Sacred Pleasures

"heretics, who rejected the notion that woman is of an interior and nonspiritual order, were mercilessly persecuted by Church authorities. So were the s called witches and other woman who still clung to the vestiges of the prehistorical worship of a Goddess and her divine son, the Bull God (who then had become the horned and hoofed devil of the christian Iconography" -8

vulva: "revered as the magical portal of life, possessed of the power of both physical regeneration and spiritual illumination and transformation": crass swear word-cunt-16

Cycladic: a platter of a stylized vulva flanked by branches under a large numnber of spirals in which look like a spiral sea"

Kundalini energy: ecstatic bliss which is awakened during sexual pleasure -17

Myth: meaning the expression through images and stories of that which is believed to be an immutable or sacred truth"-22

"thus, the notion that the human body as part of nature is somehow inferior to the mind and spirit is already articulated in European history during classical Greek and Roman times, especially by some philosophers known as Stoics. But it is only later with Saint Paul, and then conclusively with saint Augustine, that the christian idea that the human body, and in particular, the body of woman, is corrupt-even demonic-begins to take hold "-22

Zoroaster Philosophy/Christian Augustine: "Holds that mans soul is imprisoned by matter, and that the female (who is said to be soulless) is the mother of all demons. And like the medieval Christian notion that woman is a carnal source of evil, according to this much earlier Middle Eastern ideology, cosmic darkness and evil were awakened by the female creature-whose Persian name translations into english as "Menstruation".-24

Paleolithic and Neolithic: observed a woman's body as a magical vessel. they must have observed how it bleeds in rhythm with the moon, and how it miraculously produces people"-23