The Transpersonal Temple Maggie Tapert

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His eyes are momentarily blinded as he moves from the blazing noonday sun into the dark cool shade of the portico. He stands still for a moment and allows his whole body to adjust to this cool inviting space. He becomes aware that he is caked with dust and the rank smell emanating from his skin reminds him that it's more than a week since his last bath. The entrance to the house is quiet and unpretentious. A single flame burns on a wood table near the door and a subtle scent of crushed roses fills the air. A veiled women approaches through a door at the rear. She bows before him, reaches out for his hand and without a word, gently leads him through the door and down a darkened hall to a washroom. She leaves him there to clean away the grit and grime of a week on the road. Beside the tub of fragrant water, there stands a golden goblet filled with richly scented red wine. He drops his clothes and sinks into the water with a sigh. Half an hour later, the young woman returns and leads him through the darkened hallways into the holy of holies, the inner sanctuary, the temple of love. Stretched out on large red and gold stripped silken cushions, lies the high priestess, her shimmering veil pulled down closely over her face. He stands transfixed for a moment, then turns and thanks the young serving woman and puts several golden coins in the silver salver, as is the custom. As he turns back to the priestess, she raises her hands and bids him come to her. He stands beside her bed as she lowers her veil and reveals to him her lovely face and her perfect, unblemished body. He sinks down on his knees and buries his face in her robes. All praise to the great Goddess! May I prove worthy!

When I talk to groups about the ancient temples, it is more than just a good tale. I have given seminars around the world and have shared many different dreams and visions of what I imagine the Temple to have been. There was a time, thousands of years ago, before the time of the Patriarchy, when such temples did in fact exist. The sacred whore appears in the earliest records, integral to society when humans were first gathering in cities and learning to write. The major work of the oldest known author, the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, is a paean to the hierodule (sacred whore) of heaven, the goddess Inanna. In ancient Greece and Rome, temple prostitution flourished. Cultures from Japan to Africa have honored the sacred whore. The Jungian psychologist Nancy Qualls-Corbett has gone into great detail about the implications of the temple, the hieros gamos (the sacred marriage) and that most powerful of all archetypes, the sacred prostitute herself.

What seems however much more interesting to me is that, without the support of written documentation, without the support of scientific proof, without the support of investigative authors and writers, many people carry such pictures deep within their psyche. For all I know, they carry the information within the very core of their cells, within their DNA. Somehow, without ever having read about it, without ever having heard about it, without even knowing why, they just seem to know. In every seminar where I have told stories of the Temple, there have been 3 or 4 people who will uponhearing my words burst into tears. I see the tears welling up in their eyes and their heads beginning to nod in acknowledgement and they say, "I don't know how to explain it but I am very deeply moved by what you are saying." Or "It may seem weird but I feel certain that I have been in that Temple that you are describing." Or "this has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember." Obviously, this is not a dream that everyone carries. But for those who do, there is a passionate desire to find this place again, to know more about it, to understand what it means for thempersonally in this lifetime. Most of these people have a very deep conviction that they too were in some way, in some form, actually, physically there. They have no doubt. They were there in the temple, living, serving and worshipping. With people who have this magnetic attraction to the Temple, I feel an immediate kinship. It is as if we are family. It isn't that their pictures are the same as mine, it is more that they have the same deep longing to return to a place that includes every aspect of the Self, a place where the sacred and the sexual are fused into one.

In the winter of 1996, I came to the Temple for the first time. I knew at once that this was my home and I continued to serve as a sacred prostitute in the Temple for the next three years. This story I have already told in detail. With a group of like-minded friends, we recreated the ancient tradition of the Temple and we learned a lot about longing, desire and lust but also about disappointment. I never lost my love for the Temple but when it was time for me to move on, I knew it. I had passed my fiftieth birthday and there were younger priestesses who were ready to take my place. But I also had a lingering feeling that creating the ancient temple, as we held it in our memories and recollections was not the answer for now. It was not the answer for today. I felt that there was something in this archaic picture which didn't work for us anymore. I felt we needed new pictures, new symbols, new visions which took into consideration all that we had learned from one another at the end of this decade, this century, this millennium. In the spring of 1999, I began a new series of programs for women and men. Working in separate gender groups, we focus on rediscovering the sexual Self. This is not about partnership. These programs are about individuality - finding and reconnecting with your own individual essence. Rediscovering the holiness of your sexual power, learning once again to give space for your sacred sensuality to blossom. We ask the question "what does it mean to be WOMAN?" "What does it mean to be MAN?"

We, as women, do not know how to identify ourselves as individual sexual beings. We have been so shaped by our partner-oriented culture that our individual sense of self, especially around sexuality, has vanished and been replaced by the idea that we have value only as one half of an imagined whole. Some single women tell me that they are not sexual at all since they haven't had a partner for several months or years. As far as sex is concerned, women identify themselves by the reflection seen in the eyes of men. If there is no man, she doesn't exist. But the truth is that we are each an individual sexual being from the very first moment of our lives until the last. Eroticism and female sexuality have been buried under the expectations of a society, which values woman primarily as wives and mothers. This kind of reflected-glory, based on what you produce or who you sleep with, leaves women disappointed, disconnected from their true identity as powerful sexual beings and frequently very angry at men.

Talking to men, I feel their sadness and frustration at being unable to live out their true sexual longing. Devoted to their families, good providers, fine fathers, these men are sexually hungry and longing for so much more but not knowing how to get their needs met. Often, they have created a smooth, sexless, inoffensive persona, which hides the hunger and the longing of the true inner man. A sensitive, conscious man is wounded by our cultural rejection of the power of the Phallus. This center of male identity and joy is seen as a danger and a threat to women and children, an instrument of annihilation. It's no wonder that men carry an excessive load of shameand guilt around their genitals and have lost this essential connection to their authentic sexual Self.

Both women and men are finding the healing that they need through a return to their individual sexuality as an integral aspect of the sacred Self. And soon these two individual paths for men and women will lead over the threshold into the cool inviting entrance of a new kind of Temple. I am creating a Temple for TODAY, inspired by our dreams, visions and memories of yesterday and adapted to who we are as a society at the beginning of a new age.

My vision is a Temple to which both men and women can travel. It is a place of individual healing for both men and women but also of communal healing of the wounds that we have suffered between the genders. It is a place for the integration of the sexual and the sacred. It is a place of celebration and honoring, of both our differences and our similarities. It is a place of reconciliation. It is a place to dance and a place to create. It is a place to live and experience that which we are not yet able to show in our everyday lives. It is erotic and deeply sensual. It is beautiful and lush. It is open and free. It reflects the new culture that we are creating today. It represents our lust, our desire, our dreams and our convictions. It is a place of the highest possible standard and the highest imaginable service. It is the home of love.

My work is about individuality. It is about personal growth through the honoring and integration of all aspects of the individual. It is about finding your way back to sexual and spiritual empowerment, regardless of whether you are single or in relationship. My work is about learning to heal your own wounds for yourself and learning to take responsibility for that which you have created in this lifetime. When this healing work has begun, when you have drawn the focus back to your own personal individual process of growth and you have seen that the path home leads you to true self-love, you are ready to come to the Temple.

I cannot create the Temple alone. The Temple is not an edifice constructed of stone or glass, made by human hands like a church or a mosque. This is a moveable Temple, which exists between the worlds, transparent, fragile and fleeting. It is created with love and magic out of the dreams and visions of men and women with open hearts. We come together and hold the intention to create it, for a moment, for an hour, for a day and it suddenly appears. When we let it go again, it vanishes back into the mists of time. It is ever new and never the same. It exists for us because we join together and say "YES" to a vision of joy and healing. In this Temple, in a cultivated atmosphere of lush sensuality, it is possible to open into higher levels of healing for both our society and ourselves. Visualize with me the new Temple for our time. If this is a place you know, if this is a place you are longing to discover, if your heart is touched by this vision of healing, come, step over the threshold and experience the cool dark respite from the burning sun. Come, smell the scent of crushed roses. Come and let your dream awaken at last.


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