The signs of our time are both sexual and supernatural. Men heart-sick for genuine love flaunt the symbol where they lack the reality, in hopes that vicarious excitement in rock, flick, and pulp will dispel the inner ache. Witness the great high priest of hedonism himself, Hugh Hefner: “You know … in the next ten years I would rather meet a girl and fall in love and have her fall in love with me than make another hundred million dollars” (Time, Feb. 14, 1969, p. 70). At the same time those for whom Christ came to give abundant life reach out for some kind of transcendent vitality to halt the pangs of spiritual starvation—from the delightful TV comedy “Bewitched,” through dubious horoscopes and tarot cards, to the darkness of the Ouija board, seances, and Satanism.
What greater efficiency could there be for modern men than to satisfy both sexual and spiritual needs at once? Several practitioners of the media and of the occult have been quick to try; the film Rosemary’s Baby depicts twentieth-century witchcraft invoking the unnamed forces of Satan to impregnate a young woman; Ritual of Evil, a made-for-TV movie, shows a young witch casting spells and inducing astral-projection to satisfy her erotic drives; Anton LeVay, in his California-based Church of Satan, indulges in the ancient sexual rites connected with the Black Mass.
All such efforts are not orgiastic fun and spiritual games, however. Two years ago, in a situation that would make the ministrants of Rosemary’s Baby blush, seventeen-year-old Bernadette Hasles was beaten to death in an attempt to drive the devil out of her. Her murderers, the members of a fanatical European cult, had accused her of having sexual relations with the devil, and had required as penance that she write a 322-page autobiography in which she confessed that the devil often walked beside her, made love to her at Holy Communion, and promised her ten sexually diverse husbands and co-rulership of the world with him. In the March, 1970, issue of Esquire, a description of bizarre and terrifying death-styles in California was chosen to keynote the feature section devoted to the state’s sex-saturated underworld of evil.
The past yields other examples of man’s plunge into the deathly darkness of the evil unknown, taken in careless disregard for the sinister consequences of mingling sex and the supernatural and in sinful ignorance of their divine order. Aleister Crowley, the self-styled “Great Beast” of a generation ago (“Before Hitler was. I AM”), set out to banish the “Dying God” from his New Aeon of Crowleyanity through magic in which sex played a major role. Sex became for Crowley the means whereby he reached up to “Divinity”:
It was his vehicle of consecration, his daily prayers.… Any sexual act (hetero-, homo-, or autosexual) was, in his eyes, a sacred magical deed; he likened it to the blessed sacrament.… Sometimes … The Great Beast reached heights of maniac intensity, ran screaming into the temple, “went all but insane.” He roared out words magical, names barbarous, and in an ecstasy performed his mysterious acts of sex magic [J. Symonds, The Great Beast, 1952, p. 132; see The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography, 1970].
In her famous history of witchcraft, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, distinguished Egyptologist Margaret Murray maintains that what we call “witchcraft” was a religion of the people overcome by Christianity. Dishonest and overly zealous Christians, she says, felt duty-bound to discredit the innocuous fertility rites of the defeated religion by making central to them a compact with Satan. Over against this interpretation, Montague Summers in his History of Witchcraft considers witchcraft both heretical and anarchical, a flagrant deviation from the medieval Christian establishment. We ought probably to agree with the mediating judgment of Jules Michelet (Satanism and Witchcraft), who attributes early witchcraft generally to underlying traditions, to dissatisfaction with a decadent church, and to the execrable living conditions endured by the serfs. Alienated from a dead church, abused and exploited by their landlords, serfs found social and spiritual solace in nocturnal revelries we now call witchcraft—activities that prefigured the Witches’ Sabbat of the later Middle Ages. Although it took many forms, for the most part the proto-Sabbat degenerated into a huge carnival of lust under the pretense of magic rites. There were sarcastic buffooneries and mockeries of lord and priest, intermingled with the revived traditions of a vague religious past. With greater form, the developed Sabbat served as a combined religious service and business meeting, followed by an orgy of feasting, dancing, and wild lust. “Indiscriminate intercourse” is a pallid euphemism for the limitless indulgence displayed, and incubi and succubi (the supernatural parties, male and female respectively, in a sexual union between human and demon) were said to have joined the debauch on many occasions.
The Witches’ Sabbat brought a culminating development to the history of witchcraft:
This consummation is only reached in the fourteenth century during the Great Schism when the Papacy had migrated to Avignon, and the two-headed Church seemed no longer a Church at all, when all the nobility of France, and the King himself, are crestfallen prisoners in England, squeezing the uttermost farthing out of their vassals to provide their ransom. Then it is the Sabbats adopt the imposing and grimly terrible ceremonial of the Black Mass [Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft, 1939, p. 118].
“Imposing and grimly terrible” hardly describe it. Like Crowley’s sex magic, the Black Mass is a diabolical inversion of Christian truth, demonic and perversely sexual from beginning to end. And like the Witches’ Sabbat, the Black Mass gave occasion for widely claimed human-demonic sexual relations. (See Summers. History of Witchcraft, p. 90 f.; D. Hill and P. Williams, Supernatural, 1967; R. E. L. Masters, Eros and Evil: The Sexual Psychopathology of Witchcraft, 1962.)
Alienated from churches hardly worth their name, exploited by employers, taxed to the uttermost—are these conditions familiar? Perhaps then we should not be surprised to find today weird and terrifying combinations of sex and the supernatural that reflect the depraved ingenuity of twentieth-century man. Horrified we must be at such revelations, but not surprised. How can Christians understand the sexual and supernatural signs of our time and offer a way of escape?
Modern demonic manifestations of sex and the supernatural must be interpreted in light of the biblical truth that Satan “speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar, and the father of lies.” He invariably misleads, obscures, and deludes. It is utterly misleading to believe, as most moderns do, that devils and demons are the products of pre-scientific superstition. For a Christian with a knowledge of the Bible and modern occultism, this pandemic notion only serves to confirm C. S. Lewis’s observation that two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall are disbelief in devils and an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. How then are Satan’s modern converts won? By the obscuring of the demonic in a now familiar appeal. Roman Polanski, director of Rosemary’s Baby and a firm disbeliever in witches (“I’m extremely pragmatic. I went to art school and the electronics school. I know optics and physics”), describes it in words a serf could have used to speak of his evening escapades: “You go to the cinema to have fun …” (Look, June 25, 1968, p. 94). The resultant delusion with regard to the Christian view of sexuality is expressed by R. E. L. Masters: “[The equation of sex with evil] was the poison that Christianity gave to Eros. How much different the world might be, how much healthier … had reasonable men of authority decreed that: The sexual appetite is a normal and healthy one; only Paul bothers about it” (Eros and Evil, p. 167).
Thus Satan brings men to deny his existence, play in his presence, and justify themselves on the basis of a deluded conception of the divine sexual order. In the Satanic inversion of that order, sex becomes paramount. Recall, for example, the hellish atmosphere of 1984, in which Winston demands the reassurance: “You like doing this? I don’t mean simply me; I mean the thing in itself.” He is not content until he gets the answer from Julia: “I adore it.” Paul tells us that men choose not to retain the knowledge of God in their minds and that God gives them up “to impurity … to degrading passions … [and] to a depraved mind.” In the end, divinely ordered sexual love is lost in a cloud of supernatural pollution as Satan arrives to claim another soul. “Eros,” said C. S. Lewis, “honoured without reservation and obeyed unconditionally, becomes a demon. And this is just how he claims to be honoured and obeyed. Divinely indifferent to our selfishness, he is also demonically rebellious to every claim of God or man that would oppose him” (The Four Loves, 1960, pp. 101, 102)
To a world that, like medieval society, is starving for genuine love and spiritual food, the good news of the divine sexual order comes with supreme relevance. The Christian relation of sex and the supernatural is the polar opposite of its demonic perversion: it is love—divine eras—not lust; it causes “undefiled” pleasure, not pain; it knows true freedom, not fear; and it brings life—the “grace of life”—not death. Is there not an important comparison between Crowley’s Satanic understanding of sex as his “blessed sacrament” and the Christian understanding in which “the romantic lover sees in the body of his beloved that ‘the means of grace and the hope of glory are in our bodies also, and the name of them is love’ ”? And does not sex as Crowley’s “vehicle of consecration” have a meaningful counterpart in the Christian view that the beloved’s flesh is “ ‘the physical Image of Christ, the physical vehicle of the Holy Ghost,’ … because in its own right it is holy? It shares the co-inherent nature of very love—which is what it means to be holy” (M. Shideler, The Theology of Romantic Love, 1962, p. 142)?
But most wonderful of all is the divine choice of Christian marriage to symbolize Christ’s coming union with his Church—when men shall reign with God over a defeated Satan. And could it be that if the union of husband and wife is a strong analogy for the mystical union of Christ and his Church, then there is in fact a supernatural dimension to sex that consummates and imbues the whole of married life?
There are some Christian thinkers who regard the first union in marriage as cementing a lifelong mystical unity, which is accompanied by mental, emotional and physical changes which can never—at least to the full—be repeated. The one partner discovers the other in a reciprocal act of sell-giving, and the inmost consciousness of each awakens to the fact that the life of each has been fused in that of the other. There will be other pleasurable and deeper emotional experiences, but it is at this point that the marriage is really consummated [W. M. Capper and H. M. Williams, Toward Christian Marriage, 1958, p. 74].
The way of escape from today’s powers of darkness Christ graciously provided in the redemption of the Cross. The path is lit by the light of Holy Scripture and leads to God’s right hand, where there are “pleasures for evermore.” Charles Williams aptly remarked that for those who follow it, “sensuality and sanctity are so closely intertwined that our motives in some cases can hardly be separated until the tares are gathered out of the wheat by heavenly wit.”
James R. Moore is a student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. He has the B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois.
