daughtersAre beyond your commandYour old road isRapidly agin’Please get out of the new oneIf you can’t lend your handFor the times they are a-changin’.

“Changin’” in what way? By the late Sixties, I was a young theological student studying “Death of God” theology. I, my fellow students, and even our professor concluded that the times were at a high point of atheistic secularism. Like Nietzsche, the atheists were killing God. However, in 1974, David Miller, one scholar in the Death of God movement, wrote a book called The New Polytheism, in which he triumphantly announced that the death of God would stimulate the “rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.”^[2] In the same vein, a generation later, Jean Houston (spiritual counselor who supposedly brought up the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt for Hilary Clinton in the White House) declared: “Now open your eyes and look at all the gods in hiding.”^[3] In other words, the so-called “Death of God” was the death of the God of the Bible but also the demise of secularism. It was the beginning of the postsecular era and the rebirth in the modern world of the old pagan notions of the divinity of Nature and of the self. It hailed the New Age epoch where people learned to say: “I am spiritual but not religious.”

What is the essence of New Age spirituality? It is historic paganism. Two thousand years ago the Apostle Paul accurately described the only two religious options we have: “worship of creation” or “worship of the Creator” (Romans 1:25). This distinction is known in theology as the Creator/creature distinction. I have come to use the terms Oneism and Twoism to describe these options. Oneism is the worship of all things created and relies on belief that there are no ultimate distinctions. Twoism holds that distinctions are knitted into our existence, with the fundamental distinction being that between the creation and the Creator. From this “otherness” flow all the distinctions embedded in the creation. 

Eastern Oneism’s popularity in the West has caused many Westerners raised on biblical Twoism to take up yoga, trust the enneagram, walk the labyrinth, practice mindfulness mediation or seek the philosophical meaning of life in the teachings and practices of Eastern Buddhism and Hinduism. Multiculturalism seeks to bring all ideas together but, alas, Oneism and Twoism are fundamentally opposed. It is this irreducible conflict that causes the major divisions of contemporary culture.

Pagan Cosmology
Pagan Spirituality 
In the early stages of our culture’s newfound curiosity about Eastern religions, people were seeking to come to terms with their personal sense of meaning, but before long there came a yearning for a much fuller expression of this individualistic spirituality. The Jungian and Gnostic scholar, June Singer, made a programmatic statement that others have since put into practice: “What lies in store as we move towards the longed-for conjunction of the opposites [the joining of the opposites]?…Can the human psyche realize its own creative potential through building its own cosmology and supplying it with its own gods?” [emphasis mine].^[4] Singer called for a coherent, all-encompassing, attractive and religiously pagan account of the nature of existence, which she saw as essentially one, based on androgynous sexuality. She realized that a cosmology or worldview would not function without an essential place for sexuality. She saw androgyny as a means of erasing distinctions and accomplishing “our own new alchemical opus.” She saw androgynous sexuality as being a “witness” to “primordial cosmic unity.”^[5] Singer is a true Jungian, conscious of promoting the important sexual element in the coming “new humanism” that Carl Jung envisaged: “The androgyne [the human being aware of being both male and female] participates consciously in the evolutionary process, redesigning the individual…society and…the planet.”^[6] She recognizes that a fundamental element in this “new sexuality” (in its affirmation of Monism [Oneism] as both a sexual act and a state of self-consciousness) is a radical rejection of the biblical God and the creational cosmology of the Western Christian past.^[7]

Pagan Politics
There is no reason to think that the androgynous LGBTQ+ ideology, so dear to Singer and Jung, will subside in its cultural influence, for while Singer and Jung focused on spirituality and psychology, their view of a developed pagan cosmology is reaching full expression in the political forms proposed by Wokism and neo-Marxism. A full-orbed cosmology always affects our politics.

Among the most influential members of the Frankfurt School in America was Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979). The neo-Marxist Marcuse realized the revolutionary powers of sexual liberation, particularly in the early post-Stonewall gay movement and the student revolution of the 1960s. Many adopted Marcuse’s theories of sexual politics as the basis for the counter-culture’s radical transformation of values. His key book, Eros and Civilization (1955) laid the groundwork for civil disobedience, the practice of sexual license on the basis of the life or death struggle against “repression” by the culture of Western Christianity. Marcuse called for “polymorphous sexuality” and the activation of “repressed or arrested organic, biological needs,”^[8] what he called “Life Instincts.”^[9] From his chair at the University of California San Diego, Marcuse taught, as earlier Marxists had done, that the chief adversary of humanity was the “patriarchal family.”^[10] His book, One-Dimensional Man (1964), was adopted by the early “gay” leaders as a text for homosexual liberation. In other words, the undermining of society would be produced by the liberation of uninhibited sexual desire and the destruction of the nuclear family. At the very center of neo-Marxism is androgynous sexuality. So the culture is undermined both by spirituality and politics.

The current rejection of gender distinctions is an essential element of a “post-capitalist” apocalyptic transformation of all of human society, and a utopian remaking of human “identity” that eliminates all binary distinctions and normalizes all sexual expressions, based on a Marxist notion of egalitarian sameness. 

The French homosexual, Michel Foucault, one of the originators of postmodernism, declares that power permeates all spheres of life and expresses itself in pairs of opposites: old-young, man-woman, hetero-homo, and dominant-subordinate. This is often described as the Western obsession with binarity (pairs of opposites), which was “invented” by Western philosophy, created by whites. The ultimate binary of God and creation is totally rejected as a white religion and must be deconstructed and relegated to the dustbin of history. CRT wokeness identifies “whiteness” as a systemic racist evil.

The Sixties chant: “Hey Ho, what d’ya know: Western Civ has got to go” is now given clear meaning. The US Constitution is meaningful only in the light of “Western Civ.” So if that goes, the Constitution must also “go.” In the name of woke “justice,” it will be shorn of white Christian privileges and replaced in the name of human freedom by humanistic pagan justice, which will legalize “day of birth” abortion, assisted suicide, same-sex and polyamorous marriage—and structures we can hardly imagine. Often the rallying cry is to bring “white privilege” to an end.^[11] While genuine racism of all kinds must be rejected, the appeal is immediately commandeered by a religious agenda intent on destroying the religion and morality of the “white founders” of America—Christianity. Androgynous sexuality will write the rules for this coming woke “civilization.” We should not be surprised. 

Pagan Sexuality-The Timeless Religious Significance of Androgyny^[12]
Paganism’s recent invasion of Western culture (in both spirituality and politics) has raised androgynous sexuality as an ideal. This result is not without reason. Throughout time and across space, the pagan world has consistently honored as spiritual leader the emasculated, androgynous priest. In his vast history research, Mircea Eliade, a respected expert in comparative religions, documents that androgyny is a religious universal or archetype that appears virtually everywhere and at all times in the world’s religions. 

In nineteenth-century BC Mesopotamia, androgynous priests were believed to have demonic ability to transgress boundaries. The pagan religions of ancient Canaan maintain a similar connection between spirituality and sexuality. Various forms of “religious” androgyny can be found in the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Christian era. The “Great Mother” (under the names of Atargatis, Artemis^[13] or Cybele) had androgynous priests called Galli, who castrated themselves as a permanent act of devotion before the female divinity. 

In a much later period, the same phenomenon appears in pre-Columbian America. In American Indian religious practice homosexual transvestite males (berdaches) have always functioned as shamans. Amongst the Navajo, the nadle, a feminized male, served as reconciler of conflict. Among the Zuñi, Awonawilona (“he-she”) is a powerful, positive mythological figure.^[14] Similar figures are to be found in African and Australian Aboriginal cultic practice.^[15] Today people speak of “two-spirit beings” who join the sexes and unify all distinctions. 

Mircea Eliade explains the spiritual meaning of androgyny as “a symbolic restoration of Chaos, of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the Creation.”^[16] The androgynous being thus sums up the very goal of the mystical, monistic quest, whether ancient or modern: 

in mystical love and at death one completely integrates the spirit world: all contraries are collapsed. The distinctions between the sexes are erased: the two merge into an androgynous whole. In short, at the center one knows oneself, is known, and knows the nature of reality. ^[17]

Or again, according to Eliade, androgyny in many traditional religions functions as “an archaic and universal formula for the expression of wholeness, the co-existence of the contraries, or coincidentia oppositorum . . . symboliz[ing] . . . perfection . . . [and] ultimate being.”^[18]

The androgyne is thus the physical symbol of the pagan spiritual goal, which is the merging of two seemingly distinct entities, the self and God, and a mystical return to the state of godhead prior to creation. The joining of the opposites is the dissolution of creational distinctions and thus the destruction of creation’s hold upon human identity. Such joining brings a “liberating” spiritual sense that the real self, like God, is “uncreated.”

In Romans 1:18–27, with a totally different goal in mind, the Apostle Paul comes to a similar description of sexuality in relation to spirituality, tying homosexuality to idolatry. In one sense, contemporary gay thinkers would agree that Paul’s argument makes sense theologically and theoretically. “Something in our gay/lesbian being as an all-encompassing existential standpoint,” says J. Michael Clark, professor at Emory University and Georgia State University, and a gay spokesman says that homosexuality, “appears to heighten our spiritual capacities.”^[19] Clark realizes that his problem with Christianity is not “mean-spirited” or “hateful” Christians who fail to be true and loving. The problem lies with the whole biblical worldview and theological paradigm. For this reason, Clark turns to Native American animism for a spiritual model he can accept. A movie about the life of Janie Spahr, a Presbyterian lesbian activist, is entitled: “Maybe We’re Talking about a Different God.” 

Essential to biblical thinking is the divinely defined reality of holiness. The Bible reveals that there are special holy places for things—things that are in essence distinct from one another and must be kept apart but can be blended in good and holy ways, like created maleness and femaleness. Sex is holy. Therefore, as the Scriptures say: Strive for …holiness without which no one will see the Lord (Heb 12:14).

In days to come Christians will be faced with a major dilemma. The church must either announce the holiness of sex publicly through clear Gospel preaching about the person of God, while showing love to both God and the neighbor (the essence of Twoism); or it must remain silent under the culture’s determination to eliminate all distinctions and to call gospel preaching hate speech (the essence of Oneism). Christians speak the truth about God not for the sake of “Christian nationalism” but for people to meet the love of God both in the person of God as their Creator and Redeemer. Benjamin Wiker, a catholic Professor of Political Science, has written a word of warning to the Church (in his case the Catholic Church) in his article From a Moral-Historical Perspective, This Crisis is Worse Than You Realize. He sees the massive abuse of children by homosexual priests as a “horrible irony” since they have “become” willing agents of repaganization, undoing 2,000 years of Church History.”^[20] Our study of pagan cults throughout history only confirms this ironic state of affairs. Somehow we need to make this known as we also make known the love of God for all sinners.

Benjamin Wiker, Professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow of the Veritas Center at Franciscan University, brings a very moving warning to the Church:  

The only reason that we have accepted homosexuality in culture and in law is the increasing de-Christianization of the culture in the West…This is a massive crisis in and for the Roman Church because a deeply-embedded worldwide homosexual network among our priests, bishops, and cardinals…[has produced] the decades of abuse of 1000 child victims by 300 priests [just] in the Pennsylvania diocese)…That’s a rather horrible irony…these priests, bishops, and cardinals at the very heart of the Catholic Church are acting as willing agents of repaganization, undoing 2,000 years of Church History. 

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/drag-kids-are-slaying-runway-one-fierce-look-time-n918211.
[2] Miller, The New Polytheism, vii-x.
[3] Jean Houston, A Passion for the Possible: A Guide to Realizing Your True Potential (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 20, cited in James Herrick, The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition (InterVarsity Press, 2003), 177.
[4] June Singer, Androgyny: Towards a new theory of sexuality (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1977), 124.
[5] Singer, Androgyny, 207, 20, 22.
[6] Singer, Androgyny, 333.
[7] The more overt pronouncements about homosexuality appeared in lectures by Jungian followers and contemporaries, who apply his theories to bi-sexuality and homosexuality (e.g.Beatrice Hinkle, “Arbitrary Use of the Terms Masculine and Feminine” and Constance Long, “Sex as a Basis of Character,” a plea for a positive affirmation of homosexual love. Jung’s followers, like June Singer and Toby Johnson develop his thinking to include the full justification of homosexuality.
[8] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955, 1966), xiii-xv.
[9] Marcuse, Eros, xix.[10]https://www.nas.org/articles/modern_vs._western_thought_cultural_marxism_and_gender_feminism[11] John Biver, “Immigration, Economic Inequality, And ‘White Privilege’ Collide,” BarbWire (18 May, 2014)
[12] The following text is a very shortened version of part of a scholarly article the author published twenty-one years ago but is still of contemporaneous value: Peter Jones, “Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal,” JETS 43/3 9 (September, 2000), 443–69.
[13]According to Livy, Natural History 35:132, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was controlled by castrated male priests called Megabizes—see “Artemis,” ISBE (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982–87) 1:306–8.
[14] Mircea Eliade, “Androgynes,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, 277.
[15] See Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980) 285–89. See also Robert M. Baum, “The Traditional Religions of the Americas and Africa,” 19–32. Though the data for Africa is less abundant, Baum looked at fifty different African societies.
[16] Eliade, “Androgynes,” 277. This understanding is reproduced on a popular level, in the contemporary vision of a new age of “Aquarian” spirituality, which includes the transformation of male/female distinctions into unitive androgyny. Shirley Mac-Laine’s “higher self” is androgynous. MacLaine wonders aloud if “the point of life itself” is to “balance both the masculine and feminine in ourselves. . . . Then we will have spiritualized the material and materialized the spiritual” to express ourselves “for what we truly are—androgynous, a perfect balance.” Barbara Marx Hubbard, a leading New Age mystic, assures her readers that in the coming “planetary awakening . . . you will be androgynous.” See Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Revelation: A Message of Hope for the New Millennium (Novato, CA: Nataraj, 1995) 165.[17] Ibid., 154.
[18] Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (New York: Harper and Row, 1975) 174–175, and Patterns of Comparative Religion (New York: New American Library, 1974) 420–21.
[19] Clark, “Gay spirituality,” 337.
[20] http://www.ncregister.com/blog/benjamin-wiker/from-a-moral-historical-perspective-this-crisis-is-worse-than-you-realize.