Because I taught erotic massage classes in New York City in 1988 and 1989, in the Spring of 1989 I was invited to participate in a forum entitled “A Spiritual Defense of Promiscuity” at the Center for American Culture Studies at Columbia University. My credentials for speaking at this Ivy League college involved the communal erotic joy generated in my erotic massage classes (Celebrating the Body Erotic). The forum also included performance artist Annie Sprinkle, anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum and writer-in-residence Darrell Yates Rist, who had participated in Celebrating the Body Erotic on Easter weekend. Darrell read Erotic Resurrection that evening to the several hundred people attending the forum. He gave me permission to share this piece about his experience in my weekend class.
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Erotic Resurrection by Darrell Yates Rist
I no longer remember how it was that I heard about Joe Kramer and his tantric erotic workshops — maybe a mailing. But in the spring of 1989, somehow, I ended up at a Kramer weekend, titillated and full of reservations. It began with an evening lecture, where Joe laid forth his view of sex as a brotherhood-sisterhood, every body pleasuring another body with massage to generate spiritual energy. The point, I learned, was not to come, but to nurture the ecstatic spirit, causing it to circulate again and again, allowing it connect with the spiritual web that binds all men and women.
The second day began with intimate exercises — looking deeply into a partner’s eyes, massaging his heart, making uninhibited animal faces at him, grunting. Ritual breath was our vehicle. Each man breathing at his own rhythmic pace, we circulated about the room, dissolving into one another until we all knew the whole — old and young, heavy or slender, soft or built, handsome or not. Barriers to intense feeling — our prejudices — fell. We became sublimely ridiculous, learning the human touch.
The third day began on Easter morning. Our band of men withdrew into a dark loft space — a cavernous, tomb-like place — to resurrect the body from the dead. We made a circle, primal congregation, on the floor. Our breathing rose in moist silence, cacophonous hush, water and air, the elements in the beginning. “Wfoo-huh. Wfoo-huh. Wfoo-huh.” We drew quick breaths to the heart, inspiring love, standing to face each other, giving birth to a brother, creating the wheel within the wheel, a spinning marriage of eyes, bright gateways to the soul. It was a wordless time — wfoo-huh, wfoo-huh, wfoo-huh — which stripped deceit away. Pride and our garments fell at a partner’s touch. Tenderly we touched each other’s bodies. Artists’ hands restored the quiet flesh to its first delight, undressed fear, disrobed naked terror, set the skin’s sensation free, calling forth the spirit from its hiding place and wedding it to the earth.
In time, on tables like altars, each pair — wizards or Christs — anointed the waking body of a third. Beneath hot oils, this third man stirred, as the couple — priest-like — took his erect power in their hands, held its length, its circumference, worshipped its transforming shapes, exercising life: penis, cock, wand, limb, the father branch. We called its magic forth — squeezing this satin sheath, stroking this soft majesty with awe — and cradled the testicles. Balls, perfect eggs, twin suns, sources of light guarded in the darkness of an ark, luxurious bristling sack. Caressed, the fine orbs moved on their own, like sacred throbs of life inside a mother. At the same time, we shaman masseurs massaged the heart of this man who was our sacrifice, holding its hot beat in our palms, lavishing our fingers in the rich rhythms pounding in his chest.
“This man you’re touching is a god,” Joe, the teacher, in the midst of his disciples taught us. “Worship his body, touch his heart and magic wand. Sacred brothers, breathe!” he cried. “Feel the energy rise from the cock to meet the power of the heart, the centers of love. Feel your flesh come alive. You are every man and woman you have ever loved. Call them to life. You are your father and your mother, your grandfather, grandmother, you are every ancestor who has gone before you. You are all your lovers. Honor every mouth, every vagina, every ass that’s held your cock,” the teacher proclaimed. “Love them now. Heal all your relationships. You are all your relations. Breathe, brothers! Breathe life!”
“Wfoo-huh. Wfoo-huh. Wfoo-huh.” This was the hiss of oracles escaping from the earth, steaming clay. At a tape deck, Joe made the music soar. There were ascending melodies and the sound of drums, like heartbeats in magnificent chaos, the patter of wings, butterflies and eagles. “Wfoo- huh. Wfoo-huh. Wfoo-huh.” There were hollow chants and echoing songs, voices from ancient temples. The hands of priests, instruments of ecstasy and terror, turned around the cocks and balls of gods and pulled at the flesh around the heart.
Tremulous moans, screams, laughter rose. There were sobs. Bodies shuddered and were transformed. Our eyes mirrored other souls. Men — priests and gods — writhed and cried, spoke in tongues, spirit inflamed by the flesh.
“Breathe, sacred brothers, breathe!” cried Joe. His eyes were bright, enchanted. He breathed — “Wfoo-huh. Wfoo-huh” and waved his arms. “You are breathing for all the universe, for every person who has ever lived, every creature, every plant. In you now, every cell vibrates with life. Create! You are gods! Let the energy of your heart and your cock become one. This is your resurrection. Come back from the dead, bring back everyone you love who is gone. See visions. Dream dreams. Create new worlds. Brothers! Honor yourselves. The moment of life has come!” His ecstasy resurrected ours.
Suddenly the music changed. A song, a mournful Kyrie, reached deep into the void, swelled, astounding the air, drew up peace and light — brilliant harmonies flooding through the entrance of a catacomb. In this moment, our bodily breathing stopped — we held our breath and gripped, bowing to the purest inspiration of the spirit. And when this breathless moment had swept through time, men who’d richly been anointed by shamans’ hands released their breathing to utter unearthly sounds, while we priests stood silent, hands suspended above the flesh as over a living Eucharist. All the joy of paradise and anger of earth became one, for now, all gratitude and pain, all ecstasy and hatred. Some men said they saw their lovers who had died, mourned them with the grief that tears the souls, and, thus cleansed, forever let them go. Some men were beckoned by the faces of the living and pitied them as they never could before. And all of us, in this madness of laughter and tears, believed we had seen angels, embraced a prophet or the resurrected Lord, visions of life or truth beyond reason, defying our minds.
Such was the Easter morning passion achieved by what some men call sex.
For every man and woman, tolerance is shallow, our taboos die hard. Take away the risk of pregnancy or the threat of AIDS, the body and its sensations are still among our greatest terrors. Most of us are shamed by our own nakedness, let alone by the nude touch of others. To feel our own flesh or a partner’s, we turn off the lights and disembody ourselves — we drug ourselves or get drunk — then fall asleep when it’s all over. In the 1980s and ’90s, we are suffering a new plague of shame and disease, while the social imperative demands, in the name of community, that we ever more passionately repress sexual desire. This harsh ethic polishes up old terms and tries to make them sound ageless with virtue: sexual responsibility, virginity, celibacy, monogamy. But even in the midst of this erotic reign of terror, new revolutionaries have risen to preach that sexual touch is the core of our social exercise and that the rituals of tribal sexuality are the foundation, in fact, of spiritual fulfillment and community.
We must envision a new age of the spirit and the flesh, even a spiritual defense of promiscuity.