A really objective basis for an opinion regarding the relations between religion and sexuality can only be obtained when we cease to consider these relations as an affair of dogma and of the confessional, and study them upon the basis to which they properly belong—to wit, the anthropological. For these relationships are peculiar to the genus homo as such. The sexual element is quite as prominent in the religions of primitive peoples as in those of modern civilized nations.
Anthropological science has hitherto been occupied more with the fact than with the explanation of the remarkable relations between religion and sexuality. There can, however, be no doubt that these relations arise out of the very nature of mankind. The various anthropologists and physicians who have occupied themselves with these problems are in agreement upon this point: that the connexion between religion and the sexual life can be explained only on anthropomorphic-animistic grounds—that is, by the same kind of ideas which Tylor has proved to be the foundation of the primitive mental life.
Thus, the great physician and anthropologist Theodor Billroth doubts the existence of any pure religious perception entirely free from all sensual elements. In a letter to Hanslick, dated February 21, 1891, he writes:
“In my opinion, it is nonsensical to speak of a special religious perception. What we call by this name is either a purely fanciful and imaginative opinion, which may rise to the intensity of hallucination, and has for substratum any kind of imaginative product which excites a yearning in the believing or loving individual—or else, in fanatics, it is an actual erotic excitement, like the rhythmical prayer-movements of the Mohammedans, the dancing of the Dervishes, or the jumping of the Flagellants. The Church as bridegroom for the nun, as bride for the monk, has a similar signification. It is, in a certain sense, the continuation of the service of Isis, and of the festivals of Aphrodite and Bacchus. Man has always created his gods or his god in his own image, and prays and sings to him—that is, properly speaking, to himself—in the artistic forms of the period. Since the so-called divine is always a mere abstraction or personification of one or several human attributes in the highest conceivable potency, it follows that human and divine, worldly and religious, cannot really be of differing natures. Man cannot, in fact, think anything supernatural, nor can he do anything unnatural, because he never can think or act except with human attributes.”
This explanation coincides with the view of Ludwig Feuerbach, who has especially insisted on the anthropomorphistic element in religio-sexual phenomena in his essay “Concerning Mariolatry.”
M’Lennan and Tylor were among the chief discoverers of the animistic aspect of religio-sexual ideas. In a way analogous to his attitude towards other phenomena, primitive man assumed the activity of spirits in explanation of the sexual impulse and everything associated therewith; and he paid divine worship to the sexual impulse, as the visible and palpable manifestation of those spirits.
I myself have more fully described this physiological process in a somewhat different manner (“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 76, 77), and I quote here my account of the primitive deification of the sexual.
As something elemental, incredible, supernatural, the sexual impulse made its appearance in man’s life at the time of puberty; by its overwhelming force, by the intensity, spontaneity, and multiplicity, of the perceptions to which it gave rise, it awakened feelings which enriched, vivified, and inflamed the imagination in an unexpected manner. This phenomenon, overwhelming him with elemental force, filled primitive man with a holy fear. He ascribed it to a supernatural influence, and this supernatural influence became associated in his circle of perceptions with those others which he had previously experienced, and which had aroused in him the feeling of dependence upon one or several higher powers, before which he knelt in worship. To what an extent the metaphysical invaded the whole sexual life of man, Schopenhauer has clearly shown in his “Metaphysic of Sexual Love.” Religion and sexuality come into the most intimate association in this perception of the metaphysical and in this feeling of dependence; hence arise the remarkable relations between the two, and that easy transition of religious feelings into sexual feelings which is manifest in all the relations of life. In both cases the surrender, the renunciation, of the individual personality is experienced as a pleasurable sensation. Schopenhauer has described in a classical manner the metaphysical impulsive force of love striving onward towards the infinite and the divine, whose analogy with the religious impulse we cannot fail to recognize.
In his thoughtful book, “The Vital Laws of Civilization” (Halle, 1904, p. 52), Eduard von Mayer has also discussed the religio-sexual problem. He starts from the idea that man regarded as higher than himself that which he was unable to master, and, above all, hunger and love.
“The pains of ungratified hunger or love plough deep furrows, into which falls the seed of voluptuousness, of satisfied hunger, or of the joys of love. And to primitive man, to whom the entire universe is full of living beings, hunger and love also appear as divine powers, which pain and plague him until their will is satisfied.”