Sex and death: A mysterious magnetism?
Is there a relationship between a culture of sex and a culture of death? I want to qualify the question by stating that I do not see, nor do I think there exists, a direct relationship between the examples of sex and death I have just cited. I do not see, for example, a relationship between changing attitudes toward sex and the carnage of the World Wars, or in world starvation. If the examples of sex and death cited above are related, they are related only because of deeper and less obvious impulses. My question is more subtle, and could be generally stated as follows: Does sexual craving have anything to do with fascination with death, perhaps even with promoting death?

The answer would seem to be categorically negative. Sex makes hearts throb; death makes them stop. Sex arouses energy; death is inertia. Sex is (or can be) life giving; death is life extinguishing. Sex and death seem polar opposites.

One of the curious facts of both mythology and religion, however, is that sex and death are frequently celebrated in tandem. The Baal and Astarte cults that the Israelites encountered in Canaan after the conquest were an inseparable conglomerate of fertility cults and sacred prostitution on the one hand, and child and human sacrifice on the other. The mystery cults of the Hellenistic world—Mithra, Isis and Osiris, Cybele or Magna Mater, Dionysos, and the Andanian Mysteries— were all rooted in the powers of fertility and the cycles of death and rebirth. In his Exhortation to the Greeks, Clement of Alexandria castigated nearly all of them for their sexual eroticism and fascination with death.

Ishtar, the chief goddess of Egypt, was goddess of both love and war. Greek Athena, who was extensively worshiped in the Mediterranean world, was a virgin goddess of fertility and also the goddess of war, as symbolized by her omnipresent shield. Shiva, the most popular god in the Hindu cult, is both the divine progenitor, as symbolized by phallus and lingua, and at the same time the destroyer god of death. This is a very inexhaustive list, but it suggests a mysterious magnetism between sex and death.

What might be the attraction between the two? Sex and death are both liminal experiences that transport us beyond the borders of the rational. They are the two experiences in which mundane life is swept up into ecstasy and unknowing. Like the paint pots and hot water pools that perforate the earth’s crust at Yellowstone, sex and death, eros and thanatos, erupt in our otherwise controlled and predictable lives with mysterious powers from beneath and beyond. No wonder seekers of contact with life’s mysteries have found in sex and death a terra sancta of the ultimate. They always have and they always will. In his theories of the subconscious, Freud posited two independent drives at the root of the human personality, one of which was sex (the libido), the other of which was aggression and the death instinct. If Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell are right that mythology is rooted in deep psychology, then Freud’s journey inward and the mythological and religious journey outward derive from the same source. They are one and the same journey.

Modern connections between sex and death
In the modern world sex and death are not buried in the recesses of psychology and myth, however. There is an inevitable relationship between the culture of sex and the culture of abortion. The severing of sex from morality has led to the willful termination of life in the womb, and now even in the birth process. It is not very far, really, from the fertility and death cults of Astarte and Moloch. Homosexuality might appear to isolate sex from death by offering sexual expression without the possibility of conception. But I wonder if the isolation is complete. Perhaps there is a death instinct in thwarting a potentially life-giving act.

The distortion of sex invites us to revisit its meaning and purpose in Scripture. The first commandment of God is to "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth" (Gen.1:28). This may be the only commandment of God humanity has truly fulfilled. It is good we have, for in so doing we show, perhaps unknowingly, that God’s gift of sex has at its purpose life, not death.

The Bible’s connection between sex and life
The world, of course, is afraid of the life that God wills for it. The problem is not only with the obvious error of unrestrained sexuality. Often in history the Christian faith has had to combat the error of a false asceticism with regard to human sexuality. In the early church, the Manichaeans, Carpocratians, and other sects feared sex and sought to bridle and even deny it.

Already in the New Testament there are warnings of those who deny the faith by "forbidding marriage and demanding abstinence" of things that were created good by God (1 Tim. 4:15). According to Milton, even the devil fears sex. "Our Maker bids increase, who bids abstain but our Destroyer, foe to God and Man?" (Paradise Lost 4.748-749).

The Christian faith does not worship sex, but neither does it fear sex. It is the perversion of sex, its reduction to mere eros, that links it to death. The Christian faith elevates sex to the covenant of marriage and honors it, respects it, and sees in the covenant "a great mystery," to quote Paul (Eph. 5:32). In the marital union between a man and woman Scripture sees the sexual purpose of humanity to be fulfilled, resulting in male and female forming something new-- "one flesh" (Gen. 2:24; Mark 10:9). There is something God-like in this oneness, for the nature of God is oneness. This union is life-giving, not death inducing, an intimiation of an even greater union and mystery, as Paul called it--that of Christ and the church.