Sacred Sex: The Magick and Path of the Divine Erotic
Gabriela Herstik, 2022
What if the word "profane" once meant not "dirty" but simply "outside the temple"? Writer and practising witch Gabriela Herstik sees sexuality not as a cause for shame but as a spiritual practice that begins with your relationship with yourself. The book describes her rituals, tarot cards as a mirror of desire, and consent, without which, she says, there is no sacred sex.
Who it is for
For anyone who wants to stop being ashamed of their sexuality and see it as part of their spiritual life. And for everyone curious about how a modern witch brings together ritual, tarot cards and consent.
Someone who doesn't accept your boundaries is someone who benefited from you not having them.
What once meant "outside the temple"
Gabriela Herstik's father has served as a rabbi for almost forty-five years. Once, in conversation, he remarked that the word "profane" originally meant simply "that which is outside the temple". Society attached the meaning "dirty, unclean" to it later.
For Herstik this thought became a key. If you consider your own body a temple, then nothing is left outside the temple, and anything can become sacred, sex included. Herstik has practised witchcraft since she was thirteen and serves the Goddess of love. In this book she describes her path: sexuality as a spiritual practice where pleasure, ritual and an honest conversation with yourself meet.
Her main idea is simple. Your sexuality belongs to you and no one else, so the path begins not with a partner but with your relationship with yourself.
The book is esoteric: cards, goddesses, energy and spells. Here all of this is retold as the author's belief and experience, not as science. Ahead are seven steps, from shame handed down by others to an intimacy in which two people see more than each of them could alone. Let's start with a card that many people who read tarot dread drawing.
The Tower falls so the Star can shine
Herstik suggests starting with an honest question. Which of your beliefs about sex are your own, and which were chosen for you by culture, family and religion? Shame almost always turns out to be among the second kind: no one chooses it; it is inherited.
For this work she uses two tarot cards. The sixteenth card is called the Tower: lightning strikes a tower, and a golden crown falls from its top. Many people dislike this card, but Herstik reads it differently: a false crown falls, and power leaves what never deserved it. In her practice the Tower stands for other people's prohibitions, which make a person give their power away to a partner, a church or family rules.
Right after it comes the seventeenth card, the Star: under shining stars a naked figure pours water from two jugs. This is the inner guide that arrives once the old beliefs have gone. The path may begin under the Tower, Herstik promises, but by the end of the book you will become the Star.
She advises going through the collapse itself with great compassion for yourself, the way you would treat your best friend. If panic rises, don't scold yourself; let the feeling pass through your body: go for a walk, jump up and down, cry. Shame will keep coming back in waves, but each time it has less power.
The book's first ritual is built on the same cards. You write one sentence about what you are letting go of, and a second about what you are calling in. The first becomes an amulet that wards things off, and the second a talisman that draws things in.
About the author
Gabriela Herstik is a writer who has practised witchcraft since the age of thirteen, and the author of "Inner Witch" and "Bewitching the Elements". She has written about magick, fashion and sexuality for VOGUE, Glamour and Cosmopolitan.
All books by this author: Gabriela Herstik
Terms from the book
- ecstasy
- Hermit
- profane: From a Latin word meaning "standing before the temple", that is, outside the sanctuary. Today it means worldly, not sacred.
- tarot: A deck of 78 cards known since the fifteenth century. It is used for divination, meditation and ritual, and its 22 main cards, the major arcana, depict the great stages of life.
- Tower: The sixteenth major arcana card of the tarot: a tower struck by lightning. For Herstik it is a symbol of tearing down false beliefs about sex.
- Star: The seventeenth major arcana card of the tarot: a naked figure under the stars pours water from two jugs. For Herstik it is a sign of inner guidance and of living in your own body.
- amulet: In Herstik's practice, an object that wards off something unwanted, such as shame.
- talisman: In Herstik's practice, an object that draws in something desired, such as self-confidence.
- BDSM: An umbrella name for practices built on consensual play with power, restraint and sensation. In this community the main rule is to agree in advance and get consent.
- self-lust: Herstik's concept: the desire and excitement a person finds in themselves and for themselves. She calls it the bold older sister of self-love.
- hard limits: Herstik's name for what a person definitely does not want to try. Boundaries, by contrast, describe what they are comfortable with.
- Goerlich: Stefani Goerlich, a certified sex therapist and author of The Leather Couch. Herstik interviewed her for this book.
- glamour: Herstik's word for everything that changes how you look from the outside: clothes, scent, make-up, jewellery. She considers glamour part of magickal practice.
- grounding and shielding: A visualisation exercise with which Herstik opens every ritual: you picture roots going down into the earth, light from above and a protective sphere around yourself.
- grimoire: A magician's book or journal in which rituals, spells and their results are recorded.
- Virgo: The sixth sign of the zodiac. Herstik links it with the image of the virgin goddess who belongs to herself.
- Hestia: The Greek goddess of the hearth, one of the revered virgin goddesses.
- Isis: The Egyptian mother goddess and sorceress, wife of the god Osiris.
- Lovers: The sixth major arcana card of the tarot: two people in the Garden of Eden with an angel above them. For Herstik it is the symbol of the path of divine union.
- Haven: Sebastian's wife. The couple Herstik interviewed are named in the book by their first names only.
- Sebastian: Haven's husband. Herstik presents this couple as an example of a conscious relationship.
- Pollack: Rachel Pollack, an American writer and tarot scholar, author of the classic "Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom".
All terms
Similar books
Read in Livria
