Love Temples vs Play Parties: Exploring Sacred Sexuality and Divine Rituals
What is a temple? A place to connect the human and the Divine
For thousands of years, all around planet earth, humans have created buildings and monuments, some of them very impressive and sophisticated and some very simple and humble, but the way we know to call them all ‘temples’, or ‘shrines’, is because they were all used to serve as a contact places between humans and the divine.
Any temple around the world, no matter the culture or the religion it was made by, was and is always a place of contact between those two realms: human consciousness and the divine.
Love temples are the same.
Love temples are places for us humans to come with our broken humanness and connect with sacred divine realms by means of love, eros, and sexuality.
What is the difference between a love temple and a play party?
Love temples differ from “Play Parties” in the intention behind them.
What is a play party? it is mainly a party. At a party, you come to have fun, enjoy yourself, socialize, and maybe get laid.
What is a love temple? To a temple, you come with a desire to open your heart to the mysteries. Like any temple in the world, love temples should always have altars for worship, corners for meditation, and places for prayer.
The unique aspect of a love temple is that a legitimate altar can be an erected lingam, a place for meditation can be an open yoni and the act of prayer might be combined with pelvic thrusts and deep moans.
In my article “Erotica as a model for the mystical prayer” I dive deeper into the connection between prayer and sexuality, specifically through the wisdom of Kabbalah and Hasidism.
Love temples in ancient cultures
Indeed these were common parts of the rituals that were performed in many ancient temples. In many cultures around the world, including the Middle East, fertility rituals were part of the yearly, and sometimes monthly rituals that would be held in the temple.
Some of these ancient love temples were serving mainly the nation, and it would be the royalty and the priesthood that would engage in ritualistic sex, but in some other temples, usually in local shrines, Kedeshas were available to serve to laypeople and pilgrims.
In my book, “Kedesha: A Timeless Tell of a Love Priestess”, I take the readers into the hidden history of love temples in ancient Israel and specifically Jerusalem.
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Modern-day love temples
Part of the revolution of our times is that a lot of what was kept from the public in ancient times is available today to people regardless of their social status. Our post-modern Love Temples and temple nights are places like that. It doesn’t matter who you are and to what social class you belong, as long as your heart desires to find your connection to the Divine you are invited to the love temple rituals. You can of course go to a church, synagogue, a mosque, or a Buddhist temple, but there it is less likely that you will be able to get naked and worship with your entire being.
Love temples are places that invite you to fully integrate spirit and matter. In a love temple our body is seen as a sacred instrument and your pleasure as sacred energy, or even as an offering.
In a love temple, it is also not really important if you are a Buddhist, a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian, or a total pagan — as long as your religion is the religion of love. Love doesn’t care much through which archetypes you feel it is right to call her, as long as love is what you call, all the rest is not so important.
There is no dogma to love temples, the religion of love is flowing like a river and dancing like a flame. It is alive, not fixed in a box of words. Any teenager that has ever fallen in love knows that no words can ever contain love, therefore love is never a dogma, but a felt vibration.
What do you do in a love temple?
Coming to the temple of love does not mean you are going to get together with someone and have your desires met. In a love temple, there is a place for tears, broken hearts, and the sacred feeling of being alone.
But what if I find myself alone?
I remember stepping once into a love temple in a place where no one knew me. Everybody was engaging with each other, but I was left alone. No one came to connect with me. I felt the pain of loneliness crawling into my heart, but then I felt into all the lonely people of the world. Millions of them. Elinor Rigby, Father Mackenzy, and all the rest. I found myself holding this archetype of the older man that no sexy woman would engage. I felt I needed to hold this position with dignity and in a mode of prayer. It was a very meaningful evening for me. An evening of deep prayer — not for myself, but for all the homeless and lonely people of the world. They too deserve love to reach them, and good sex to open their body to the goddesses. In a love temple, this is an important position — the position of holding the pain of humanity and bringing it into the temple.
I wish we stop calling play parties temples, and start relating to love temples in the deep manner they need to be related to. Or have play parties and shamelessly call them for what they really are, a party with sexuality, which is beautiful too. But let us stop confusing between the two.
Learn more about the connection between Sexuality and the Sacred in my Kabbalah of Love Online Course.
Ohad Pele / February, 2022
