Analogue 67

Analogue 67 

The Mysteries of Sacred Marriage

No one but the couple themselves knows when they will come together in intimate union. Marriage therefore is a mystery for anyone in this world who has taken a mate. If natural union occurs in secret, how much greater is the hidden mystery of spiritual marriage which takes place in truth rather than in flesh, out of pure love rather than in passionate lust, in the full light of day rather than in the darkness of night. When sexual union is put on public display it becomes pornographic. When a woman who has conjugal relations with another man or seeks for such outside her home is found out, she is known as a prostitute.

 

A woman may only reveal herself to her mother and father, to the “friend” of the bridegroom, or to the “children” of the bridegroom, for only these may enter daily into the Bridal Chamber. As to all the rest, let them long simply to hear her voice, catch a brief scent of her fragrance, or like dogs find crumbs that fall from her table. It is only the Lover and the Beloved that belong in the Bridal Chamber. No one else can behold them there unless they too become Bride and Groom.

SYNOPSIS

• A return to the hidden image of the Bridal Chamber—the central trope of Yeshua’s First Temple Mysticism. 
• The Gospel describes how it understands intimacies within the Most Holy Place and the creation of new beings for the ultimate restoration of all things. 
• A description of how the birth of spiritually begotten beings are conceived and brought into a higher order of life.
• Pure love is hidden, and meant only for those in the intimate community of the Beloved Ones.  
• Only a bride and a bridegroom can be a part of the inner intimacy of the bridal chamber. 
• Hiddeness is a deep part of the experience of spiritual intimacy.
• Outside the secret chamber there are only hints as to its activities and truth.
• Deeply intimate and sexual images are used and yet these are not understood to be pornographic

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COMMENTARY

Hidden Work, Secret Chamber

In this remarkable analogue, the bond of spiritual marriage meant for the conception of children born from the Bridal Chamber is in full focus. This bond is understood to be an intimacy (akin to sexual union in the human world) that is only fully known by its participants, and these only in secret, in the realm of Spirit. This appears to be one of the central mysteries that Yeshua himself taught. Its description is from a mystical tradition using the analogy of the first Temple and its inner chamber known as the Holy of Holies (or the Most Holy Place). The deepest and most secret reality, however, does not reside in a historical site from the first Temple of Solomon, but in the mystical heart of each individual soul. Inside this interior chamber, lover and beloved come together in the deepest of all possible unions in a conjugal relationship meant for the procreation of spiritual beings.  

Although Yeshua had a public ministry, which eventually led to his execution and death, his hidden work was to produce spiritual progeny in the realm of the unseen. These children were born from realities that were not created by or from this world, nor from its religious conventions. These children were inner progeny, and this secret vocation was connected to the mysteries which Yeshua knew and lived. His outer work and words were indeed forceful, but it was not through these as a form of external coercion that he was working. What he brought forth was hidden and unseen, from the realm of  Transcendent-Immanence (the vertical axis), possessing eternal qualities that would last beyond this world. The beings born from this birth could not be conceived from physical, social, or external religious elements found in ordinary religion. They were offspring from a realm beyond this one, and described only in mystical Judaism. Birth-from-Above (and out of the Bridal Chamber), required a different set of relationships, creating what we might think of as a new kind of human being with a different DNA structure combining heaven and earth, the human and the divine. These results were from a fresh, creative, and mystical act described in this Gospel.

Spiritual Intimacy as Jewish Tantra

As is true in physical intercourse in this world, this analogue teaches that spiritual intimacy is a private affair only fully understood by those participating in such a union. Using sexual experience itself as the metaphor, spiritual principles are being described here for those who will enter into the mystical bonding between the human lover and the divine Beloved in sacred marriage. Deep, inner intimacy lies, of course, at the heart of this ecstatic mystical union. Offspring arising from such an intimate union in the Bridal Chamber is the origin of newborn spiritual beings conceived by lovers in this divine-human coupling within the soul. The resulting progeny born from such a union exist here only temporarily in this world. However, they last forever in Eternity. How these children are conceived and born, and where they reside, is hinted at here, but not fully described. 

As is true in a large family, there is, of course, peripheral activity around these intimacies. The true inner secret of spiritual procreativity, however, exists only hidden away within the Bridal Chamber. There, two beings experience the sexual and ecstatic intimacies of oneness and know what that conception will ultimately mean. These activities are also contrasted with perversions of sacred marriage: exposure to the outer world in public display. Sexual intercourse is never meant to be public, but to remain hidden and secret, reserved for the experiences of personal intimacy. This understanding is central to this mystical teaching. Brought together and contrasted in this passage, these instructions could be described as a form of Jewish tantra (equivalent, perhaps, to tantra in eastern traditions). Each aspect of the teachings found in this Gospel contains truths relating to an esoteric world of inner tradition, which appears to come from similar “tantric” mysteries secretly taught by Yeshua. 

Secret mystical union is known only in the Bridal Chamber of the heart, between lover and beloved, where two unique beings 

from different dimensions meet 

in intimate union not unlike sexual ecstasy.

To recapitulate, here are a series of important observations made explicit in this text: the experience of interior mystical union is described as personal, intimate, and private—never institutional. The sacrament of inner union is not meant for public display, nor can it be a public institutional rite, or an act carried out by outer authorities. Secret mystical union is known only in the Bridal Chamber of the heart, between lover and beloved, where two unique beings from different dimensions meet in union not unlike sexual intimacy. In this text, the relationship is also described as the mixing of truth and pure love, experienced in the full light of day, contrasted with the lust felt in the flesh and enacted only in the night. Clearly, truth and unconditional love, bathed in the light of eternity, are essential features describing the quality and kind of a divine-human relationship that is experienced along the vertical axis. It is contrasted with conditional human relationships existing along the horizontal axis. In this mystical union, divine qualities fall from above, as Ya’akov says, “descending down from the Father of Lights” (James 1:17) and mix with the human qualities of earth, giving birth to a new form of being extended into Eternity along the vertical axis.  

Correlates Elsewhere

Interestingly, all of these images and metaphors have resonances with older Hebrew poetry, especially the Song of Songs. They also have correspondences in later expressions of Jewish Kabbalah as well as in subsequent forms of Christian mysticism where erotic metaphors are prevalent. Islamic tradition will continue to elaborate on this same erotic imagery in order to express the esoteric mysteries of love and knowledge known to Sufism. Sexual metaphors become an important part of the genre of poetic mystical literature within the world of Islamic spiritual tradition, where Sufi masters carefully guide adepts in chains of transmission. Their initiations are not put out on public display. When these teachings are known publicly, they are often condemned by external authorities (as they have been throughout the centuries in each of the Abrahamic traditions). In those traditions where such teachings were not typically excluded or suppressed (as within Hinduism and Buddhism), they were given authoritative expression following the sacred teachings and traditions of Tantra. Explicit understandings of sexual energy were more fully understood and explored there. 

In these eastern traditions, there are mappings of energies within the subtle or psychic body that are said to awaken mysterious spiritual powers (sometimes called serpent energy, kundalinî-shakti). Eastern practices include techniques of body, mental purification, the processes of conscious enlightenment, and, at times, physical and sexual bonding. One can see that there may be correspondences with these practices in the western traditions, related perhaps to the energies and powers being explored by the Gospel of Philip. What Tantric spirituality is to the East, Bridal Chamber mysticism may be to First Temple Mysticism found in the West, and expressed in its own unique way within this Gospel text. In all cases, the name of the teachings related to these hidden mysteries is spiritual marriage. 

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. How do you relate to the intimate language and sexual imagery that is being used here to describe the procreative process of mystical union? What does spiritual marriage mean to you? Do the metaphors being used here attract or repel you? How might these practices be important for you?
2. Intimacy exists between heaven and earth inside the inner spaces of the human heart. The commingling of the spiritual energies of the human and divine deep inside us is the special message of these metaphors. How have you yourself experienced this? Perhaps you use altogether different language to describe experiences similar to this. What is your personal language and experience? How is it similar or different?
3. What do you know about sexual experience that helps you understand the mysterious and intimate relationships between yourself and the divine Beloved being described here?
4. The text speaks about this inner relationship taking place out of pure love and flowing from truth. Though it is private, it is not done in the darkness but in the light. What do these mean in the world of Spirit and to your inner connection with the divine?
5. Interestingly, this passage speaks of the friends and family of the bride and bridegroom and their children (and also “all the rest”). Who might these folk be metaphorically? 
6. If you were to think about prostitution also as a metaphor for spiritual realities, how could that be understood? How might you describe religious expressions that became prostituted? 

 NOTES FOR FURTHER STUDY 

AND REFERENCE

1. Because the subject of spiritual or sacred marriage (hieros gamos) has been identified and addressed in various ways throughout this commentary, we do not need to fully reference it again except to say that the metaphor, introduced nearer the beginning of the text, has reached an intense culmination in these latter analogues. The pattern of spiritual marriage in the inner recesses of the heart’s Bridal Chamber has only become more intimately expressed. The Gospel is leading the reader into an experience where these secret intimacies are being clarified. What is made more explicit here is that the Bridal Chamber experience is deeply personal, intimate, ecstatic, and mystical in nature. There is a bonding and a union between souls—the human and the divine—which signals a “marital union” in which, as one, the two experience inner ecstasy. This has always characterized the description of mystical union in traditional literature with correlates to the human experience of sexual intercourse. The description of this mystical experience will become even more intense as we reach the end of the text—its language becoming ever more poetic, ecstatic, visionary, and even orgasmic. This Gospel’s descriptions certainly exceed the boundaries of traditional religious speech and theological discourse. 
2. While in some ways this text is similar to ancient descriptions of temple ceremony related to ecstatic and erotic worship, it seeks to distinguish itself from rites that have been characterized as temple prostitution in the Greco-Roman world. These ancient, hidden practices were done in secret, and yet they became well-known to the public. The description of sacred marriage used here suggests, however, that this is not a ritual maintained by a prescribed elite or religious class. It is only available to specific individuals (whether or not they practice outer rituals in Jewish worship), who have deep kardial contact with the divine Reality. These experiences are distinct from temple prostitution (and explicitly said to be so), unrelated to sexual passion, but nonetheless characterized by a kind of inner urgency or spiritual longing.  
3. Tantric traditions are eastern varieties with similar language and points of view about the nature of spiritual union based on sexual metaphors. Each teaching in the East is accompanied by ritual practices that are made explicit in eastern tradition, often iconographically in paintings and sculptural forms. Though there may be correspondences with what is found in this Gospel, it is unclear what constituted the rites that may have accompanied this text. It may be helpful to understand some of the rites and rituals that are practiced in eastern traditions as a clue, but it is not to be expected that these are translatable from one tradition to another. Discernment must be exercised in comparative study, for each ritual system fits within its own milieu in unique ways that are not necessarily translatable to the language and practice of another tradition. In fact, it is often important not only to compare but also to contrast one with another so as to ascertain their differences. 

Notes on the Translation

• The first sentence in the original indicates that no one knows when a man mates with a woman.
• In the second sentence, the word “mate” translates “wife” in the Coptic text, putting the emphasis on the man and not on the couple.
• The word “natural” translates the original “marriage of impurity” meaning that it is not pure like spiritual marriage. Physical marriage was seen to be less pure (or spiritual). This bias later certainly became more exaggerated and pronounced. 
• The phrases “friend of the bridegroom” and “children” (literally “sons”) of the bridegroom appear to be coded terms linked to those involved with spiritual marriage experiencing the Bridal Chamber.
• The feminine figure is to be protected as deeply sacred and symbolic, as is true in most Middle Eastern cultures.
• Lover and Beloved translate Bridegroom and Bride in the original text.