Metaphysical Symbolism of the sexual act

Love and sea sharing the same bed, love and sea in the same bed […] And on the shore of my body the man born of the sea lay down¹ Saint-John Perse (1887–1975)

True knowledge is achieved through a loving fusion. This is why Scripture calls the conjugal act “knowledge”² Marie-Magdeleine Davy

Introduction

Just as, except in Indian or Chinese metaphysics, the male is reputed to be active and the female passive, coitus is systematically described from a masculine perspective by the term “penetration,” properly defined as:

the action of penetrating, the movement by which a body penetrates (into another body, into matter, or into an enclosed space, passing through what presents an obstacle or offers resistance) (CNRTL).

Yet once this commonplace—or prejudice—of an active-passive sexual opposition has been rejected, one must acknowledge the reality of the inverse perspective: the active absorption of the penis by the vagina³. The penis can indeed be grasped and inserted, ultimately absorbed or even engulfed. An analogy may help convey this: the penis may be gulped down, swallowed, devoured, eaten; and although it is not actually chewed, masticated, or munched, it can quite literally be sucked in and massaged or kneaded⁴ by the (trained) vaginal muscles.

In symbolic terms, this means that coupling or conjunction cannot be reduced to the sole act of “penetration”; rather, if this term is to be retained, it should be complemented by those that constitute its inverse and counterpart: “aspiration” and “absorption.”

Sexual Metaphors

To begin by indicating some of the metaphors used to describe the sexual organs or sexual intercourse—metaphors that naturally degenerate into commonplaces and clichés or fall into disuse—is to show just how far removed they are from genuine symbols.

Thus, among the LATINS, metaphors were mainly drawn from the agricultural world:

• sēmĕn (seed)⁵ or rōs (dew) for semen;
• fabae (beans), poma (fruits), mala (apples) for the testicles;
• arbŏr (trunk, tree, plant), thyrsus (stem, stalk), rādix (root), falx (pruning hook, sickle), and above all vōmĕr (ploughshare) for the penis;
• ăger or campus (field, ground), sulcus (furrow), vīnĕa (vineyard), or fons (spring)⁶ for the vagina.

Among the GREEKS, metaphors could likewise be botanical:

• from myrtiá (myrtle), the fruit was an image of the clitoris;
• and roz (rose) an image of the labia minora and majora.

Among the HINDUS, on the other hand, metaphors are often zoological:

• according to the dimensions of their lingam, men fall into three classes, in increasing order of size: hare-man, bull-man, and stallion-man; and according to the depth of their yoni, women fall into three classes: doe-woman, mare-woman, and elephant-woman⁷;
• among the types of kisses is Jatavestitaka, or the “embrace of the reptile” (ibid., p. 56);
• among the types of nail pressure or scratching are the tiger’s claw, the peacock’s foot, and the hare’s leap (ibid., pp. 68–70);
• one of the standard bites is called the boar’s bite⁸;
• one position is called the crab position (ibid., p. 84: “The woman’s two legs are contracted and placed upon her stomach”); one type of congress (coitus) is the congress of the cow, and others are the congress of the dog, the goat, the doe, and the cat, to which are added the violent assault of the ass, the leap of the tiger, the pressure of the elephant, the rubbing of the boar, and the assault of the horse (ibid., p. 85);
• the perfect woman has the gait of a swan, skin like that of a young elephant, the voice of the kokila (cuckoo), and the eyes of a gazelle (cited by E. Armand, Encyclopédie anarchiste).

In JUDAISM, we likewise find zoological and botanical metaphors (Song of Songs), as well as the classical image of the door for the vagina (Talmud):

• “Your eyes are doves’ eyes” (I, 15); “My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag” (II, 9); “Your eyes are doves behind your veil; your hair is like a flock of goats streaming down the slopes of Mount Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of shorn sheep coming up from the washing; each has its twin, and none among them is barren” (IV, 1–2); “Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, grazing among the lilies” (IV, 5); “Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts like its clusters” (VII, 8);
• the labia minora are the door, the labia majora its jambs, and the clitoris its key (ibidem).

In ARAB EROTOLOGY, we find the same metaphor of the door—the portal—although it refers to any opening, whether male or female⁹—together with a whole range of picturesque expressions:

• for the vagina: the portal, but also the kouss (of a young woman), the hood (if nothing has ever entered it), the hedgehog (the dishevelled one of an old woman), Father Pointed-Cap (it “wears a little red cap at its extremity, resembling a cock’s comb”), the spacious one (a “broad tuft”), Father Little-Nose (“which wears a charming beret surmounted by a sort of large button”), Father Prominent-Forehead, the pleater, the interceptor, the welcoming one, Father Swallows-All (for “a strong, well-fleshed woman”), the disfigurer, already mentioned, etc.¹⁰;
• for the penis: the wrapped one (this, together with “sex,” is the original name), the thing that lengthens, the dove, the bell-ringer, the one-eyed one, Father Saliva, the wriggler, Father Long-Neck, Father Tearful, Father One-Eye, the ripper, the harpooner, etc. (ibid., p. 165).

In TAOISM, the names given to the sexual organs and sexual acts are no less figurative¹¹:

• yùjīng (“Jade Stalk” or “Jade Peak”), as well as guī (the mythical tortoise), refer to the penis; thus guī tóu (“tortoise head”) designates the glans penis;
• yùmén (“Jade Gate”), yùfáng (“Jade Chamber”), and zhūshì (“Purple Chamber”) refer to the vagina, as do pántáo (“peach of immortality”), mǔ dān (peony), and liánhuā (lotus);
• yùquán (“Drinking from the Jade Spring”) means obtaining a woman’s Yīn essence during the sexual act;
• Yún yǔ (“Cloud and Rain”) designates sexual intercourse:

Chapter 5 of the Sù wèn says: “The cloud is the terrestrial qi that rises; the rain is the celestial qi that descends.” Thus the “clouds” would correspond to the ova of the earth and refer to the woman’s vaginal secretions (the Chinese were not yet aware of the existence of female gametes), while the “rain” that comes to fertilize the Earth would correspond to the semen of Heaven, symbol of the man’s seed; hence the expression “play of cloud and rain” to designate sexual intercourse.

From this image derive expressions such as fān Yún fù yǔ (“clouds overturned and rain reversed”) to indicate the homosexual act practiced by two men.¹²

As we can see, this survey of traditional expressions presents nothing but metaphors, thereby revealing their radical difference from symbols and rendering any inventory of the erotic vocabulary of French slang unnecessary, despite its poetic richness.

For metaphors are images that refer horizontally to other objects, whereas symbols make present a meaning, a reality belonging to a transcendent order: they refer directly and vertically to the principles that govern the way in which we can intellectually apprehend the world and, beyond it, ultimately to the First Principle.

Sexual Symbolism

We may briefly consider three forms of sexual symbolism: those of the sexual organs and that of their conjunction.

The Axis of the World

The erect penis is inscribed along an axis, and every axis refers to the Axis of the World, that is, to the vertical axis, unique yet present at every point in the universe, which links creation to the Creator, beings to Him who gave them being. Yet the penile axis originates in man and is not vertical, two characteristics that are not without symbolic consequences.

First, although the penile axis points toward infinity, it nevertheless has a point of origin in the person who bears it; if we consider this point of origin and the direction it indicates, we have a ray, partially materialized by the segment constituted by the penis. This ray reflects the condition of the human soul, created yet immortal; the materialized and limited segment marks the beginning and end of human existence.

Second, the penile axis is not actually vertical; it may even be seen as forming a forty-five-degree angle, an oblique midway between the horizontal and the vertical—a direction that, moreover, remains unchanged whether the man (with an erection) is standing, sitting, kneeling, or lying down. This oblique marks the human condition, at once dependent upon that Vertical which gives life and takes it back, and condemned to act according to the horizontality of its existence¹³.

This oblique may, moreover, constitute a trap: it is merely the foolish mean between the horizontal axis of existence—whose horizon, forever receding and forever inaccessible, can never constitute the goal—and the vertical Axis, which is both origin and end. A “trap,” because the Above does not lie at the end of the forward path; it is always only “here and now” and “above.” If this trap is avoided, there remains this indirect yet irrefutable reminder of the cross of the world: the intersection, within each person, of the horizontal axis of his or her existence and the vertical Axis of his or her destiny.

In Christian language, as will have been understood, the Axis of the World is the Christ-Word-Son¹⁴, “through whom all things were made” (Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed)¹⁵, and the cross of the world is the one He marked out for all in the kenosis¹⁶ of the Incarnation and death upon the Cross. The inhabitation of the vertical axis is total: from above downward (Incarnation and descent into hell) and from below upward (ascent from hell and Ascension), through the horizontal plane of human life.

Although this Christic verticality of the human being, “in the image of God and according to His likeness” (Gen. I, 26), characterizes woman as much as man, the erect penis at their encounter reminds both of them of the existence of the relative axis and the Axis of the Absolute. And both bear its symbolic weight, each in his or her own way.

The Cave (kahf) or the Grotto (ghār)

¹⁷

The vagina belongs to the symbolism of the Grotto or Cave. From the grotto of the Nativity to the cave of Ghār Hīra’¹⁸, by way of the cave of the “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus” or the ahl al-kahf (“People of the Cave”)¹⁹, the cave is, in universal symbolism, a central place in which a transformation (death, rebirth, initiation) takes place and where a link is established along the vertical Axis.

As center of the world and origin²⁰, or heart²¹, and as an illuminated place²², it is where communication with higher and lower states takes place along this vertical axis. It is therefore hardly surprising that the cave should be the archetype of the spousal and maternal matrix²³, and that entering it—or being welcomed into it—should constitute an initiation²⁴

Thus, for the Sufi mystic al-Hallāj (858–922), in his Diwān, the cave is

the place of divine hospitality, proximity, and original knowledge, […] the center of the world, a place outside time and space, for original knowledge belongs to the pre-eternal world, the sacred world.²⁵

The same is true of Ibn ‘Atā’ al-Adami (10th c.), who sees in it the passages of fanā’ (“extinction”) and baqā’ (“supra-existence,” “subsistence”), that is, death-resurrection, except that these are experienced “at the level of the world of the spirit, without passing through natural death.” The cave is thus also a place of divine hospitality and of

pre-eternal light, which could signify the pre-eternal and original knowledge mentioned by Hallāj, for knowledge is light.²⁶

The same is found in the Sufi exegete Abū l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (986–1074). He adds, however, the notions of tafrīd (solitude) and tajrīd (stripping away), which precede and bring about extinction (fanā’). It is an interiorized “spiritual dwelling.” Hence, in ‘Abd al-Razzāq al-Qāshanī (d. c. 1330), “the sacred place is no longer the cave, but the human body”²⁷ itself.

We may add that, for Ruzbahān Baqli al-Shirāzi (12th c.), the cave is above all a symbol of union and of the bridal chamber, while for Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207–1273), the Cave

is no longer even a spiritual place, a dwelling, a station, or a topos in celestial geography. It is not even a state (hāl), as in Hallāj, but quite simply Love […], His Love, which encompasses the entire world like a matrix.

Enough has been said. The vagina, the Cave par excellence, is indeed a symbol of divine hospitality, a place of transformation, spiritual as well as physical (matrix), and of initiation into knowledge or love. This symbolic spiritual topos, this inner center, recalls the presence of God in the innermost depths of the human person. In Christian language: “Know this: the kingdom of God is within you” (Lk XVII, 21; in Greek, εντος υμων εστιν: “it is inside you”). Certainly, the cave appears “empty”: this is God’s transcendence; yet every emptiness is filled with God: this is His immanence in the Ground of the world²⁸.

Although this indwelling by God applies to man as much as to woman, it is she who contains the symbolic cave that reminds both of them of the inner presence of the Holy Spirit—the Spirit who “is that of the Father and the Son and ours”²⁹.

The Creation of the World

If sexual union in love symbolizes the creation of the world, it is not so much because the act of union consists in procreation—which it rarely does—but because it commemorates the encounter between the Christic Axis and the Ground of the world. Indeed, if God the Father creates through His Son (the Word), where does He create? In the Holy Spirit! This is creatio ex nihilo per Verbum in Spiritu Sancto³⁰, that is, creation out of nothing through the Word in the Holy Spirit, who are “the two hands of God”³¹.

It is for man to live a “Christic act” and to understand that there is no action without receptivity; for woman to live a “pneumatic act”³² and to understand that there is no receptivity without action. It is for both to recognize, in the grace of their union, That which transcends them and sustains their subsistence³³. Each being both subject and relation, woman and man, beyond any possibly distinct roles in their union, are virtually both Christ and Holy Spirit: therein lies their intrinsic deiformity.

Trinitarian Circumincession

Circumincession is defined as the “existence of the persons of the Holy Trinity in one another; their mutual compenetration founded upon the unity of essence”³⁴. But this deserves further explanation:

Nothing matters in the eyes of the Father but the Son, who is equal to Him in all things; without Him, the Father is nothing: He exists as Father, and as God, only because He begets the Son to whom He gives all that He is, divine Nature and divine Essence. Thus, the divine Essence consists in this total gift; the Father exists only because He gives Himself in His entirety.

Reciprocally, the Word knows Himself in the Father and exists, as Son and as God, only insofar as He is begotten by the Father. He is the divine Essence only because He receives it from the Father; it is the same Essence, given by one and received by the other. But the Son, in turn, constitutes Himself only by giving back all that He has received; He can receive the divine Essence only if He gives it to the Father.

The mutual exchange of the divine Essence between the Father and the Son, this total and perfect gift of free will, constitutes the reciprocal Love of the Father and the Son. But this mutual Love, which proceeds from the will to give totally, must itself, in order to exist, be given totally. The gift of the Love shared by the Father and the Son is then expressed in the necessary third Person, the Holy Spirit, as Love and Essence, as the substantial and essential bond that unites the Father and the Son in the unity of one and the same Love.³⁵

Clearly, sexual union in love offers each person the opportunity for this total gift of free will that we call reciprocal love, in the image of Trinitarian circumincession. Indeed, “there is a resemblance between the union of the divine Persons and the union of love between human persons,” as St. John Paul II points out³⁶; hence the communion of persons

is to be understood […] as a participation in an “unfathomable divine communion of persons” (TDC 9, 3) within Trinitarian life.³⁷

Sexuality is an act [… that] reflects the relationship of love of the Trinitarian God and participates in God’s creative act.³⁸

Hence the insatiability (desire) and instability (divorce) of unions: persons are called to exist in permanent communion, yet this communion can be fully realized only in the eternity of God.

It is for woman and man to realize—to make effective—the threefold structure of every gift: the giver, the receiver, and the gift, which, in the Absolute, are the Persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit. It is for them to enter symbolically—that is, here, spiritually—into the motionless vortex of the absolute and reciprocal Gifts of the three Trinitarian Persons, who “mutually contain one another”³⁹.

Footnotes

1. Amers IX – “Étroits sont les vaisseaux” [“Narrow Are the Vessels”] (ninth and final episode of Strophe).[↩]
2. “La tradition dans le christianisme,” lemondeduyoga.org, August 31, 2005; cf. Revue Française de Yoga, no. 14 [former edition], autumn 1983, pp. 3–14.[↩]
3. The same applies, from this point of view, to active absorption by another orifice.[↩]
4. One of the roots of “orgasm” refers to “kneading” (Littré).[↩]
5. The polysemy of sēmĕn in Latin is significant: seed in agriculture; in botany: fertilizer or spelt, but also cutting, shoot, sucker, scion, offshoot, and bud; in philosophy: atom, principle, element; and figuratively: stock, race, lineage, blood, as well as origin, cause, principle.[↩]
6. In Roman mythology, Fons (or Fontus or Fontanus) is the god of springs and running waters.[↩]
7. Vatsyayana, The Kama Sutra, op. cit., p. 46.[↩]
8. ibid., p. 75. It “consists of several broad rows of marks.”[↩]
9. Mouhammad al-Nafzāwī, La prairie parfumée…, op. cit., p. 183. For “God Most High has said in the Qur’an: ‘Those men and women who guard their portal’” (ibid.).[↩]
10. ibid., pp. 183, 188–189.[↩]
11. Anaïs Languebien, op. cit., pp. 13–14.[↩]
12. ibid., p. 14. “It should be noted that nowadays ‘sexual intercourse’ is literally translated as 性交 (xìng jiāo) or 性关系 (xìng guān xì), where 性 designates ‘sex,’ with the ‘heart’ radical (心 xīn) and the idea of ‘being born, growing’ (生 shēng)” (ibid.).[↩]
13. It should be noted that in the Tantric ritual, with the śakti “riding” the shiva, the phallus is verticalized; cf. André Van Lysebeth, op. cit., p. 204.[↩]
14. Christ on earth (Incarnation), Word at the Creation of the world, Son within the Trinity.[↩]
15. Or again: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, thrones, dignities, dominions, authorities. All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and all things subsist in him” (Col. I, 15–17); “Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor. VIII, 6).[↩]
16. Incarnation stripped of all divine attributes in order to assume the human condition.[↩]
17. We draw here on material from GRIC (Groupe de Recherches Islamo-Chrétien), “La caverne entre symbolique universelle et imaginaire soufi,” 2006, online; also from Vanessa Hélène Sandrine Hernandez (1984–), Le Chêne aux quatre ruches, Thebookedition.com, n.d.; as well as René Guénon, Symboles fondamentaux de la Science sacrée, Paris: Gallimard, 1962 (repr. 1965), and Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles, Paris: Laffont, 1973.[↩]
18. Site of Muhammad’s first revelations received from God through the angel Gabriel in July or August 610.[↩]
19. A miracle that appears to be common to Islam and Christianity, in which seven palace officers escape the persecution of Christians by Emperor Decius (reigned 249–251) and sleep, hidden in a cave, for three hundred years (Christianity); or in which six ministers of King Diaclitianus, governor of Philadelphia (present-day capital of Jordan), together with a dog, having become monotheists (the dog as well), are forced to flee and likewise sleep for three hundred years sheltered in a cave (Islam).[↩]
20. Cf. René Guénon, “L’idée du centre dans les traditions antiques,” op. cit., p. 84.[↩]
21. Cf. Jean Chevalier…, op. cit., p. 288; René Guénon, op. cit., p. 218.[↩]
22. “The initiatic cave is illuminated from within, so that it is outside it that darkness reigns” (the “outer darkness”); René Guénon, op. cit., p. 212.[↩]
23. Cf. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, op. cit., pp. 285, 288.[↩]
24. Ibid., p. 195.[↩]
25. GRIC, op. cit., p. 7.[↩]
26. Ibidem[↩]
27. Ibid., p. 13. Vanessa Hernandez draws a parallel between al-Qāshanī and St. John of the Cross (d. 1591), who, in his Living Flame of Love, uses the symbol of the cave in relation to the powers […] of the soul: memory, understanding, and will, which are capable of receiving the greatest goods, the infinite, once freed from all creatures. For when each of these powers is empty of all that is created, it experiences a burning thirst for God, a hunger, and melts into expectation. St. John of the Cross and Qāshanī thus converge, since for both of them the cave symbolizes faculties proper to all human beings, and because both propose a path of inner purification accessible to anyone who has the will to follow the path of stripping away. Cf. La vive Flamme d’amour, Paris: Seuil, 1995, pp. 92–95 (ibid. and n. 57).[↩]
28. Likewise, in the “cave of the heart” dwells Ātma, the universal Spirit; cf. Chāndogya Upaniṣad, 3rd Prapāthaka, 14th Khanda, shruti 3, and 8th Prapāthaka, 1st Khanda, shruti 1; René Guénon, L’Homme et son devenir selon le Vêdânta, ch. III.[↩]
29. St. Augustine, De Trinitate V, 14.[↩]
30. See our Introduction à une métaphysique des mystères chrétiens (imprimatur), Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005, ch. 14, pp. 197 ff.[↩]
31. “Ontologically, God gives being by projecting His Charity into a relative exteriority, into an unheard-of otherness. Thus the absolute Gift of divine Life becomes this Gift of being to the world. This Gift […] passes through the Son, for the Son and the Spirit are ‘the two hands of God’ [St. Irenaeus, Contra Haereses IV, praefatio, PG, vol. VII, col. 975 B]: everything is made through the Son (the Word) in the Spirit; the Son (the Christ) is the Axis of the world and the Spirit its Ground”; Bruno Bérard, Introduction à une métaphysique des mystères chrétiens, op. cit., p. 250; following Jean Borella, La Charité profanée, Paris: Éd. du Cèdre, 1979 (repr. as Amour et Vérité, L’Harmattan, 2011).[↩]
32. The Greek pneuma, “breath” (spiritus in Latin), designates the Holy Spirit. See, for example, Odette Mainville, “De la rûah hébraïque au pneuma chrétien : le langage descriptif de l’agir de l’esprit de Dieu,” Théologiques, vol. 2, no. 2, Oct. 1994, pp. 21–39.[↩]
33. Jean Borella proposes spelling the French word subsistence with an “e” (from the Latin subsistentia) when the term designates the fact of subsisting (permanence in being), in order to distinguish it from subsistance, meaning the means of human sustenance (food) and military supplies (cf. Lumières de la théologie mystique, p. 86, n. 183).[↩]
34. eglise.catholique.fr/glossaire/circumincession/. Emphasis ours.[↩]
35. Abbé Henri Stéphane André Gircourt (1907–1985), Introduction à l’ésotérisme chrétien, treatises collected and annotated by François Chenique, Paris: Dervy, 1979, vol. 1, treatise I.2, pp. 42–48.[↩]
36. Cf. Gaudium et Spes no. 24, 3; John Paul II, Abrégé de La Théologie du corps, Y. Semen ed., Paris: Cerf, 2016, p. 223.[↩]
37. John Paul II, ibid., p. 217.[↩]
38. Evangelium Vitae § 43.[↩]
39. St. John Damascene, De fide orth. I, 8.[↩]