Speaking of Jesus loving porn stars and strippers, I just realized something about the Da Vinci Code and the subsequent catapulting of Mary Magdalene into the spiritual spotlight.

If you’ve been following the controversy over Mary Magdalene at all, you might know that she traditionally was often seen as having been a prostitute who turned from sin and followed Jesus. The Da Vinci Code and associated Gnostic speculation recasts her as a woman representative of the suppressed feminine side of religion which the patriarchal Catholic Church (almost) drove into the ground. The idea of her being a whore has been replaced with the notion of her being the “divine feminine.”

Now, I think this is a worthy development in popular spiritual understanding and gives the spotlight to a lot of important ideas. And hey, let’s face it: women are divine (although so are men). But I realized that there may be another even more radical reading of the Mary Magdalene story which is being unfortunately swept under the rug.

I remember back before the Da Vinci Code came out, I used to come across these really eye-opening articles about the topic of sacred prostitution, or the so-called “sacred whore.” I don’t have any of those original bookmarks that I read way back when, but there is a real wealth of information available on the subject nowadays as well. If you find any other good links, please drop them in the comments!

There is even a practice (devadasi) which lingers in certain part of India even today where young girls are “married off” to a temple and become incarnations of the goddess, acting as sacred prostitutes for people in upper castes. Though I’m sure a few people in the Mary Magdalene revisionist cults are in fact still holding onto her as a figure of not only sacred sex, but also sacred prostitution, far far more seem to be rebuilding her as a sort of beautifully non-threatening and largely unchallenging archetype of female sexuality.

Again, I am all for this, and it’s about time. But since this is myth and symbol we are dealing with, we owe it to ourselves to use it to it’s fullest extent. That means we ought to look at it from a multitude of different perspectives, rather than trying to fix it to a new and better one. The fact remains that one of those perspectives is a radical challenge to most people’s conventional views of sexuality. While it seems that only very conservative people are threatened by the idea of a feminine aspect of God, how many more people are threatened by the idea that sex is a spiritual act? How many more people are more threatened by the idea that sex for money outside of love with a complete stranger could also be a profoundly spiritual act? It’s easy and comfortable to argue that passionate sex with a person you’re completely in love with is spiritually acceptable. But how much harder is it to “swallow” the idea that something as over the top as bukkake could also be an incarnation of the divine on earth?

One of the ideas that I found the most shocking back a few years ago when I was researching this topic of sacred sex in more detail was an arch-feminist essay which was declaring that marriage was nothing more than institutionalized prostitution. The thinking went that women in marriage are basically trading exclusive sex rights to their husbands in return for food and protection. The idea then was that prostitutes - sacred and otherwise - were merely boiling down this form of the social contract to its barest essence, and taking control of their destinies and bodies. How many fundamentalist Christian knees would knock together in fear and dismay over hearing such an idea eloquently and passionately argued? What would happen to the cultural battering ram of “Family Values” if such a threateningly radical viewpoint really caught on? I’m a pretty liberal person myself, but it even gave me pause to consider the implications of such a worldview.

I’m not sure I can live like that, but I think it’s important to let myths challenge us like that, affecting our most deeply held and unexamined assumptions about how the world works and how it ought to work. I’m not saying that all women are whores or that marriage is a perversion of nature. Far from it. But I am saying that we shouldn’t try to neuter myths of their earth-shattering transformative powers simply to advance social agendas and update the clothes, hair-style and chromosomal make-up of God.

Long live the sacred feminine! Long live the sacred whore! Neither needs to exclude the other.