Introduction

Over the course of one week, each scholar presented his or her paper in a roughly historical order that stretched from the ancient world to the medieval and then up to the present. This chronological sequence was not accidental either, but was designed in order to test one of co-convener Wouter Hannegraff's hypotheses about the nature of western esotericism. Hannegraff has suggested that there may be an incarnational trajectory in the history of esoteric spirituality, by which he means that esoteric thought and practice have become increasingly oriented toward embodiment and the life of the flesh as time has passed. In particular, the dualisms that were so prominent in the spirituality of the ancient world—those between heaven and earth, spirit and matter, and mind and body—seem to have yielded over time to the more integral, embodied, and even earthy spiritualities of more recent years. So, what better register could there be to assess Hannegraff's proposal than the evolving attitude displayed by esoteric practitioners towards sex?

Conference Participants

The other participants included:

• Allison P. Coudert, Paul and Marie Castelfranco Chair in Religious Studies at the University of California at Davis and author of Leibniz and the Kabbalah and The Impact of the Kabbalah in the 17^th Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont.
• April D. DeConick, Associate Professor of Religion Illinois Wesleyan University, an expert in Valentinain Gnosticism, and authoress of Voices of the Mystics: Early Christian Discourse in the Gospels of John, Thomas and Other Ancient Christian Literature.
• Antoine Faivre, professor emeritus of History of western esoteric currents in modern and contemporary at the Sorbonne and the author of the classic, Access to Western Esotericism.
• Claire Fanger, an independent scholar and medievalist with a special interest in the history of magic.
• Cathy Gutierrez, Assistant Professor of Religion at Sweet Briar College, an expert in Spiritualism, Freemasonry, and the Free Love movement in nineteenth-century America and the editor of The Occult in Nineteenth-Century America.
• Hans Thomas Hakl, doctor of jurisprudence, private scholar with an interest in modern magical groups and personalities in Germany and Italy, and editor of the German magazine "Gnostika.".
• Daniel M. Levine ,a graduate student in Religious Studies at Rice University whose research interests include Tantra, western esotericism, and western erotic and sexual magic.
• Pierre Lory, who holds the chair of Islamic Mysticism at the Sorbonne in Paris (the position formerly held by Henri Corbin).
• Michael Murphy, Esalen co-founder, a mystic, novelist, independent scholar and one of the fathers of the human potential movement.
• Marco Pasi, assistant professor of History of Hermetic philosophy and related currents from the Enlightenment to the present at the University of Amsterdam and author of Aleister Crowley e la tentazione della politica.
• Lawrence M. Principe, a leading expert in early modern alchemy, and professor of the History of Science and Technology and of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest.
• Jacob Sherman, of the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, a doctoral candidate and adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he teaches on the history of Western thought, Romanticism and the Christian contemplative tradition.
• Hugh B. Urban, Associate Professor of religious studies and comparative cultural studies at Ohio State University, and expert on Tantra and author of four books including The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy and power in Colonial Bengal and Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism.
• Arthur Versluis (Michigan State University), one of the major American voices in the study of western esotericism, and the author/editor of numerous books and articles including Restoring Paradise: Esoteric Transmission through Literature and Art, The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance, and Wisdom's Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition.
• Elliot R. Wolfson, the Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and the author of many publications in the history of Jewish mysticism, including the award winning Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination.

The facilitators guided this august group of esoteric scholars through a series of daily presentations in the Big House, each of which was followed by an opportunity to discuss, challenge, and explore the most provocative ideas. The presentations were based on papers that each participant had shared electronically with the others prior to the conference. This allowed the gathering to move quickly into serious and fruitful discussion not only of the papers directly but also of the larger issues raised by the various presentations (for example, the issue of gender roles and sexuality). Both the historical ambiance of Esalen and its vibrant community seemed present throughout the week, acting as a silent but powerful part of the conversations that took place. The Esalen land provided both a context and container for the explorations of sexuality, gender, and esoteric spirituality.

Conference Presentations

Second, this kind of historical research not only fills an important void in our culture's spiritual self-understanding, but is also a way to explore in critical detail crucial issues relating to gender, class, colonialism, and imperialism. By considering practices seemingly far removed from our current lives, scholars can often discern patterns that threaten to remain hidden and unconscious in our own social practices of today. Once discerned historically, such insights can then cast light on present cultural predicaments.

Third, heavily academic conferences like this one are especially appropriate for the CTR to pursue. With the help of a CTR conference at Esalen in 2003, Jeff Kripal and a number of other scholars have brought to the academy's attention the crucial role that Esalen played in the emergence of 20^th century spirituality and culture. Kripal's forthcoming book on Esalen, The Enlightenment of the Body, should further that effort, particularly by helping scholars of esotericism and religion to better understand Esalen's role within the larger context of American and global spirituality. Today, Esalen CTR's attempt to build stronger ties with the academy by sponsoring conferences such as this can only help the process of recognizing and understanding Esalen's unique historical role.

April DeConick began the sessions with her talk "The Passion of the Psyche: Marriage and Gnostic Spirituality in Early Valentinian Traditions." Founded by Valentinus in the second century, the Valentinians were perhaps the most influential of the Gnostic Christian sects. They were a sacramental tradition that considered the performance of rituals not only a human act, but also an act through which the divine made itself present. More than ritual, sacramental celebrations were understood as mysteries. The most notorious Valentian ritual was known as the Bridal Chamber. In addition to the more familiar sacraments of baptism or Eucharist or anointing, the Bridal Chamber was the most irregular and tantalizing of sacraments in the Valentinian community. Because our sources are scarce and opinionated, it has been hard for scholars to reconstruct what this sacrament really was beyond saying that it had somehow to do with the union of male and female in some sort of ritualized intercourse. For centuries, scholars have read the Valentinian Gnostics as licentious libertines, on the one hand, and prudish celibates, on the other, but the Bridal Chamber mystery has rarely been approached within its context. DeConick argued that, nevertheless, careful scholarship can uncover a nuanced and coherent picture.

DeConick believes that the sacrament of the Bridal Chamber (i.e., the Valentinian practice of ritual sexual union) only makes sense within the context of Valentinian anthropology and theories of salvation. The Valentinians believed that every human soul contained two seeds. First, every soul has a hylic (material) seed, made from the same recalcitrant substance as the devil, that tends to draw our souls downward. Second, every human has within her, as her True Self, either a psychic (soul) seed or a pneumatic (spiritual) seed. The pneumatic seed is more perfect than the psychic seed. It is more subtle in nature and is found in prophets, righteous people, and genuine gnostics. Depending on which seed is dominant in an individual, that person can either be characterized as hylic, psychic, or pneumatic. The psychic and pneumatic seeds are the germs of the spirit that the Savior came to awaken and quicken to life. Those born of the psychic seed are less able to grasp the Christian mysteries than those born with the pneumatic seed—the psychics are the ordinary or exoteric Christians, the pneumatics however, being capable of greater insight, are esotericists. If our spiritual growth is determined by the kind of seeds out of which we are made, it becomes quite important to ask whether or not one can produce children of higher pedigree. How does one ensure that his or her child is a pneumatic? This is where the practice of the Bridal Chamber comes in.

The Valentinians believed that intentional coupling and the exercise of the directed imagination during coitus allowed for the formation of a pneumatic embryo. During sexual union, the man was to set his attention wholly on the divine Sophia and the woman on the man, and by doing so the embryo would be imprinted with a pneumatic seed thus guaranteeing the new child's spiritual pedigree. This act of directed imagination during sex was the sacrament of the Bridal Chamber. For the Valentinians, only pneumatics can engage in this practice, which makes procreation an act of the will not of eros. Other Christians, the psychics, must instead practice continence, because their coupling is based on the movements of desire (eros) and threatens to populate the world with increasingly fallen souls.

I have spent some time on DeConick's presentation because it introduces a number of themes that recurred throughout the conference. This notion of psychic imprinting, as Larry Principe pointed out, was an ancient commonplace that can be found in Galen and was believed (at least by some) even into the early nineteenth century. If one holds the belief that the state of the mind during sex changes the psychological and even physical form of any child thereby conceived, it is easy to see how this drastically alters attitudes towards sexuality and attaches an ineluctable moral obligation to the act. Sex has to be pure because it affects the child. Moreover, the imprinting-hypothesis leads to another theme that appeared again throughout presentations later in the conference: the idea of sex as an act of the will, sex as a magical act, sex as a form of power, rather than sex as motivated by eros or as a celebration of relationship. Esoteric traditions, often influenced by the imprinting hypothesis and an interest in magic, repeatedly take an instrumental view of sex, seeing it as a means and not as an end.

For a break from these fascinating but (to contemporary ears) somewhat dour conclusions, Pierre Lory took us on a tour of the possibility within Islamic societies of marrying a genii, that is, sex with the jinn. For traditional Muslim societies, this issue is not quite as hard to swallow as it is for westerners, to say nothing of post-Enlightenment westerners. The Koran is everywhere clear about the existence of angels, demons, and another spiritual world, all of which suffuse the physical. Koranic revelation sees life on earth as pervaded by spiritual energies or baraka and, therefore, it follows that an esoteric path is available to anyone (although there exist prohibitions against dabbling in that which is not useful to salvation).

The jinn are part of the architecture of this esoteric option within Islam. Their name is derived, like the word esoteric itself, from a root meaning 'hidden' or 'cloaked by the night.' The jinn are moral agents themselves; some of their population are good, and some are evil (these are the 'satans'). The jinn even follow different religions; there are Jewish, Muslim, and Christian jinn, perhaps even Buddhists and Hindu jinn, and so on.

The jinn are connected with the boundaries of the world; they are 'in-between' creatures, liminal beings. In a way somewhat akin to the faerie tradition in the west, the jinn ought not to be thought of as spiritual beings. They do not dwell in the imaginal world like the angels of light; rather, they inhabit the boundaries on the nether side of this world. They are not ontologically higher beings. We cannot see them simply because our eyes are not conditioned for such vision. Haunting the boundaries of this very physical world, the jinn are associated with very earthy behavioral proscriptions, such as what to eat or what places to avoid. Transgressing boundaries therefore, is at least potentially to have commerce with the jinn. This transgressive presence of jinn is the first way they get involved in sex. It is said that if a man fails to pronounce "in the name of God" prior to making love, he opens the door to bad jinn (the satans) becoming involved in the act. Such involvement is held to be the cause of "disturbed" (read 'effeminate' or homosexual) children. The jinn may also be the cause of possession, a state most often brought about by 'unhealthy' bodily love, as for example, when unrequited love produces frustration, or when menstruation is irregular.

Is there a non-transgressive way of being with the jinn? Lory pointed to the way that doctors of Islamic law have, over centuries, debated whether or not it is possible to enter into a legal marriage with jinn. Regardless of their legality, such marriages do happen. Men may even marry a jinniyya princess, though in order to do so he must forswear sexual relations with other humans (except perhaps his wife if he is already married, though even then he must alternate nights, one with his wife, the other with the jinniyya). It almost goes without saying that the consequences for breaking such an arrangement are severe.

Lory recounted a case study that is worth repeating. In northern Morocco, several important saints are venerated and asked for healing, like Sîdî 'Ali ben Hamdûsh or Sîdî Ahmad Dghûghî. It is believed that these saints are able to diffuse their supernatural power (baraka) among people who approach them. The point is that these saints are 'coupled' with a female demon (as their wife, or sometimes daughter). These she-demons actually communicate something of the saint's holiness to him, and are the proximate source of his baraka. Often one gets the impression they possess equal or even higher power than the saints. The most famous of those jinniyyas is called 'Aïsha Qandîsha, or better Lalla (Lady) 'Aïsha. She is described as very powerful, fierce, never laughing. She may harm people, and become very dangerous. What is important here, is that Lady 'Aïsha displays the double attitude of fascination and fear before feminine power and thus shows something of the role that the jinn as transgressive beings can play in society. Lalla 'Aïsha (in her many manifestations) seems to be a hard, severe mother, and at the same time she is the most attractive female figure one can imagine. Lalla 'Aïsha is particularly dangerous because she seduces men on a tremendous way. An isolated man may see her as a beautiful young lady; she proposes intercourse, asking marriage with him. When they have had intercourse, the man is prisoner of his own promise, with the contract passed with her. If he refuses to fulfil it, he gets ill and may die. Not only do men marry 'Aïsha, but many women seek private 'contracts' with her, because she is said to be very powerful. They ask for healing, children, money, or for an attack against a rival. The women's 'Aïsha cult is often a first means of liberation, allowing a transgression of traditional gender roles and the accumulation of some power within a patriarchal society. Perhaps the most telling example of this is the emergence of new images of Lalla 'Aïsha in the present that picture her in jeans or trousers and high heels.

Lory concluded with three suggestions for why we should care about and study the jinn: first, jinn allow language about the passions and the transgressive that might otherwise have no outlet within traditional Muslim societies. Second, in this society averse to images, jinn allow the unseen to nevertheless be seen. Third, and finally, said Lory, as liminal creatures, jinn may offer us a clue to what transgression itself is all about.

Leaping over a number of centuries, the next presentation by Claire Fanger looked at the role of eros within medieval magical traditions. Delving into a fascinating textual labyrinth, Fanger considered the relation between erotic tropes within medieval Christian spirituality and similar tropes within medieval magic. In the Christianity of the middle ages, sacralized eros (directed at Christ and the Virgin) generally makes its appearance in exegeses of the Song of Songs and in Marian liturgies that themselves drew heavily upon the Song. At this very time and in this same culture, we also find the phenomenon of "dirty magic", a practice designed to constrain the will and libido of a desired sexual partner. Spellcasting within dirty magic regularly employs words of power taken from the biblical texts. Fanger asked what sort of relationship might obtain between the exegetical interpretation of biblical words and the instrumental uses of biblical words (in magical and liturgical contexts).

In exploring this, Fanger noted first that the Song itself is hardly ever employed in dirty magic. There is something surprising about this absence: the locus of erotic spirituality within medieval Christianity vanishes when we look at practices of dirty magic. Other biblical texts are regularly used in such magic—Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sara, even John the Beloved and the Virgin Mary—but the most erotic book within the canon is unused. As Hugh Urban pointed out, this is probably because of a structural inversion; magical practices follow the logic of transgression; they invert the established order in order to attain influence. To use an erotic text within an erotic spell would hardly accomplish this inversion and would therefore be considered ineffective.

Although the words of the Song of Songs are never used instrumentally in erotic magic, they are used in non-erotic spells. A chief examplar of this is the early 14^th visionary writer John of Morigny. John of Morigny created prayers and incantations designed to aid in the acquisition of the liberal arts. In these prayers and spells, the Song of Songs occurs repeatedly. Why can the Song be used in John's magic, but not in erotic magic? The conspicuous absence of the Song in medieval erotic magic suggests, as Urban said, the logic of inversion. The literal sexuality of the Song of Songs is used by medieval mystics in their allegorical ascent to the divine, while the biblical language of spirituality is used allegorically in dirty magic in order to obtain literal sexual fulfillment: literally spiritual texts are used for sexual aims, while literally sexual texts are used for spiritual ends. This juxtaposition reveals a relationship between the spiritual and the erotic, but it is a relationship whose power derives from its being unacknowledged, hidden, even esoteric.

This ambivalence about eros and spirit within the middle ages was highlighted again by Eliot Wolfson's presentation on medieval kabbalah. The intensely charged erotic symbolism of kabbalah, along with the general Jewish rejection of celibacy, suggests to many popular commentators a friendlier relationship between spirituality and sexuality, but Wolfson contests this reading. Consider the kabbalistic understanding of the body. Kabbalah sees the body as inherently textual. It is not merely that the Word becomes flesh, as for example in John's gospel, but that the flesh is always pointing beyond itself to the sacred text, the Torah, from which it is suspended. The kabbalist's flesh is a semiotic flesh, or what Wolfson calls the literal body. Wolfson quoted from his remarkable book, Language, Eros, Being (p. 191):

Pitched in the heartland of Christian faith, one encounters the logocentric belief in the incarnation of the word in the flesh of the person Jesus, whereas in the textual panorama of medieval kabbalah, the site of the incarnational insight is the ontographic [i.e. writing of the being of things] inscripting of flesh into word and the consequent conversion of the carnal body in to the ethereal, luminous body, finally transposed into the literal body, the body that is the letter, hyperliterally, the name that is the Torah. Both narratives, therefore, presume a correlation of the body and book but in an inverse manner: for Christians, the literal body is embodied in the book of the body; for Jews, the literal body is embodied in the body of the book.

But what does this have to do with sex? Quite simply, as with the Valentinians, it instrumentalizes sex, and refuses bodily eros any delight in and for itself. While kabbalists are commanded to marry and procreate, they do so, as Wolfson said, with as much asceticism possible under this injunction ("they go as far in monastic celibacy as possible for a tradition maintaining the injunction to procreate"). Even where the kabbalah enjoins the practitioner to engage in sexual relations at midnight with his wife, there is an instrumental asceticism to this coupling. She is to have the kabbalist in mind, and in being with his wife the kabbalist is always to intend only the divine feminine. Again, the doctrine of the impression of the imagination on the conceptus (which we met in the Valentinians) is present here. Sex must employ the proper imagination—it must be an affair of the disciplined will—or else the child will be abnormal. When the kabbalist intends the divine feminine, there is a loss of relationship to the particular woman that is his wife; her individuality, her peculiarity, and her body are negated or subsumed into the divine. This negation of the feminine is also envisioned as something that will be finally fulfilled in the eschaton when gender dimorphism and carnal sexuality will be no more. At the end of all things, kabbalists imagine a restoration of the primal androgyne, which is really a re-absorption of the female into the male (for the supposed 'androgyne' is nevertheless circumcised).

There is a fashionable presentation of kabbalah—one thinks of the pop artist, Madonna—that owes more to the contemporary zeitgeist than it does perhaps to the Zohar. Wolfson's presentation was not a debunking and was in fact very sensitive to spiritual matters, but there was a note of alarm, and a warning about that nostalgia which projects into the past a future we've only now begun to dream of. Despite its eros and its riches, historical kabbalah is not the site of a genuine or celebratory marriage of sex with the sacred. For that, we must look elsewhere.

Perhaps this relationship can be found a few hundred years later then when, like so many things, eros was reborn in the Renaissance. Wouter Hanegraaff's presentation focussed on sexuality and eros in Marsilio Ficino (his paper considered Bruno, as well, but time constraints kept us from discussing the later). Hanegraaff spoke about the difficulty of doing contemporary scholarship on Ficino, for our ways of approaching the world are very different than his: as Hanegraaff said, where we consider matters from the bottom up, Ficino inevitably thinks in a top-down manner. So, for example, scholars characteristically think of themselves as sexual beings with a tendency to sublimate; Ficino thought of human eros as itself caused by divine eros. Still, despite the difficulty of fusing these alternative hermeneutic horizons, such a project is worth the effort, for Ficino is both one the great figures in queer history (on which see Giovanni Dall'Orto's many influential articles) and, as the author of the De Amore, Ficino is also one of the most profound writers on love ever.

The De Amore poured out of Ficino as a kind of catharsis that brought to an end a depression that had been plaguing the Florentine. It is a remarkable celebration of love, as well as a repository of renaissance Platonism (indeed, it may be the best introduction to the latter). It is also an unabashedly homoerotic text; in contrast to the embarrassment evident in previous commentators, Ficino never sought to hide the homoeroticism apparent in Plato's works. Hanegraaff suggests, in fact, that this openness was crucial to Ficino's own healing. His commentary on Plato's Symposium allowed Ficino to legitimate his feelings without (Hanegraaff believes) yielding to them in action.

Indeed, it is to Ficino that we owe the neologism 'Socratic love.' Two streams contributed to mint this new species of amor. First, there was the romantic heterosexual stream of courtly love. As the birthplace of Dante and childhood home of Petrarch, Ficino's Florence was no stranger to this tradition. But to this courtly love tradition, Ficino brought the homoerotic tradition of Athens (filtered through Socrates). This Socratic tradition always tended to use the tension of human life as a kind of dynamo to drive the soul onward and upward—what contemporaries would understand as sublimation but more ancient thinkers would consider the lure of the Good itself. When Ficino married these two traditions the result was the 'heterosexualization' of Socratic love or, as Ficino dubbed it, "Platonic love." At the close of Hanegraaff's talk, Allison Coudert suggested that the lack of hierarchical authorities in esoteric currents might be what allows them a freer expression of sexuality.

The next presentation by Antoine Faivre lent credence to Coudert's insight. Faivre considered the phenomenon of 'sensuous relations' with the divine Sophia (Wisdom) in Christian theosophy. The figure of Sophia recurs constantly in the stream Christian theosophy that derives from Jakob Boehme. Although the status of Sophia is often debated, it is clear to Faivre that in this tradition Sophia is never simply a personification; she is a person (albeit a divine one) and capable of relationship. Boehme, the visionary Lutheran cobbler, claimed to have a personal encounter with Sophia, though (for a man willing to publish the most intricate details about the state of the world prior to creation) he remained peculiarly discrete about it. It was really Boehme's disciple, Johann Georg Gichtel who most developed the theme of relationship with Sophia.

Gichtel, writing at the end of the 17^th and into the 18^th centuries), describes in 900 letters the details of his relationship to Sophia herself. These descriptions employ not only a generic language of love, but also a language of tense anticipation and they even speak about the pleasure of orgasmic release. Gichtel believed that no woman could play in so lovable a way with a man as Sophia did with his soul. In Gichtel's hands, the doctrine of ineffability becomes also a matter of prudenceÑafter all, one does not speak too openly about the affairs of the bedroom. The sensuousness of Gichtel's descriptions is stunning, and tells of the theosophist's involvement in a series of divine erotic adventures that transform the soul. Some of these even involve gender-bending, as when Sophia takes on the role of father, impregnating Gichtel with the seed of divine love.

Gichtel founded a Sophianic cult that intended to "rush into the bedroom" of Sophia, to cultivate the radical intimacy that Gichtel experienced. Other theosophers in the tradition—including the woman Jane Lead—continued to develop this theme of relationship with Sophia throughout the 18^th century and its influence can still be felt in the birth of romanticism. A word should be said here about the bridal spirituality of theosophers and the similar spirituality found in, say, John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila. The difference between Christian mystics and theosophers is that the former seek a union of the person with God, while the latter seek a union with the divine Sophia, who is not properly God herself. Perhaps the overt sensuality of the theosophers (though John of the Cross was no prude either) is because Sophia is closer, she is not on the other side of the ontological difference as God is from creatures, and relationship with her is therefore less in need of allegorization. Gichtel's intimacy with Sophia is not so different from our own human-to-human relationships, whereas John of the Cross's intimacy with the divine cannot help but be different.

Larry Principe's presentation considered the erotic and gendered imagery within alchemy. Even a cursory glance at alchemical texts reveals them to be inordinately rich in metaphors and emblematics. This profusion of imagery is initially both confounding and enticing, and so the interpreter of alchemical texts is especially in need of certain methodological constraints. Principe suggested that we ask three questions of alchemical imagery: First, where doe it come from? Second, how and why is it put together? And third, what can it tell us about the worldview and cultural conditions of alchemy?

Principe suggested that the answer to the first question will often govern the answers to the next two questions. Over the last three centuries, many interpreters have sought to read alchemical texts as personal, psychological, or spiritual allegories, even as revelations. But this is the wrong answer to the first question for careful attention to the texts themselves reveals that they are consciously created. The scholar who reads these texts with attention to their historical setting will see that alchemical texts are deliberate ciphers for alchemical experiments, and not artifacts of a spiritual realm or the collective unconscious. That these images were consciously chosen can be seen by the fact that we have rather prosaic alchemical texts published initially without imagery, but to which imagery was added at a later date (even at a publisher's insistence!). The imagery was not the core of the alchemical project. So the answer to the first question is that alchemical imagery comes from human deliberation.

What about the second question, the question of how and why such imagery is chosen? Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas's famous teacher and a great alchemist in his own right, suggested that in order to talk about that which is below our level of sense perception (i.e. chemical processes) we have to speak per similia, after a likeness. Today we are inclined to do so with mathematical and geometrical metaphorsÑquarks, strings, quantum packets and so forth. But, for those classically educated in the medieval humanist tradition, the biblical and mythological images we find in alchemical texts presented themselves more readily. Beyond these metaphors, few forces are more prominent in human experience than the mysteries of sexuality and so the alchemists' reliance upon erotic metaphorics is understandable. Sexual differentiation provides a ready metaphorical way to speak about the various differentiations within alchemical processes. (It should be noted that the practicing alchemists Principe discussed were engaged in a different art than later 19^th century esotericists who, quite unconcerned with chemical operations, borrowed the rich symbolism of alchemy as a way of speaking about the spiritual realms.)

But why speak in so veiled a language? Principe suggested two reasons. The first is that alchemy, if true (as it was believed to be), is a dangerous art. The power to produce gold could destabilize entire economies in a way that can hardly be overstated. Indeed, the potential for power in successful alchemy was one of the main reasons for courtly patronage of the art. This art therefore had to be guarded, and thus alchemical treatises had to be coded. There is however another (perhaps more interesting) reason that begins to answer the third question. Namely, there is a love of the emblematic worldview within alchemists. The production of these images assumed an analogical similarity between events at a lower chemical level and the realities of human sexuality, for example, or mythological truths. Instead of looking to alchemy for insights into the unconscious as such, Principe suggested that we reflect on the importance of metaphors and emblems in this culture and ask ourselves why the image exerted such a mystique in this culture.

Allison Coudert's presentation focused on a different use of gendered symbolism: namely, the portrayal of women in early modern demonology. The witch hunts that took place in the early modern period seem almost unintelligible to contemporary readers but we should not allow ourselves to treat this phenomenon as a entirely irrational. To call this a "witch craze" misrepresents the issue by suggesting that it was simply a breakdown of reason and not the result of deeply embedded tendencies in western thought. The witch hunts were continuous with patriarchal tendencies and structures that charcterize western culture. As Coudert said, she had no idea how many horrible things were said about women and how often these were said until she started teaching women's studies classes.

The witch hunt combined popular concerns with highbrow ecclesiastical fears all in highly eroticized manner. So for example, the identification of supposed witches supplied answers to questions such as, 'Why did that woman kill my cow?' But it also fed on churchmen's concern that popular pieties were actually in league with the devil. Both of these concerns appear regularly in the infamous text Malleus Maleficarum [The Hammer of the Witches], which became a sort of witch hunters' how-to book.

The Malleus is overtly and disturbingly erotic. It includes detailed description of the (painful) intercourse that women were supposed to engage in with the devil, anatomical accounts of genitalia (demonic and human), and everywhere evidences deep anxiety about gender roles. Indeed, the sixteenth and seventeenth century saw a hardening of gender stereotypes, perhaps in response to social instability, that led women to be almost exclusively considered as fitting into the binary of either good (even virginal) wife or bad witch. There was also the issue of religious instability—unbelief was becoming, for the first time in that society's memory, a real option, and the demonic played an apologetic role. If witches exist—and, the logic said, they must since we have found them—then God too must exist. As Henry More put it negatively, if there are no demons, then there is no God.

Nevertheless, we must not forget that these metaphysical worries only took the shape of the witch hunt because of the construction of gender that was operative for centuries in Christendom. The witch hunt derived its power from gender imbalances and fears that have always been present in western culture, but are usually less overtly acted upon. These issues included the view of women as both life and death: women give birth, but this corporeal birth is only the first step towards death. What the men who pursued the witch hunt wanted was intercourse with God in such a way as to yield a birth (spiritual) that doesn't die. So the witch hunts can be seen to play on what Ernst Becker has called "immortality projects", the patriarchal desire for the infinite without the finite, which has long characterized the western condition. Recognizing this, we see the very real political and existential dangers contained in questions of sex and gender. The investigations of this conference are not simply scholarly or intriguing, but part of society's crucial need to uncover its hidden (even esoteric) relationship to gender. Ignorance about our constructions of eros, sexuality and women is a luxury we dare not indulge.

Cathy Gutierrez's presentation continued the focus on the political ramifications resulting from constructions of gender and sexuality, but Gutierrez's concern was with potentially positive effects. Gutierrez looked at the radical democratizing of gender within the spiritualist movements of the 19^th century. This was a time of radical de-hierarchicalization of power, even in places where you really wouldn't want such liberty. For example, by the mid-nineteenth century several states abandoned the requirement that medical doctors be credentialed. But this liberty had salutary effects as well, notably in the realm of sex and the sacred. The spiritualist movement spread across the United States like wildfire and saw the proliferation of mediums (almost always women) who claimed the power to communicate with the dead and the spirits of other worlds. Religion became, in this era, the public sphere in which women were allowed to perform freely. By allowing women to speak authoritatively in public, the spiritualist movement became an important precursor to the suffragist movement. The fame of spiritualist mediums allowed women and girls an undreamt of level of mobility and publicity—as Gutierrez said, "There was thus a way for a little girl from Ohio to see Par’s."

The mediums involved were almost always attractive women who were generally put into trance states by male hypnotists. Some women however, apparently discovered that they could entrance themselves and were thus set free from reliance upon a credentialed male. These spiritualists like to imagine that they were up to date on the latest sciences (phrenology, hydropathy or water-cures, etc.), and thus assumed a level of cultural sophistication.

The real power of spiritualism lay in its rejection of dualism, often under the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg. Suddenly the great divide between heaven and earth (often thought of as the paradigm for all other dualisms, including those between male and female) was seen as bridgeable. The mediums transgressed this boundary and established communication between this world and the next. This was particularly damaging to the Calvinism that had been so prominent in early America (indeed, Swedenborgian-influenced movements have always been an enemy of Calvinism). Women, who were both increasingly literate and increasingly at home and free from the labor of survival, formed powerful attachments to their children but infant mortality remained high. Gutierrez said that Calvinism indulged in a sick vision, which considered many babies who died young as un-elect and therefore damned. This became intolerable to the mothers who cared for them and the spiritualist movement provided a decisive refutation of this Calvinist pessimism. Not only were these babies spared damnation, but they were alive and prosperous and communicative in the other world.

The spiritualist challenge to Calvinism was of a piece with their generally progressive agenda. Leaders and laypeople alike consulted spiritualists on all matters from mundane concerns to live social and political questions, and the spiritualists inevitably gave progressive answers. Finally, spiritualist movements also gave birth to a number of progressive communitarian experiments such as Oneida. Here, their progressive policies were put in place through a radical egalitarianism that extended to the marriage bed. The exclusivity of 'normal' marriage was challenged by a delicate system of complex marriages that allowed sexual intercourse, under certain conditions, with any adult member of the community. While the context is different, and there were admitted extremes, it is easy to see in spiritualism a forerunner of many of the radical spiritual movements in later American history, including most recently the events of the 1960s and even Esalen itself.

Indeed, not so far away from Big Sur, in the hills of Santa Rosa, a spiritualist influenced community was established by Thomas Lake Harris in one of the great esoteric-sexual experiments in American history. T.L. Harris was the focus of Arthur Versluis's presentation. Harris, a contemporary of J. H. Noyes, the founder of Oneida, created a number of intentional spiritual communities in New York and California that engaged in martial experimentation and sacred sexual practices (e.g. coitus reservatus). Harris's similarity to Noyes shows him to be part of a much broader movement within 19^th c. America rethinking sexuality.

As the leader of his communities, T. L. Harris developed and innovative and complex esoteric sexual theology within a Christian context. Three distinctive elements can be identified in Harris's system. First, he taught that every human being has a divine counterpart that needs to be recovered through a revelatory process of inner exploration. Second, Harris taught divine respiration, a breathing technique that involves the entire body and not just the lungs. This sacred breathing unleashes spiritual energy and is involved also in practices of sacred sexuality. Finally, Harris was particularly concerned with nature spirits or the Fay. One could compare this to the faerie tradition in England, though in English lore the faeries have a sinister element to them while in Harris's Christianized version these nature spirits were essentially baptized and thereby made more benevolent. Such benevolent fairies were thus engaged as partners in the spiritual journey.

Finally, a word about Harris's influences. Harris came out of a Swedenborgian community—the intricate vocabulary of which often clutters his published texts—but he later claimed that they were his worst enemies. Why his worst enemies? Because Harris saw his system as superseding theirs and it is often those movements to which we are closest that are most threatening. Later, the famous esotericist Lawrence Oliphant met Harris and then claimed that his teaching was entirely disorderedÑand yet Oliphant largely reproduced it in his own writings. Anna Kingsford met Oliphant and publically denounced him as well, but she too then reproduced Oliphant's system under her own name. Versluis noted that the rhetoric of anarchy seems to play out in this endless need to supercede one's predecessors in an ever re-enacted primal struggle. If all authorities are to be resisted then the truth has to begin afresh with each new teacher. This is perhaps the dark side to radical liberation. Nevertheless, Harris's communities and the esoteric sexual theology he left behind remain an appealing episode in American religious history, the full details of which have barely begun to be explored.

In the next presentation, Marco Pasi turned his attention to one of the most enigmatic figures in 19^th century esotericism is Georges Le Clément de Saint-Marcq, who was born in 1865 and died in 1956. Le Clément was more of a spiritualist than an occultist and is famous for his advocacy of spermatophagy, the ingestion of human sperm. His writings display the tendency of 19^th c. freemasonry towards rationalism, radical anti-clericalism and liberalism. What Le Clément claimed to have discovered through a spiritualist communiquŽ was that the Christian Eucharist instituted by Jesus was not the sacrament practiced in churches but was actually a spermatophagic ritual. In short, the sacrament was really Christ's own sperm.

Le Clément's claim goes further. He asserts that all ancient traditions practiced spermatophagy and that hidden references to it appear throughout sacred texts. He interprets the tree of life within the Garden of Eden, for example, as a veiled reference to this practice, the tree being phallic and its fruit being sperm. Or again, in the Exodus account of hidden manna being given to the Israelites, Le Clément sees (what else?) a reference to sperm. What Le Clément wants in all of this is not a new mystery, but the unveiling of occulted power. Religious institutions claim power based on a mystification of actual events but when Jesus transmitted his sperm to his disciples in the Eucharist he unveiled the secret of religious authority—the emperor was shown to be without clothes. This symbolic act showed the poverty of institutional religion. It was not that sperm itself had power; it challenged power by unveiling the hidden practice that gave rise to these institutions. Shortly after Christ's death however, this great revelation was again occulted and the church assumed its place with all other religions as a hierarchy of power.

Le Clément believed in a spiritual realm, a Kantian noumenal realm inaccessible to ordinary consciousness but available to the egalitarian practices of spiritualists. Institutional religions pose the greatest challenge to the proliferation of this knowledge and so he believed that the renewed practice of spermatophagy (as a deconstruction of institutions) could prepare the way for increasing spiritualist activity. Since his research into Le Clément is ongoing, Pasi's presentation left many questions open. Le Clément remains an enigma and, as of yet, somewhat incoherent, but his influence on later occultists such as Crowley and Reuss makes him an important historical personage.

Hugh Urban's presentation on Tantra, orientalism, and sex magic within the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis) followed. This talk represented a bridge of sorts between Urban's earlier published work on Tantra, and his current ongoing research project to write a history of modern western (19^th and 20^th c.) sex magic. Since its discovery by the west, the complex of texts and traditions known as Tantra has fascinated, tantalized and horrified western authors. The scandal and allure, of course, were due to Tantric sexual rituals, rituals that have since become conflated with western practices of sexual magic. Indeed, one of Urban's points throughout his presentation was that classical Indian Tantra bears only the most inconsequential of similarities to the "spiritual sex" and "sexual magic" of contemporary New Age or new spirituality movements. But Tantra, in name at least, seems to be everywhere; how did the idea of Tantra become part of the furniture of western spirituality?

It seems that throughout the 19^th century, British and European esotericists and occultists began to explore and appropriate Tantra for their own projects. The East was already, as a result of western Orientalist tendencies, romanticized as a repository of certain secret truths and the discovery of Tantra added to this mystique. Sociologically, more than Orientalizing lay behind the western embrace of Tantra, however. Following Michel Foucault, Urban pointed out that the Victorian era (the late 19^th and early 20^th century) was hardly 'Victorian' in its sexual sensibilities. Far from a repressed avoidance of the subject, Europeans in the late 19^th century couldn't stop talking about sex, categorizing it, classifying it, and describing it in endless titillating detail. This included an especially pronounced interest in deviant or transgressive forms of sexuality, i.e. non-reproductive sexuality such as masturbation, or homosexuality. Sex became everywhere spoken about and exploited; it became what Foucault calls 'the secret'. So it is hardly surprising that, in this milieu, word of new secret sexual technologies and rituals from 'the mystical East' found a ready reception.

One of the first groups to embrace Tantra—in name at least—was the O.T.O., founded by Karl Kellner and Theodor Reuss in the 1890s. While the Tantra embraced by the O.T.O. was more of a western fantasy than and Eastern tradition, it is still significant that Reuss and Kellner did embrace it at a time when even the famous esotericist Madame Blavatsky considered it "degenerate, perverse, black magic." Moreover, what Reuss and Kellner would do to the tradition became paradigmatic for further western appropriations of Tantra. The O.T.O. merged (perhaps even subsumed) Tantra into western practices of sexual magic such as can be found in the likes of Pascal Beverly Randolph. In doing so, the O.T.O. changed the practices beyond the recognition of any tantrika. In the imaginations of Reuss, Kellner, and their later infamous disciple, Aleister Crowley, Tantra was no longer the means towards liberating spiritual experience but the first step towards the reconstruction of the entire social order. For Crowley, 'Tantric' O.T.O. rituals were envisioned as the first step in the destruction of the Christian order and the birth of a new epoch.

Urban expressed visible skepticism about Tantra's ability to be so used. He pointed out that far from challenging the western order, Tantric appropriation in the O.T.O. actually mimicked the Victorian fascination with deviant sexuality. The secret was only here made a bit more explicit, but the same obsession with non-reproductive sexuality is discernible. Moreover, the O.T.O., and indeed later movements including contemporary ones still prevalent today, show little real relationship to Indian Tantra. Rather, their praxis of sexual magic reproduces and acts out colonialist fantasies—our horrible and alluring images of what the other does—albeit reversing the negative judgments generally attached to these imagined sexual escapades. Today, in an era of neo-imperialism (based upon transnational capitalism and military power), we ought to guard against and consider our own representations of the other. Especially when asking questions so charged as those about sexuality and the sacred, we ought also to ask what orientalist and imperialist fantasies we ourselves might still indulge.

Hans Thomas Hakl, an independent scholar who has built one of the most impressive private libraries of esoteric literature in existence, spoke next. Hakl's presentation touched on sensitive material and included elements from his biography. Hakl's presentation looked into some of the darker elements of western sexual magic, including the practices of the Italian Ordine Osirideo Egiziano founded by Giuliano Kremmerz. This group employs sexual magic not for the achievement of mundane magical power and the acquisition of material aims but exclusively as a means to obtain contact with higher beings. This contact, it is believed, allows the soul to detach from the body and even to eject other souls from younger bodies thus allowing a type of physical immortality and even the eventual replacing of the human soul with a spiritual numen (similar to a demi-god) that takes over the aspirant's body. Hakl also considered the Group of Ur associated with Julius Evola, which expresses a more Tantric and Yogic outlook and consider the male orgasm highly dangerous. Their aim is also immortality but in a merely spiritual sense. Another order, the German Fraternitas Saturni, practices sexual magic in various ways, including the consecration of talismans and the creation of familiar spirits that can then be used in other magical experiments.

The final presentation of the conference belonged to Jeff Kripal, who shared some of his research into Esalen's extraordinary history. He focused particularly on events and themes related to Mike Murphy's book An End to Ordinary History. Murphy considers it helpful to delineate four related genres of fiction: fantasy (unconstrained by reality); science fiction (a mediating genre that imagines something that is perhaps possible); mystical/occult realism (which takes phenomenologically real experiences and weaves them into a coherent world, and is thus constrained by William James's "radical empiricism"); and finally magical realism (unconstrained by the radical empiricism of category three).

Within this schema, An End to Ordinary History can be considered a work of mystical/occult realism. This novel integrates elements from the Cold War remote viewing experiments or "psychic spying" of the SRI (Stanford Research Institute) under Russell Targ. Targ later embraced a version of Buddhist Tantra and developed the concept of "nonlocal mind." These elements find their way into Murphy's novel, much of the motivation for which comes from the SRI project that Targ co-directed (initially funded by NASA, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Army, and the Navy) in its (reportedly successful) efforts to spy on the Soviet Union. Murphy's novel is a fictional account of similar remote viewing projects, Soviet psychical research, Russian esotericism and even an alien encounter. The mystical, psychical and extra-terrestrial events in the novel often carry erotic dimensions that Kripal sees similarly played out in Murphy's own life. Kripal, acknowledging the difficulty of studying a living subject (Murphy was in the room), sought to weave together the three narratives (an intelligence community narrative, a fictional narrative, and Murphy's biographical narrative) in an elaborate inter-textual quilt and to relate them to traditional themes in the history of religions, including Asian Tantra, the western medieval succubi/incubi (sexual demonology) traditions, and, most recently, UFO abduction phenomena.

Kripal reflected on the way that Murphy's fictional work has managed to carry these esoteric themes to a wider and hungry public (Golf in the Kingdom has sold over a million copies), thus publicizing the esoteric and hidden for the mainstream. Esalen itself, it seems, has a similar vocation, publicizing much of what in earlier centuries would have been necessarily driven underground. Esalen, in Kripal's view, represents a new stage in American spirituality, a genuinely American Tantra whose influence on the wider culture is only beginning to be felt and known.

Conclusion

It could be said that scholarship always has an aspect of voyeurism to it—academics require at least a minimal distance from their material in order to critically interrogate it and uncover what may otherwise remain unsaid—but at its best this spectatorship serves to do more than titillate. If the scholars assembled in this conference sought to peek into the bedrooms of Valentinian Gnostics, medieval magicians, and 19^th century spiritualists, this was not simply because of a fetishized curiosity. Rather, through papers, presentations, and discussions, the participants reflected on several important points: the place of gender in various esoteric communities and practices; the way certain traditions managed to subvert the status quo in the name not only of spiritual but also social liberation; and the way attitudes towards sexuality can be used to alert us today to problematic structures of dominance, imperialism, or hierarchical control. Fittingly, these questions and concerns have always animated Esalen's own visions and pursuits.

So, in the end, we might ask humorously: Did they do it or didn't they? To return to Hannegraff's question at the beginning of this summary: Did attention to the historical development of esoteric sexuality reveal a noticeable trend towards more embodied forms of spirituality? As the conference closed, it was not crystal clear whether an incarnational trajectory lies behind (or hidden within) the history of esoteric traditions. In more recent years, there have been moments of bodily and erotic celebration, but some of the most extremely transgressive traditions of the recent past still remain fundamentally at odds with the body, and treat sex instrumentally—as simply a vehicle for power. Perhaps this is due to a hidden or esoteric side in human sexuality itself that refuses to be normalized, and chafes against any easy personal or societal acceptance. Sex and eros remain, even for initiates and the scholars who study them, a mystery, even a problem, and, oh yes, from time to time a great delight.