Sexual issues have always been at the heart of religion, with its concern for procreation, origins, birth, the survival of the human race. Rabbis, Christian clerics, Imams, and Brahmins have claimed the ultimate authority over sexuality until relatively recent times, and in many ways they still do.
But why should a priest legislate sexuality? There are two sides to this question: Why should a priest want to interfere in this area, and why should people allow him to do so? The answer to the first side is that sexuality is among the most basic of human needs, the key to the survival of human life. To control sexuality means to control everything that stems from it — politics, power, everything. Moreover, that very same fact — that this force is so deeply imbedded in the human organism — suggests the answer to the second side of the question. For sexuality, like death, is an area of great vulnerability, mystery, danger; it is, ultimately, inaccessible to reason or to science. This is the shadowy place in which people feel a need for religion, where priests are invited to enter in or offer to enter in.
The sexual connection between god(s) and humans is often envisioned as a kind of marriage — the hieros gamos of the ancient world, the nun's wedding to Jesus — or as sexuality — the gloss on the Song of Songs, Bernini's Saint Theresa, and so forth. But it is also envisioned as divorce or adultery. God's abandonment of his worshipper and human adultery often become metaphors for one another.
Stories about human women and men become inextricably entangled in the toils of human sexual tragedy and take flight in the illusion provided by myth. But the banal and the magical are by no means mutually exclusive, for the royal road that connects myth and experience is a two-way stretch. The myth is a bridge between the actual human sexual experience and the fantasy that grows out of that experience and in turn transfigures it.
The meanings of these myths must be sought not merely in the superficial anthropomorphic forms and quasi-human events but in darker theological questions. Irrationalization occurs in mythology when ideas about men and women are transformed into myths about gods and goddesses, but the opposite process, rationalization, is equally common and important, when ideas about gods and goddesses are translated into myths about men and women.
Gender and Religion
Gender plays a central role in the wider religious concern with order. Broadly speaking, a structuralist might say that, in religious thinking, gender/sexuality = culture/nature. Religious communities and dogmas tend to disqualify the pieces that don't fit their paradigm; if the paradigm is defined as male (as it usually is), they discard or devalue the female (or the homosexual, or the bisexual). Thus, women (and, sometimes, eunuchs or bisexuals) are usually cast as the villains in the founding myths dealing with such central religious topics as death, evil, and disease.
Traditional religions regard sexuality as, overwhelmingly, heterosexuality. What homosexual themes there are in traditional myths are seldom overt, because such myths almost always have, as a latent agenda, the biological and spiritual survival of a particular race, in both senses of the word: race as contest and as species ("us against them"), the "outnumber-them" agenda ("be fruitful and multiply"). Such myths regard homosexual acts as potentially subversive of this agenda (or, at the very least, irrelevant to it, perhaps not part of the problem, but certainly not part of the solution). The ascetic aspects of Hinduism and Christianity, among other religions, create a violent dichotomy between heterosexual marriage, in which sexuality is tolerated for the sake of children, and the renunciant priesthood, in which asceticism is idealized and sexuality entirely rejected, or at least recycled. In this taxonomy, homosexual love represents what Mary Douglas has taught us to recognize as a major category error, something that doesn't fit into any existing conceptual cubbyhole, "matter out of place" (in a word, dirt). (Here we may do well to recall the ways in which homophobic language often employs "dirt" symbolism.) Traditional religious texts regard homosexual union not, like heterosexual marriage, as a compromise between two goals in tension (procreation and asceticism), but as a mutually polluting combination of the worst of both worlds (sterility and lust). The myths therefore seldom explicitly depict homosexual unions at all, let alone sympathetically.
Other mythologies of sex and gender are not necessarily open to more liberal constructions of gender than our own; some of them are simply open to different constructions from ours. Yet the very fact that they explore options that we have not even considered gives them the power to make us notice the ways in which our own religious traditions legislate, often without our conscious knowledge, our sexuality.
Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions at the Divinity School, The University of Chicago. She is jointly appointed to the Department of South Asian languages and Civilization and the Committe on Social Thought. Her forthcoming book is called, The Bed Trick: Sex, Myth, and Masquerade.
