In the ancient mysteric praxis the aspirant to the deification, to the total union with the Numen, had to pass through numerous trials and experiences to win himself, in order to receive at the end the baptism, to experience the death and the resurrection, to descend to Inferno and to be transfigured in the Sun.

 

The neophyte or miste was submitted to a particular sexual experience, connected with the esotericism of the sexes, with the laws of the polarities and with the awakening of the so-called "Sacred Fire". A conception prevailed that today still has its counterpart in Tantric Yoga, the techniques of which are indisputably true and effective.

 

In fact, in Hindu and Tibetan Tantrism, old and contemporary, we find the analogous experience, of Eleusis, Samothrace, Egypt of old: experiences in which the sexual sphere of who was initiated to the Mysteries (the miste) was involved. A priestess, due to her merits, received the divine presence of the God according to its feminine metaphysical aspect (in the Egyptian mysteries it was the Goddess Isis).

 

This deified Woman, installed in the Temple, received in her spiritual intimacy, affective and erotic, the ascetic who had overcome the trials. If the misto was a woman then she could unite herself intimately with the Numen (Osiris in the Egyptian Mysteries) physically represented by an Adept of the Temple, who, spiritually and sexually, received the neophyte, the initiant, so that she became a single spirit, a single soul and a single eros with him, projected in the Numen. This experience was obtained with special sexual techniques, which in Tantric Yoga take the names of maithuna and Kundaliniyoga, and in the Hermetic-Alchemistic Tradition are indicated by the term of "operation of the two
vases".

The mysteric sexuality of ancient Greece, of Egypt, of India, or China and Japan, underwent,
without changing the substance of the things, remarkable innovations after the Advent and the revelation of the Messiah Jesus. We mean to say that Christ laid stress on the sexual problem, confirming the sacredness of the sexual act solely for the married.

 

He indicated the way of chastity to unmarried men and women, and that of the ascesis in two for whom, loving each other, got married. In the wisely-celebrated marriage, choosing a
partner of kindred mentality, that is archeosophical, it is possible to put into practice that which in the ancient Mysteries was celebrated in a certain way for lack of that divine revelation which arrived later and was taught to the people of all the earth by the living voice of Christ.

The sexuality, the eros, the genetic instinct must be sublimated, purified to become instead of instruments of bestial slavery, instruments of freedom and joy. One arrives to this with an
appropriate regime, which we have treated exhaustively in the 12th Booklet: The Meditation on the Sexual Sphere and the Ascesis.

 

Tommaso Palamidessi

excerpt from "SEXUALITY AND ITS ESOTERIC PROBLEMS IN THE MYSTERIC REPRESENTATION OF ELEUSIS, ORPHISM, SAMOTHRACE, EGYPT, INDIA AND IN OCCULT CHRISTIANITY"

from the 4th Booklet