It’s May, it’s May, the lusty month of May! That lovely month when everyone goes blissfully astray.

Camelot

The month of May derives its name from Maia, a nymph in Greco-Roman religion. According to the Homeric Hymns: “Maia bare, the rich-tressed nymph, when she was joined in love with Zeus….And the purpose of great Zeus was fulfilled.”

Springtime is an aphrodisiac.

Now is the month of maying,
When merry lads are a playing,
Each with his bonny lass
Upon the greeny grass.

English Ballad by Thomas Morely (1595)

Ancient May Day festivals are said to have been orgiastic. Young men and women copulated in nature to ritually fertilize the fields (and to biologically fertilize the young women). The maypole is an obvious phallic symbol, a representation of the divine phallus plunged into Mother Earth to fertilize her womb. (It’s sexual symbolism led dour English Puritans to ban it during the Interregnum.)

Beltane was an ancient Gaelic festival which falls between the spring equinox and summer solstice which celebrated fertility. Wiccans and other neopagans mark it as an observance of the sexual union of god and goddess which fecundates nature. One self-proclaimed witch enthuses, “Celebrations include the obvious pleasures of sexual coupling!” Some engage in the “Great Rite in Truth”: the uniting of man and woman in ritual sex.

Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,
   Or he would call it a sin;
But - we have been out in the woods all night,
   A-conjuring Summer in!

—Rudyard Kipling, "A Tree Song" (1906)

With the Deaconess, I practiced coitus interruptus. (Her upbringing convinced her that evolution was untrue, Harry Potter contained satanic influences, and that Good Christian Girls shouldn’t be on birth control.) Once, as I was pounding her from behind, I approached orgasm and pulled out, ejaculating on one of her cute ass cheeks. (I had to strain to avoid staining her blue skirt.) As my cum glistened on her butt, I thought of Onan.

So whenever [Onan] went in to his brother’s wife he would waste the semen on the ground…. And what he did was wicked in the sight of the LORD, and he put him to death (Gen 38:9-10).

Onan’s story isn’t one you’ll see in Sunday school class enacted on flannel boards.

The Hebrew term ra’ (“evil”) is employed to describe Onan’s act. Scriptural interpretation of the passage has historically focused on the wasting of seed. Luther condemned the act as “unchastity, yes a sodomitic sin.” Calvin considered it murder: “The purposeful spilling of semen outside of intercourse between man and woman is a monstrous thing…. For this is to extinguish the hope of the human family and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring.” The text was used to condemn any form of birth control. “Onanism” came to describe the sin of masturbation. The consensus of modern biblical scholars is that Onan’s sin was his refusal to fulfill the levirite obligation.

With the Deaconess, I deposited my semen on her ass and her back, on her stomach and her dainty breasts. It somehow felt more sinful than ejaculating into a condom or her vagina. Raised in a tradition that still emphasized the procreative purpose of sex, Onan’s punishment weighed heavily on me. But not enough to stop fucking the Deaconess.

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. – Genesis 3:7

My theology is decidedly Augustinian, so the Fall is crucial to my theological thinking. We are told in Genesis that Adam and Eve originally were “both naked and were not ashamed” in the Garden of Eden (2:25). Then after the man and woman ate of the fruit proffered by the serpent, they became aware of their nakedness and sought covering. Their first recorded act after being expelled from the garden was sexual intercourse (4:1). Or as one commentator memorably puts it, “The moment they knew sin, they fucked.”

A Baptist minister and sexologist recently wrote a book entitled Sinless Sex: A Challenge to Religions. The main thrust of the book is that a scientifically-based understanding of human sexuality punctures the traditional sexual doctrines of the Abrahamic religions, which must necessarily reconstruct their teachings to conform with modern sexual science. A further implication of the title, I think, is that the encrustation of sex with notions of sin should be summarily discarded by an enlightened perception of sexuality.

For those of us who have struggled to adhere to the traditional sexual ethic, this sounds like liberating news. But what if sex is not so sinless? Augustine, dour erotophobe that he was, believed that even within the divinely approved conjugal relationship, the element of sinfulness could not be entirely eliminated. The deformed passions of lust brought about by the Fall, he thought, contaminate the whole of human sexuality. The innocence of the prelapsarian Adam and Eve, particularly in the realm of sex, cannot be retrieved. Those who promote a “shameless” sexual ethic, guided by a certain romanticism, believe that if the old irrational taboos are tossed aside and our sexual desires are openly communicated, sexual dysfunction will cease. I’m not so sure. We are condemned to stand naked and ashamed.

Stephanie hung a print of Lilith in her incall bedroom as a signal of female sexual empowerment. Lilith’s mythology is certainly saturated with sex.

According to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval Jewish text, Lilith (Hebrew לילית) was created from the dust after Adam to be his first wife. Adam wanted to have sex with her in the missionary position. Lilith refused to lie beneath him and flew away from the Garden of Eden. In Jewish mythology, Lilith was imagined as a demoness, a succubus. In the Zohar, a Kabbalistic text, Lilith was portrayed as a “harlot” who “commits fornications” with the “sons of man.” (The Babylonian Talmud had warned, “It is forbidden for a man to sleep alone in a house, lest Lilith get hold of him.”) If, as Judith Plaskow writes, “for the rabbis, a prime instance of the evil impulse was the sexual urge,” Lilith personified the depradations of untrammeled female lust.

Lilith’s defiance of patriarchy and her untamed sexuality has made her a modern feminist icon. “Lilith is the instinctual feminine, hungrily animating [female] sexual longings for the taste of primeval eroticism, seeking sex for its own pleasure without further obligations,” writes Karin E. Weiss. One feminist writes admiringly, “This is sex without love, without procreation, unpartnered, purely for the sake of pleasing the male sexual urge and not at all permitted within the Abrahamic ethos.” (Lilith is considered a patroness of prostitutes and is said to be summoned by black candles and sexual offerings.) Lilith represents the shadow feminine, symbolizing carnal desire and taboo sexuality. “With her legs open and her back arched, she writhes in orgasmic ecstasy, screaming out her pleasure, unashamed for all to hear” (Catherine Hale).

Lilith is both threatening and alluring to men. Kabbalist Ohad Pele says of Lilith:

She poses an erotic seduction that is very difficult for men to withstand. Men yearn for a woman like Lilith, a woman who is able to express the fullness of her unbridled passions, who is willing to be a sexual creature, to be active in bed, to be a woman who derives great pleasure from sexuality and is not one bit ashamed of it…. He will find her in the prostitute, in the courtesan, in the secret lover, in the dark romance….

In Lolita, Nabokov writes, “Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.”