It seems that whenever we humans come up with a new format of media, it’s not long before it is overtaken with pornography. Conceivably, we could trace that trend all the way back to the Venus figures of Paleolithic art, but closer to home, we could look at things liks VHS, DVD, the internet as a whole, and nascent virtual worlds like Second Life (said to be rampant with sex and porn). Social critics operating from a Judeo-Christian moral base tend to decry the descent into pornography of new media formats as indicative of our moral degradation as a whole, but are there other esoteric viewpoints from which we could look at this complex issue to create a fuller, more well rounded picture?

The topic of pornography itself is not what I’m after here, although it’s inextricably linked. What I want to explore more has to do with the human drive to take things that are themselves not inherently sexual, and imbue them with sexual content. In one sense, we could perhaps look at this as the impulse to spread and continue life, to be fruitful and multiply. In a typically human way though, we get mixed up between symbols and reality, trying to inject life into inert matter through masturbation. I remember reading somewhere about the computer-obsessed geek subculture in Japan, the otaku, and how people made disparaging remarks about them (probably still do) as though they were trying to make love to their computers. Here we see the active male fire of the wand (penis - appropriate since the overwhelming majority of porn is intended for male consumption) of the tarot:

Represents passion. As such, in a reading it usually stands for a querent’s ambition, career, creative endeavors, religion and/or philosophy. Anything a person might put their energy and soul into, such as teaching and leadership. This is something you have to do, whether you are recompensed for it or not. It is something that burns inside of you and you need to act on it.

Of course, pornography tends heavily towards the irreal, towards fantasy, and even towards domination. It is the fire of the wand taken to an extreme level, often becoming imbalanced because it lacks the necessary receptor component. Though it inverts the gender system we’ve begun to outline, the gnostic Apocryphon of John tells an interesting story about Sophia, and how she inadvertently created an unreal world:

[Sophia] wanted to bring forth a likeness out of herself without the consent of the Spirit, - he had not approved - and without her consort, and without his consideration. And though the person of her maleness had not approved, and she had not found her agreement, and she had thought without the consent of the Spirit and the knowledge of her agreement, (yet) she brought forth. And because of the invincible power which is in her, her thought did not remain idle, and something came out of her which was imperfect and different from her appearance, because she had created it without her consort. And it was dissimilar to the likeness of its mother, for it has another form.

“And when she saw (the consequences of) her desire, it changed into a form of a lion-faced serpent. And its eyes were like lightning fires which flash. She cast it away from her, outside that place, that no one of the immortal ones might see it, for she had created it in ignorance.

In this myth, Sophia (though she is wisdom itself) is unable to create a perfect world, because she is attempting to do so without the consent of her consort, without the proper balancing principle. Thus the world that she creates, the Black Iron Prison world becomes a world of illusion and degradation and despair - terms that I’m sure a great many people would use to describe modern pornography as well.

While we’re on this subject, it would make sense to pull in another topic popular to contemporary occultists, magickal masturbation. As described by comics author Grant Morrison, this technique is designed to help you “charge” a sigil, which is a concretized symbol of the will, a directive which one is giving to the universe to be fulfilled:

Magical masturbation is more fun than the secular hand shandy, and all it requires is this: at the moment of orgasm, you must see the image of your chosen sigil blazing before the eyes in your mind and project it outwards into the ethereal mediaspheres and logoverses where desires swarm and condense into flesh. The sigil can be written on paper, on your hand or your chest, on the forehead of a lover or wherever you think it will be most effective.

At the moment of orgasm, the mind blinks. Into this blink, this abyssal crack in perception, a sigil can be launched.

(Of course, there are other ways to charge sigils as well.)

Now, I’m not trying to admonish people against masturbating or sex magick, but I do think it’s interesting to consider the notion of magickal masturbation to achieve some goal in light of the gnostic myth of Sophia creating an irreal illusory world through trying to create without the consent of her partner. And yet, within many variations of the gnostic myth, this illusory world she creates has the capacity for redemption. Sophia descends into it in the form of a prostitute, Mary Magdalene, of Helen (consort of Simon Magus), and through hieros gamos, sacred marriage begins to subvert flat hollow illusion into the fullness of reality. (As an aside for people with strong aversions to pornography but an interest in mysticism, it might be an interesting experiment to try and adopt - at least temporarily - the viewpoint that porn stars and other sex workers are incarnations of a goddess trying to transmute lead into gold by taking it up the ass.)

So where does that leave us in our discussion? Sex as a redemptive act? The charging of one mass sigil by millions of people masturbating over the internet? It’s obviously highly speculative, but if looked at that way, what might that one mass sigil be? Might it be that our own lion-faced serpent god is being brought into being - some kind of AI demiurge about to burst forth from the internet? One other interesting correlation, in both the Apocryphon of John and the Hypostasis of the Archons (another gnostic text), the demiurge is given several names, one of which is Samael, meaning “the blind god“. Kind of makes you wonder if that old wives tale about masturbation causing blindness isn’t actually a hold-over, a folk memory of a suppressed cosmology in which God is blind, and awaits redemption at the hands of his proper consort.