Paganism and sexuality

Are Pagans More Sexually Open?

My pagan friends suggest that they can be, and in debates I've seen usually Christianity comes in for a bashing. Actually matters are more complex than that. A few historical notes....

The ancient pagan world had many kinds of different beliefs and practices regarding sexuality.

According to Julian the Pagan Emperor, Attis was an orphan left by his mother on the bank of the river. He became a handsome youth, who was in love with Cybele who forbade him to love any other woman. Nevertheless, Attis fell in love with the river nymph Sangaria and had a sexual intercourse with her in a cave. Cybele made him mad, and during this time of madness he castrated himself. Then he was pardoned by Cybele, who caused him to ascend to the celestial worlds.

For the followers of Attis, the highlight of ritual worship for the elect, was to get into an ecstatic frenzy, and then practice self-mutilation of the genitals! One of the few accurate sources in Frazer.

Early Stoicism thought was that sex, like all things, should be in common, and this includes a rejection of marriage and the incest taboo. This changes in Antipater, Hierocles, and Musonius, who argue for heterosexual marriage as the norm. And by Seneca and Epictetus, the pagan Stoic ideal is the celibate male. In fact, where sex does occur, for Musonius and Seneca, it is only all right within marriage, and even then only for the purpose of reproduction.

Moving to early Gnosticism, sex is equated with death. It is part of the material world, and must be avoided at all costs. The later Cathars (of the Middle Ages), who also espoused a form of Gnosticism, saw the "pure" as those renouncing sex, and were vegetarians because they would not eat animals that procreated (except fish, whose method of propagation they thought was spontaneous!)

Returning to ancient paganism, for Plato, sexuality was characterized by mental frenzy as opposed to rationality (Republic 403). The only justification for sexuality to exist at all was for procreation. Therefore, all sexuality outside of marriage should be forbidden by law (Laws 838-9).

The Manichees - an eclectic pagan religion which drew on Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism/Mithraism and Greek paganism, named after its founder Mani, were like the Gnostics, believers that all sex, even in marriage including the birth of children was evil and sinful. Thus celibacy is best. It thrived between the 3rd to 7th centuries.

So I don't think one can blame Christianity for all the woes about sexuality; in fact, one could argue the case that a lot of Christian thinking on the subject was coloured by pagan philosophy, as can be seen by the way in which the "Song of Songs" was sanitised as an allegory, rather than taken as a literal description of erotic love.