Sex--The Unknown Quantity: The Spiritual Function of Sex

by Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall

This was accompanied by a loss of generative activity, and thus, they argued, the power that made man god-like (the creative energy) left him. This was indeed a calamity greater than we in this generation realize, although we know that old age with consequent cessation of physical vigor is the dread enemy of the undeveloped man. Even our supposedly advanced thinkers have the absurd idea that sexual-energy dies with the physical body. The few who have risen to the place where they realize the truths made plain by soul-consciousness, know that old age is but physical; that it is the vacation time between the functions of physical activity and that of the soul-life. Old age is the wise provision of the Cosmic Law which compels those who will not do so of their own volition and wisdom, to transmute the life-energy into higher channels. If the race knew enough to consciously transmute the creative sex-energy into an interior function, there would come to pass the time prophecied by St. Paul when Man shall consciously "lay down his body and take it up again."

There are spiritually advanced men and women today who can consciously leave the physical body as they do the house in which they live, while they visit distant places, annihilating space. To these the body is no more than a garment. Thus death is overcome and the knowledge attained that we are souls using a physical body; that death does not in itself confer upon any one either immortality or youth or love, but that these may be acquired by acts of virtue and unselfish service—not as payment or reward for unwilling work, but as the result of unfailing law, which gives what we demand.

What we demand we naturally work for. If we serve Love, we get the coin in which Love pays as naturally as we get the checks signed by Jones when we work for Jones, and by Smith when we work for Smith.

Death merely discloses our interior nature. If we have failed to transmute the life-energy into a love that is deeper than mere animal instinct; if we have missed the beautiful and the pure and the lofty idealism of Love, we will find ourselves as age-worn after death as before the change. But again we may note a wise provision of the Cosmic Law, for it is almost impossible for a human being to live through many years of life without having loved some person or some thing with at least a spark of unselfish love. Fortunately almost every one is better interiorly than he appears to our limited vision. The most depraved of mortals has his moments of the higher vision.

From this deduction of inquiring primitive man, namely that the blood was the source of procreative virility, it is easy to trace the logical result in the terrible practise of blood-sacrifice which reigned so long and which, carried from one nation to another, and engrafted into the God-idea, has come down to us in the story of the "sacrificial lamb," at length personified in Jesus, the Son of God, as a final act of propitiation.

The blood-atonement idea is naturally repulsive to civilized beings, and were it not that nearly every one who adheres to the old form of orthodox Christianity swallows theologic interpretation of the Bible as he would swallow a dose of castor-oil, by closing his eyes and holding his nose, the teaching as thus interpreted would be stopped by police authority. And yet we may readily trace the gradual descent of the God-idea of the ancients until it reached the culmination in the idea of sacrifice of a son of God Himself.

In their blind but eager groping for some means of escape from death, even as we of this day and generation are groping, the early races observed that birth was accompanied by blood; that as age came on and the blood became thin, and in the case of the female ceased to flow at certain reproductive periods, the power of generation ceased. What more natural to primitive man than that he should conceive the idea of sending back to this unknown and invisible power behind the veil of the sky the blood, which he must need to supply his creative energies? And when the sacrifice of animals was not sufficient for this God, they concluded that it must be because he required the blood of man.

And so at first the old and the sick and the deformed were sacrificed; but as it was seen that this did not answer the need, they began to sacrifice the young, and naturally the slaves were substituted for the aged, as affording more blood; and when this failed the idea came, that the sacrifice must be that of one who was innocent of the world, and so they selected a girl or a young man, who had been secluded and trained to the thought of sacrifice, and in whom the sex-function had been rigorously suppressed.

And still the old grew bloodless and death claimed his toll, and so they conceived the idea of voluntary blood-sacrifice, and we read of repeated occasions in which fanatical ones offered themselves freely on the sacrificial altars as atonement for the sins of their people. At length this contagion of sacrifice consummated in the idea that the only Son of God Himself became a voluntary offering to pay the final debt of transgression and set men free from death, that they might have eternal life, which to them meant life in the physical body.

It is not at all possible that Jesus had any such idea of his mission. He was far too illumined for that, even judging from the meager accounts which we have of his life and message. But when the story of his mission on earth came to be told and retold the idea of blood-sacrifice as payment for the privilege of physical virility, so implanted in the race-thought from centuries of such belief, could not die immediately, and thus it reaches us today adown the centuries and is re-told (though we trust not believed) in most of the Christian churches in this civilized century.