## Metadata - Author: [[Giorgio Tricarico]] - Full Title: Lost Goddesses - Category: #books ## Highlights - A single individual may still feel him- or herself contained in some frame of meaning, even a religious one, in Western societies; but the gap between how the individual feels and perceives their way of being-in-the-world, and how the collective level has turned out to be over more than two centuries, is actually a primary, and inadequately explored, issue of our current era. On one side, we have human beings, with their beliefs, and acute need of frames of meaning, while on the other, the world they inhabit has long ago become fatherless, godless, frameless, limitless, technological, and functional. ([Location 604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=604)) - Note: After Virtue? - TePaske reminds us that “the patriarchies of Christianity or Judaism—in blatant disregard for the deep connection between religion and sexuality—have failed to provide adequate images, symbols, mythologies, or rituals through which the full range of sexual instincts might be accepted, positively valued, reflected upon, and imaginatively cultivated” (TePaske, 2008, p. 3). ([Location 758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=758)) - Speaking about sexuality in the consulting room is usually not a taboo, and even talking about masturbation is quite commonly possible and acceptable. But the number of patients telling me something more detailed about their relation to internet porn has been negligible, so far. This sort of taboo seems particular to the use of internet porn, and we know from Freud that where there is a taboo, there is a desire. ([Location 780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=780)) - The topic of the repression of our multiply desiring nature is too complex to be explored here in a deeper way.8 Let’s be content to note that this topic has always had to do with the need of the ego to keep some control, during the process of its emergence, of the uncontrollable par excellence, that is, sexual drive.9 Also, this topic has had to do with the strong need of past societies to maintain some kind of stability, whose outcome has always turned into a complex and more or less rigid set of norms and rules about relationships, sexuality, and marriage. And it has had to do with the numinous nature of sexuality, that placed it in dangerous contiguity with the sacred, whose monopoly and strict administration have been pursued by all the forms of religion. ([Location 797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=797)) - On another, more positive, hand, the fading of all the previous frames of meaning, the consequent no-limits mentality, and the growing difficulties in looking for a deeper meaning in life and in the experience of our mortality, may awaken a strong need to regain our bodies, our sensorial reality, the sphere of senses and desires, as a foundation of a more balanced way of being in the world. Accordingly, a recovery of the previously repressed desiring multiplicity inhabiting our psyche and of corporeal sensuality, and their integration, could represent a step ahead on a transformative and individuative path, on a personal and on a collective level. Porn openly shows multiple desires in action, it speaks of enjoying sex with anyone, at any time, everywhere, giving evidence to elements normally exiled in the shadow. For these reasons, porn could have a role in this transformative path, but much more often it is merely turned into (and experienced as) a regressive compulsion, a narcissistic fulfilment, just another product that we must consume, again and again. ([Location 819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=819)) - Repressed and demonised for two thousand years, as was the previous one, a second shadow aspect possibly conveyed by some kinds of porn is what could be described as a pristine joy of the body, that is, a joyous sensation of naturalness, energy, and pleasure in feeling the sensuality of the body. The lack of judgement about physical appearance, the acceptance of the other, no matter who he or she is, the straightforwardness of the expression of desire, the directness of the sexual exchange, the apparent atmosphere of free enjoyment of sex in any form,10 may be transmitted to the spectator, who, at times, can feel energised, resonating with an excitement that is more than sexual. I would describe it as a joyful feeling of being an excited and responding body, in sharp contrast with the more usual thought of having a body: a body that must satisfy the aesthetic requests of advertisement and fashion, a body that has to perform, to be slim, fit, flawless, a machine-body that carries our brains around, a disconnected body. ([Location 826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=826)) - When porn is evoking such pristine joy, masturbation too may be experienced as a healthy, energising relationship with one’s own body, a way to care for oneself, and not as a sad, solitary surrogate for sexual intercourse, a sort of tranquilliser for anxiety or depression, a compulsive necessity, and so on. The joyful sensation may persist alongside masturbation, in the form of a more confident feeling of being grounded, more attractive, and living in a world full of possibilities. ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=838)) - Despite millennia of evolution of the soul, human beings at every latitude are still inclined to the abuse of the weak for strengthening their own fragile, empty identities, to the libido dominandi, to the violence against the neighbour, the animals, and nature. Capitalism, economic liberalism, consumerism, the exploitation of natural resources, and of people all over the world, are basically the legalised and more acculturated transposition of the very same primal ingredients of our psyche. ([Location 849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=849)) - Assuming that exerting power over someone is a basic ingredient of our original psychic structure and development implies that this element may resonate in the deep shadow of everyone. Porn offers a very immediate opportunity to get in touch with this element, to feel some degree of resonance in oneself, and to see which emotions are evoked by this discovery. ([Location 888](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=888)) - I maintain that it is the deep resonance with some shadow content of our own psyche that determines the haunting quality that a porn image may assume for the viewer. ([Location 902](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=902)) - From that observer position, one can painfully feel the extent to which porn does not keep the promise it makes. The excitement for the quest for the right scene and the right girl, the wandering desire, mirrored by the images or induced and taught by them, the quivering voluptousness, all the arousal is doomed to vanish, often in the very moment of the ejaculation. Those juicy girls and women, their real flavours remain unknown, and unattainable. The promised ocean of pleasure turns out to be just a glass of water. ([Location 1050](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=1050)) - Human consciousness unfolds and expresses itself in the difference, in the distinctions that avoid the con-fusion of things. Proceeding towards the non-differentiated, thus, would correspond to a gradual abandonment of conscious subjectivity, and to a movement towards the indistinct background that preceeds the birth of consciousness itself. Human beings have always placed the indistinct and the non-differentiated beyond what is human, in the realm of the sacred and the divine.13 The indistinct, that is, the background from which consciousness emerges over the history of millennia, has been usually perceived as the original chaos from which human beings needed to differentiate, and that they always feared. ([Location 1209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=1209)) - C. G. Jung has acknowledged the tight relation between religion and sexuality, underlining the close association between the sexual instinct and the striving for wholeness, which is part of what he called the religious instinct of the psyche. ([Location 1234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=1234)) - Contemporary porn could be seen as the desacralised, technological, and consumerist counterpart of the so-called “sacred prostitution”, a ritual institution in the honour of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, passion, fertility, and warfare, as portrayed by Nancy Qualls-Corbett in a book of hers.6 Inanna was a moon goddess, afterwards worshipped as Ishtar in Babylonia, as Anahita by the Persians, and as Anath, Astarte, or Ashtart by the Canaanites and the Phoenicians. In Egypt, she was originally called Hathor, and later on Isis. The same type of goddess was known as Cybele in Lydia, Aphrodite in Greece, and Venus in ancient Rome. ([Location 1391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=1391)) - The following physical description of the sacred prostitute may perfectly fit most of the girls or women in current porn as well: “Her gestures, her facial expressions and movement of her supple body all speak to the welcoming of passion […] Her movements are graceful, as she is well aware of her beauty […] in her ecstasy she forgets all restraints and gives herself to […] the stranger” (Qualls-Corbett, 1988, p. 22). ([Location 1398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=1398)) - The frames of meaning of that ancient world where sacred prostitution had a precise place and important ritual functions have been buried under more than four millennia of human history. The advent of patriarchy, the transition from polytheism to Judaic and Christian monotheisms, the split between matter and spirit, the repression of the body and the feminine, the consequent demonisation of sexuality, the gradual fading of any mythological, religious, and metaphysical frames, and the epochal rupture of the “death of God”, are some of the milestones that we can quickly mention, and that have led to our current technological, desacralised, disenchanted world. ([Location 1413](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=1413)) - According to Mircea Eliade, though, “the majority of the non religious people still behave religiously, although unawarely […] Modern men, who pretends to feel and to be irreligious, have at their disposal a camouflaged mythology, and several degraded rituals” (Eliade, 2006, p. 129; translated for this edition). Eliade avers that “the profane is nothing but a new manifestation of the same constitutive structure of human beings, that previously was manifested through sacred expressions” (ibid., p. 10; translated for this edition). Under this perspective, porn as well may hold some of the elements that in very ancient eras had been related to the sacred and the divine, but manifested and displayed in degraded forms, since we live in a totally different moment of the history of consciousness: de facto we are “metaphysically naked”, outside any mythical and religious container, in a technological world where everything functions but does not offer sense/direction, in relation to the ultimate meaning of life. ([Location 1420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=1420)) - This specific colour may bring to mind Luigi Zoja’s reflections in an interesting work of his, about drug addiction.8 Zoja avers that behind the growing consumption of drugs and alcohol in Western societies of the last forty years, it is possible to see a powerful, unconscious need of initiation. In his work, the ancient sacrality of initiation rites is placed in relation to the destructive forms it assumes in the current materialistic and consumerist world. It is once again Mircea Eliade who reminds us that the biggest difference between archaic societies and the contemporary world lies in the disappearance of initiation, and of its rites of passage. Our current desacralised, technological, and consumerist world is very likely to produce a deep feeling of meaninglessness in its inhabitants, hence an equally intense need of change, renewal, and transformation, aimed at regaining the lost meaning and a more rooted sense of identity. In ancient societies, initiation was exactly complying these deep needs for change, renewal, and transformation, and implied different rites of passage. These rites were essentially expressing an initiatic death, and a subsequent initiatic rebirth. ([Location 1433](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=1433)) - Porn imagery could be considered one of the post-modern stages where grace winks, and immediately disappears, under its consumerist degeneration, similarly to what happens in many forms of art as well. Were we able to become deeply aware of all the shadows previously listed, to integrate them, and to gain momentum in order to go beyond them, so to say, even porn could become something else. It could become a place where female performers can embody aspects traditionally belonging to the area of the sacred, and gift the world with glimpses of grace, being careful not to pay too high a price. It could become a place where male performers give up the patriarchal antics, and open themselves up to look for the correspondent form of sacrality possible to masculinity. It could become a place of inspiration for spectators, who would no more be mere consumers and voyeurs, devoid of any ethical responsibility for what they watch, but human beings who will try to embody porn in their own lives, as a real experience of the pristine joy of the body. It could become a place that may teach human beings to approach the non-differentiated waiving the as if quality in its fake aspects of displacement, and preserving it in the acceptance of a genuine form of playing. Porn could become a place where grace is not the swan-song of a dying woman’s soul, but a divine quality, evoked, embodied, and accordingly worshipped by those who would be deeply tuned on it. ([Location 1554](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CCNK7X3&location=1554))