REVIEW:
A Packed Trunk RITUAL SEX, edited by David Aaron Clark and Tristan Taormino
(New York: Rhinoceros, 1996).
Copyright 2001 by Jean Roberta.
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This compact paperback with vague, smoky images on a black cover resembles a sorcerer's trunk, filled with strange, beautiful and scary objects. Published by an imprint of the erotic publisher Masquerade Books before its drastic downsizing in the late 1990s, this book already seems like a collector's item. (If you could get your copy autographed by an editor, as I did, it would probably increase in value.)
In the foreword, Tristan Taormino describes the subject-matter as "the uneasy-yet-sublime territory where sexuality, religion, and spirituality intersect." She explains further:
"People often investigate religion for the same reasons they turn to sex: to help make sense of our complex, fragmented, ever-changing identities and lives; to pay homage to personal spirits, deities, and even demons; to take a soulful journey inward, searching for personal enlightenment and spiritual transformation.”The intentions of the editors are explained thus:
"We wanted to collect writings which strive to accomplish a number of different goals: they challenge the separation of sex and spirit; they melt the boundaries of false dichotomies like Western/Eastern, Judeo-Christian/New Age, and Anglo/tribal religions; and they create and celebrate diverse notions of sin, worship, faith, and healing intertwined with pleasure and desire."
The editors have organized a mass of diverse material into overlapping categories in five sections:
1: Sacred Blood,
2: Ritual, Religion, Rite,
3: Worship and Sacrifice,
4: Demonology, and
5: Healing Spirits.
As a first-of-its-kind anthology, this collection combines such items as Laura Antoniou's clever vampire story told as a Jewish lesbian's search for her roots, Alice Joanou's acid-trip fantasy of the Virgin Mary and the Egyptian god Anubis as a whore and a john and non-fiction such as Terence Sellers' irreverent but dead-serious essay, "The Catholic Religion as a Sadomasochistic Cult."
The total effect of this hodge-podge is somewhat dizzying, but each piece approaches the intersection of sex and spirituality in a way which is satisfying in itself. This reviewer recommends sampling the entries one at a time instead of skimming the book at one sitting.
Both editors have contributions in the book. In the first section, devoted to blood rituals, Tristan Taormino has a story about an encounter in a red, candle-lit room between a Latina with a knife and her "virgin" ex-Catholic date. Pat Califia's article in the same section, "Sharp Shiny Things," approaches a topic which might not be thoroughly explainable in words: the appeal and significance of ritual cutting. As she (before her recent sex-change) explains: ". . . it is important to know where you can cut and where you cannot . . . But I am not sure I can pass on the deeper part of it, the part that is spiritual and psychological." She discusses blood as a symbol:
"In the realm of magic, blood is the most powerful product of the human body. It is a potent symbol of both life and death, healing and pain. When people bleed, they let things go; but blood is also a binding substance, a pledge as well as a purge. It seals oaths and cements connections between people. Lady Macbeth was right: once you get somebody's blood on your hands, you can't wash it off again."
In the third section, editor David Aaron Clark has a story which deals indirectly with blood as it describes the performance of a dominatrix, "Our Lady of the Wrist Restraints," in a "theater of pain" complete with audience. This piece, like several others, suggests the spiritual and emotional effects of AIDS as an incurable, sexually-transmitted condition.
The sequence of the last two sections, "Demonology" and "Healing Spirits," somewhat resembles the grand finale of the classic animated movie FANTASIA, in which a night full of demons is followed by a peaceful dawn heralded by "Ave Maria." Several of the "demon" pieces, particularly the optimistic sermon, "Faggot Rant," about "dykes and faggots trying to vision a way to come together," do not seem especially hellish to this reviewer. The "healing" in the last section seems equally ambiguous, although most of the pieces in it focus on transformative sexual pleasure for women.
On this topic, the most fascinating piece of non-fiction is "Pasiphae: The Woman Who Fucked Bulls" by Will Tracy, a High Priest of the Goddess. Tracy claims that the human-animal unions which produce hybrids such as the Minotaur in ancient Greek mythology are based on even older religious rites in which women actually mated with animals. To this day, according to he author, a wide range of male animals (apes, monkeys, goats, pigs, camels, bears, tigers, even porpoises) are sexually aroused by menstruating or ovulating women although they cannot be aroused by any other females outside their own species. Tracy claims that the taboos and prejudices of patriarchal culture have almost wiped out the historical evidence of a practice which dates back to the beginnings of human history.
Appropriately enough, Sandra Lee Golvin's "healing" poem, "Fisting," uses animal imagery:
"I am so hungry hungry for snake food a fat mouse to swallow whole I am wanting something furry to eat some creature with A wet nose and a tail And she wants me too is waiting to be eaten has lived her life To meet this death of consumption her body fattened and awaiting The fangs and the tongue inside I move into her she opens up her jaws I move inside copper-head Serpent easing in jaws wide tongue flickering shedding skin Shedding skin."

This lesbian activity is described as a ritual in a temple.
If you can acquire this book by serendipity or magic spell, consider yourself blessed. Some of the information it presents is arcane, while some is so appealing to the senses that it seems self-evident. In the best traditions of religious and sexual freedom, this collection offers wildly different routes to approximately the same goal.