Sex is sacred. It seems to have always been this way, with dancing girls, choruses singing in a heavenly-style, (and goodness knows molested altar assistants). Always up until a certain Age.
For example, the almost obscene word "harem" (Turkish, from Arabic حرم ḥaram "forbidden place; sacrosanct, sanctum," related to حريم ḥarīm "a sacred inviolable place; female members of the family" and حرام ḥarām, "forbidden; sacred") indicates that what we consider sacrilege and irreligious today was once held sacred in temples (revealing advanced architecture, materials, and math others gave humans in different places), churches (communes or congregations of people not buildings), and religious beliefs.
Harem refers to the sphere of women in what is usually a polygynous household and their enclosed quarters which are forbidden to men. It originated in the Near East and came to the Western world via the Ottoman Empire. That's according to Wikipedia.
But all of this pre-Axial behavior sounds like it emerged out of the same general region that centers in the Near East (at the base of mythical Mt. Sumeru: Sumeria, Mesopotamia, Babylon). From there it extended out in all directions -- towards Egypt in the west, India in the east, Jerusalem in the north, and Arabia in the south. The Greeks and Romans (and the great walled Chinese) still carried on until something happened in the Axial Age: some kind of sexism took over and made us believe this is the way it has always been -- sexually uptight, mysogynistic, patriarchical, imperial rule from the top.
It's as if unsavory aliens (maybe nagas, yakkhas, asuras or reptilians, ogres, titans) landed, made a deal with small countries that turned them into superpower empires with enormous senses of entitlement and talk of a "divine right" to conquer and rule the world. "Divine"? "Handed down from space" -- which is all the div in "divine," deity, and deva stands for -- has come to mean a terrible injustice. It set up a whole upside down world that closed down the right side of our brains.
Something happened to our creative, preverbal, idetic imaginations. And we have been systematized and simplified where even meditation -- the most natural thing in the world connecting us to reality -- does not make sense without step by step instructions, books and diagrams, a guru, and lots of words. Is it any wonder people, or entire movements, get back to the land, enjoy free love, take mushrooms (or DMT-friendly drugs as opposed to harmful synthetic chemicals brewed in labs and distributed by operatives for the clandestine services). And we laugh and call them hippies, bonobos, and drop outs. Hmmm.
Berlusconi's Italian Harem
TIME.com
The woman at the center of Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi's latest sex scandal says that when she was 9 years old, she was raped... converted from Islam to Catholicism. Not all of Italy is impressed. A management consultant grew so disgusted with the things she saw on Berlusconi's shows ("Bunga Bunga") that she made her own video to raise awareness of the problem, splicing together scenes from various shows, including one, from a show called Joking Apart, that shows a woman in a thong hung on a hook in a meat locker. More>>
