Venus and Her Lover

by Becca Tzigany

  “All this talk is making me horny!” James said. “Why don’t we move onto the floor?” James was mindful that it was getting late.

  “But I made an apple strudel for dessert!” Nicholas said, with disappointment in his face.

  “It’s OK, Nicki, we can have it later. We can do the dessert course later,” Cleo said.

  Everyone got up. Without premeditated design, we had nevertheless partaken of the first four M’s (fish, grains, wine, meat), and now headed to the fifth M, Maithuna (making love). “You boys sit on the couch,” Cleo directed them as she changed the music. Turning up the volume and the pace, she joined me next to the fireplace. In rhythm to the music, she and I began to dance. “For your titillation and pleasure, gentlemen, we give to you... The Libido Sisters!”

  Cleo’s red curly hair bounced, and she blew exaggerated kisses to the audience, accentuated by her red lipstick. She and I bumped and grinded and swayed, then slowly undressed each other. We exalted in all our feminine radiance while the men indulged the masculine pleasure of watching the Feminine shine. When we were down to our lingerie, we leaned over the three men, helping them out of their clothes. When one of them reached for us, we slid away, having agreed we wanted to tease them, to heighten their desire. Before long, Nicholas, Santo, and James were sitting side-by-side all sporting erect lingams. An image hit me of an ancient landscape, like Stonehenge, with its upright stone pillars. And on holidays we could decorate them with flags and drape streamers between them, and celebrate Rock Hard Penis Day by dancing around them!

  I could not dwell on the fantasy, though I was quite amused by it, because Cleo had started fondling my breasts. My nipples seemed to want to join in on the Rock Hard Holiday, and I noted that whereas in the past I might have felt uncomfortable (an old memory of being molested), at this moment, her touch was very stimulating and pleasurable. She leaned over to lick my ever-stiffening nipples, and I caressed hers. I heard a moan coming from the couch, “Ooooo” …that was James.

  Cleo and I faced one another, so the men got a profile view of us rubbing our bodies together and stimulating each other. I really loved Cleo in this moment. We were sisters celebrating Shakti power, feeling free and beautiful. Santo was right: Hey – this should be normal!

  Now Cleo began peeling off my lacey teddy. When I raised my arms, I heard James again, “Ooooo!” and remembered what he had told me before. It was an incredible turn-on for him to watch me being disrobed by others. During one photo shoot, when I put my hands above my head (the image of the painting “Carnevale di Venezia”) for the men to take off my shirt, James had struggled to not offend the women undressing him, as he was completely spellbound watching me. He had recently told me, “In the Coterie it’s even more intense than in the photo shoots, because it’s so personal with our lovers! Seeing how you open yourself to it all gives me more pleasure than I thought possible. You give of your full sensuality and body at the same time – it makes me hard on the spot!”

  By the time Cleo and I had disrobed each other, the men were like sled dogs straining against their leashes while running the Iditarod. The Libido Sisters really drove them wild, and they practically tackled us down onto the covers on the floor. As Nicholas and James ravaged Cleo, she started laughing hysterically. James was kissing her mouth, and Nick was on her yoni, and I could not tell if she was coming or laughing or crying. The joy was infectious, and soon Santo and I were laughing into each other’s mouths, and the whole room rocked with merriment.

  Our hysterics settled into slurping and groans, as we got into more intense lovemaking. Cleo was lying on the floor with Santo thrusting hard into her, next to James lying on the floor with me grinding on top of him. When Santo raised higher up on his arms, James could not take his eyes off Santo’s lingam sliding in and out of her yoni. I was doing my best to keep my orgasm simmering, but the feelings of connection seemed to be filling the room like a pool, and as the pitch of moans and sighs raised, so did the level of love that was buoying us all up, until my orgasms boiled over. Maybe I was flooding the room – I do not know – but I felt like we were all swimming in the same sea of ecstasy.

  Eventually the energy subsided, and we found ourselves all mushed together on the covers, Nick’s arms slung loosely over my shoulders, Cleo’s foot absentmindedly stroking Santo’s thigh. Firelight danced on the walls, and occasionally the burning wood popped and sizzled the smell of piñon into our huddle. Outside snow was falling noiselessly.

  I extracted myself to go into the kitchen to put on the tea kettle and cut up the strudel. When I re-emerged with dessert, I found my four lovers all dozing. Opening the door to step onto the patio with bare feet, I stood outside naked, letting the snowflakes sting my warm skin. I felt alive in every way a body could feel alive, and in love with a love that was bigger than I could imagine. Scraping up snow and patting it into oversized snowballs, I stepped back into the firelit room to wake up my lovers.

  WORLD MOUNTAIN

  World Mountain

  Then I was standing on the highest mountain

  of them all, and around and about me was the whole hoop of the world.... I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit and the shapes of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the Sacred Hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one almighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father, and I saw that it was holy.

  ~ Black Elk

  Our first year in Taos I would lie in bed, and in the time before dropping off to sleep, I would feel myself flying up to the peak of Taos Mountain. The night was as deep and subzero as outer space, and I would imagine myself suspended alongside the mountain, somehow immune to the cold... and gravity. Storm-force winds blasted snow off the crag, trailing ice crystals that hung sparkling in the thin air and moonlight. So this is where stars are made! I thought. Other nights I found myself atop the mountain amid swooshing clouds, which obliterated everything else except me and the mountain, huddled together like two lovers under bunches of grey wool shorn from some celestial sheep. I would soon learn that what was happening was that I was being summoned by the spirit of the mountain – the Andean people of South America called it the apu. I gladly responded.

  Like the Tree of Life, the World Mountain or Kosmic Mountain is a fundamental archetype of Earth: the axis mundi. Lama Anagarika Govinda considered sacred mountains to be vessels of cosmic power113, which was why pilgrims were drawn to them all over the world, from Mount Fujiyama (Japanese holy mountain), Mount Olympus (home of the Greek gods), Mount Sinai (where Moses met Yahweh) to Mount Meru (Hindu center of the Universe), and countless others. Native Americans sought sacred high places for their vision quests, to meet their spirit guides and receive their visions. W.Y. Evans-Wentz pointed out in his book, Cuchama asnd Sacred Mountains, that while the materially-minded might be drawn to conquer a mountain, the spiritually-minded let themselves be conquered by it.114

  So went my relationship with Maxwaluna/Mó-ha-loh/Má-ha-lu, the Indian names for Taos Mountain.115 The old name Maxwaluna took root and resounded within me, as I was willing to be conquered by the spiritual force of the mountain. I was not alone. Whereas Taos Mountain was its common name, many people called it “the Magic Mountain.” On maps it appeared as Pueblo Peak. By whatever name, the mountain commanded the respect, awe, or at least acknowledgment of all taoseños.

  Joseph Campbell took a long, historical look: “For in the view of the old Sumerian astronomical observers, the universe was neither flat nor a sphere, but in the form of a great mountain rising in stages by the orbits of the circling spheres – the moon, Mercury, Venus and the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – that the imposing temple towers [i.e., ziggurats] were designed to reproduce in local, visible form. Nor were the abyssal sea and cosmic mountain composed of inanimate matter; they were living creatur
es.”116 Accordingly, Native Americans also regarded supposedly inanimate objects – mountains, rivers, sky, rocks, and so forth – as being endowed with spirit and consciousness.

  The ziggurats of the Sumerians, according to Campbell, were attempts to “heal the break” between Heaven and Earth, and on feast days the hieros gamos (sacred marriage) enacted between Inanna and Dumuzi, or their priestly representatives, restored the balance of Sky and Earth by their lovemaking. Thence flowed the power of creation and fertility, for the benefit of all creatures, according to the inhabitants of the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization.

  Indeed the seven levels of the ziggurat corresponded with the seven celestial spheres, from which we got the expression “in seventh heaven.”117 Inanna also descended through the seven levels of the underworld, a kind of World Mountain the other direction.

  Many cultures have constructed pyramids, towers, and mountaintop temples, and while certainly some were attempting to reach the sky gods, I liked the idea of bridging the realms, Sky and Earth, of connecting the Great Below with the Great Above. There the mortals, gods, and goddesses of all the realms could meet, mingle, and make love, fertilizing new life and new ideas.

  The Taos Hum

  My first meditations in Taos surprised me because when I went to that “place” of usual silence, I encountered instead a hum. It was a sound that seemed to come from a moving current, like the sound of water flowing through large pipes, and I could pick out three tones: an undertone, like the muffled drone of airplane engines; a high tone as if monks were ringing hand-held bells that echoed from way down the hall; and in the middle a sonorous tone, like the sustained tolling of an old European church bell. In those first weeks in Taos, at my little altar in our townhouse, I stopped meditating and went to look for what construction or destruction project Mohammed might be up to in a far apartment. After inspecting the grounds and finding nothing making a noise, I returned to sit in meditation, and lo and behold! The hum began again.

  I figured it was the hum of the Earth and later discovered that others heard it, too. They called it the Taos Hum. People theorized it was the sound of tectonic plates moving under the Rio Grande Rift Valley, heartburn from eating too much green chile, chi moving through ley lines in the Earth, radiation from Los Alamos, hallucinations from ingesting bad peyote, or a secret base (alternately of extra-terrestrials or the US military) under Taos Mountain.

  Or maybe it was the sound of a World Mountain. The apu (mountain spirit) was alive, and it infused me with the feeling of Earth, beloved Mother, my body’s place of origin and its final destination.

  I had another theory. Taos found itself between the 243-meter (800-foot) deep Río Grande Gorge and the Sangre de Cristos Range, with many peaks over 3,650 meters (12,000 feet). The mountains were made of granite, quartzites and hornblende schists from the Precambrian, the earliest geologic age, contrasted with the Río Grande Rift Valley, which was extruding basalt below the surface, birthing new rocks for the planet. The tension between the two – the archetypal up-pointing Masculine and the archetypal crevasse of the Feminine – was the energetic in which we were living in the Taos Valley. Maybe that energetic had a vibration to it, a sound. That masculine (out-pushing) - feminine (in-pulling) relationship sure made a big stir everywhere else, from atoms to peacocks to mountain goats to humans to black holes and supernovas. Why not mountains and rift valleys?

  Living in Taos, we were balanced between the two polarities – the Mountains and the Gorge – and I could not think of a better place for Venus and Her Lover, with its wedding dance of the Masculine and Feminine, to be.

  Thus, in my nighttime ritual, I would find myself swooping away from the mountaintop, flying across the mesa and diving down, down into the Rio Grande Gorge, down into the Earth, into a seething, molten pit of lava, which did not harm me in the least, because I was just as protected here as I had been from the intense cold of the mountain range. As I fell asleep, I glided through waves of sound: the tones of Tibetan singing bowls with the dulled roar of cruise ship engines in the background... the Taos Hum. Wrapping these Taos experiences around me like a down comforter, I dreamt of my greatest love affair, this love affair I was having with the Earth.

  Chuluaqui Quodoushka

  Having established ourselves in the Southwest, James and I formulated a couple different presentations of Venus and Her Lover for the Taos Noetic Sciences group and others. In November of 2006, ASEP, the Association of Sexual Energy Professionals, organized its first conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and Kenneth Ray Stubbs invited us to present our art and poetry to the convention. In addition to meeting sex therapists, neo-Tantra teachers, sexual healers, activists, and other erotic artists, we met Ina Laughing Winds Mlekush, who was teaching a Native American-based Tantra called Chuluaqui Quodoushka. She claimed they were ancient teachings originating with the Mayans and Toltecs that had been preserved orally, passed from shaman to initiate, until her teacher, Thunder Strikes, decided it was time to reveal the teachings to a wider audience. Ina Laughing Winds taught breathing techniques of channeling the “fire within” (i.e., the kundalini) higher up the chakras so that orgasms could be experienced in the heart, as well as ceremonies for balancing the Masculine and the Feminine within each person and establishing right relationship with all the nations: spirit, human, animal, plant, and mineral. She described lovemaking as “the merging of two magical energy fields.”

  I was amazed to discover an indigenous American Tantric tradition, and evidently others were, too, as I later found out – but incensed would be a better word to describe their reactions. Cherokee leaders, with whom Quodoushka had been associated by its proponents, outright denied any such association. Dr. Richard Allen, a research and policy analyst of the Cherokee Nation, remonstrated that Chuluaqui Quodoushka had nothing to do with their initiation rituals because, “We learn about sex like everyone else does, behind the barn.”118 The Indian reactions fascinated me as much as the Quodoushka philosophy (which seemed to me to be Tantra essentials with a Native American twist). If they were indeed secret sexual rituals, the shamans would sure as shootin’ have kept them concealed from the masses, especially since the white invasion, which dismantled much of Native American culture. For it is documented that the large majority of tribes traditionally offered equal or high status to women – many were governed by wise Grandmother Councils – and sexual practices were quite free. Two Spirits (transgendered men or women) were highly regarded. Gender equality and sexual openness? White invaders hastened to suppress them. So the comment about learning sex “behind the barn” dismayed me because it showed that some Native people were distancing themselves from liberated sexuality, claiming it was outside their tradition, when in fact, they themselves may have forgotten, or never known, just how close to their tradition Quodoushka might have been.

  Archetypal Time

  It was Christmas Eve at Taos Pueblo. Dressed like a herd of Michelin men and furry animals, a group of us joined the hundreds of people visiting the Pueblo for the ceremony. Standing for hours in the cold was not for James, so he stayed home to put final touches on our formal holiday dinner. The sun was just setting, casting dark blue shadows across golden snow, and igniting Taos Mountain with the day’s last salmon-colored light. Stacked atop one another like giant adobe ice cubes, the houses of the village bracketed the plazas on either side of the Río Pueblo de Taos. The clang of the church bell sliced through the frosty air, marking the beginning of the evening service. My friends, Alex, and I would not have a prayer of squeezing into the packed chapel, so we crunched through the snow, touring the north plaza which would soon be in darkness, as Taos Pueblo was not wired for electricity. Piles of pitchwood were stacked in the plaza, in anticipation of the night’s festivities.

  I loved coming to the Pueblo, loved watching the traditional dances that marked the wheel of the year. My favorites were the buffalo and deer dances, when bare-chested men (in the middle of
winter!) wearing real buffalo heads and deer heads marked the steps to rhythms their ancestors had been beating out for centuries. Paula Gunn Allen relates ritual action with the power of myth: “American Indian myths depend for their magic on relationship and participation... Only a participant in mythic magic can relate to the myth, can enter into its meaning on its own terms.”119 Indeed, that was why I danced every week at Trance Liberation, the main difference being that I was dancing my own archetypal myths, not having been raised within an intact tradition.

  Be that as it may, when it came to learning or participating in their religion, I had found Taos Indians to be closed to the idea. Fearing misinterpretation or dilution of the religious traditions, they would not reveal them. Given their treatment by white culture, who could blame them? Even accepting their rationale, I was disappointed. I had been able to gain much of my Native American ceremonial knowledge because a Neue-Shoshone medicine man who believed in the Rainbow Tribe, the new human tribe made up of all races, was willing to teach me. There were also Hawaiian kahunas who subscribed to the notion that their ancestors might be reincarnating in non-Hawaiian bodies, so they should watch for and engage them.

  I had attended sweat lodge in Taos. Because it was a mixed (male-female) lodge, I was advised I had to keep my clothes on, which I found very unnatural for sweating, given my ideas about being in the body. But I was told I needed to respect the native men present. I also sought ceremony in a kiva underground pit, but this was a much more difficult quest. Taos Pueblo did not even allow their own women into the kivas, much less white women. They were for the men and the boys’ initiation ceremonies.

  The concept of the kiva captivated me, and no one described it better than Frank Waters, a 20th-century taoseño writer. In contrast to the tall, pointed steeple of the church, “the phallic symbol of the male, lustful to conquer,” the kiva’s “circular, soft adobe walls sinking like a womb into dark, resistless earth” surrounded one with “the fertility imbedded in our Mother Earth...” The kiva was “a form of life whose substance was passivity, not action, and which had no will to conquer, to even oppose.” It taught “a creed of supplication and appeasement,”120 which in turn infused the ceremonies for rain to fall, or crops to grow, or deer to offer themselves in the hunt. As a woman, I would have loved to do ceremony in such a place where yin, feminine energy was so honored.