The sacred, the holy. The mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the numinous. Why might it matter, here and now, to some of us? The sacred. Power frightening presence overwhelming dark bloody heat touch burning light source life madness danger terror touch longing burning pleasure presence knowledge gone. Present yet absent. Known yet unknown. Lived, felt, feared, celebrated, yet curiously unthinkable. All but inexpressible. Unpardonably unreasonable. Almost almost almost irrational. But not quite. There is a logic to the sacred, a deep, dark, enfolding, demanding logic. A fleshy, chaotic logic. The logic of the womb, perhaps. Contained, yet always bursting forth. A bloody logic. And yes it is a gendered logic, a racialized logic, a sexual logic, all together all at once. The sacred, the holy, the numinous. The signifiers multiply, gather and disperse: their single commonality, a resistance to control. The sacred. Why might it matter, here and now, to some of us?

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Virgin, whore, mother: too harshly literal to be metaphors, too potently imagistic to be concepts, too profane to be purely religious symbols, too suffused with sacred associations to be merely secular designations. What then are these signifiers, and what exactly do they signify?

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The sacred. "[T]he sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being." (Eliade, p.12) There's more to it than ontology, of course. "[T]he full range of the term sacred, or rather, of the Latin sacer, which is sometimes translated "sacred," sometimes "accursed," encompasses the maleficent as well as the beneficent."(Girard, p.257) Accursed, maleficent. In his offering of a term that would return the "…'extra' in the meaning of 'holy' above and beyond the meaning of goodness," Rudolph Otto included in the numinous, in the mysterium tremendum, "a moment whose singularly daunting and awe-inspiring character must be gravely disturbing to those persons who will recognize nothing in the divine nature but goodness, gentleness, love, and a sort of confidential intimacy…." (Otto, p.19) Indeed, those persons who prefer nothing but goodness, gentleness, love and confidential intimacy (the easily approachable virgin, the sweetly innocent whore, the perfectly powerless mother?) struggle to subdue the sacred, to dilute the holy, to filter out from it all that is disturbing, all that is uncontrollable, all the unknown, bloody mess of life, of chaos, of all that threatens, via sheer overabundance, their annihilation, their nothingness.

There seems to be little desire for numinous subjects to be walking in our midst, these days. Numinous subjects are disturbing of the social order; they have teeth, and they can bite.¹ Curiously enough, numinous subjects are always female. Virgin, Whore or Mother. Among the living none but they can achieve numinence. And they, I believe, are in danger of extinction.
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There was a time, I do not know how long ago, when, under the sacred canopy of the western christian symbolic universe, a woman need neither worry nor work at becoming divine, at being a numinous subject. Born a virgin, her innocence and purity were given. As her body grew so too did her virginal potency increase, seeming to ripen, to burst forth in full bud precisely as her body, grown, knew naught. At that moment in her life she was the very incarnation of wonder, of a tremendous, awe-filled, unknown mystery. (Otto, p.13-15) Present yet hidden, at hand yet untouched, possessed of a solitary sovereignty, a certain majesty, all the while flooded with an urgent energy. (Otto, p.23, Beauvoir, p.791-792) They were drawn to her in fear and trembling; they were filled with a stupendous desire to penetrate through the depths of such mystery, to partake of her power, a force incomprehensible. "Bewildered and confounded, they felt a something that captivated and transported them with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication." (Otto, p.31) In the virgin the wholly unknown other was a presence, an earthly, unbearably immanent transcendence: radiantly, dangerously numinous.

And then she chose, more likely the choice was made for her, to know another in, with and through the flesh. It was not, was never pleasure that rendered her impure. Nor was it ever desire, yearning, longing, concupiscence. It was simply knowledge. The material, unspeakable knowledge that comes with touch. For her such knowledge arrived not with a mere 'little death', but with a veritable apocalypse. The mystery unveiled, revealed, now, at last, perhaps with an enigmatic smile, she knows. But he, alas, does not. "Woman survives man's embraces, and in that very fact she escapes him; as soon as he loosens his arms, his prey becomes again a stranger to him; there she lies, new, intact, ready to be possessed by a new lover in an as ephemeral a manner." (Beauvoir, p.184) "No," he cries. "This cannot be, you are no longer wholly other, no longer worthy to be worshipped, neither innocent nor pure you are merely flesh and you must serve me." Thus the wife's numinence is dimmed, hemmed in, denied - on this side by the laundry, on that by the dishes, there is the vegetable garden, here is the cow, the sow, the chickens scratching in the dirt. A wife. No longer a virgin, no longer a numinous subject, nothing about her is perceived, allowed to reach beyond a kind of happenstance - "the inevitable, dull tediousness of the contingent - the senseless fact that happens to be so; it is as an irrational and unchosen presence, as an unavoidable and material condition" (p.528) that this woman happens to be simply, only, this more or less useful (to him) lump of flesh. Until, that is, she is born again in numinence - that uncontain-able, threatening conjunction of immanence and transcendence - born again as whore or mother.

Whore. She who knows the most intimate secrets, the mysteries of the flesh. She who, it is imagined, has done the unimaginable with the uncountable, yet still remains herself unknown, accountable to none but herself. Seemingly known by all, yet she remains a stranger. Again and again she rises, departs, newly whole, newly unknown. The whore. She who rules the night, the city, who brings king and prince and peasant alike to their knees in desperation, adulation, worship. The whore. She who has given up all innocence and in return receives omniscience. If the virgin is the absolute presence of the wholly other, is the place of unbearably immanent transcendence, then the whore is the absolute absence of the wholly known, is the place of unbearably transcendent immanence. She is as dangerously numinous as the virgin, as the mother.

Mother. She who places her body at the crossroads of life and death; she who is the bloody threshold between this world and that other - from whence no one comes without her, to which none may depart without having been first carried by a woman. (Eliade, p.147, p.181) She is again a holy, terrifying mystery, at once too sacred, too profane. She who has been purified by her own living waters, she who has been rent asunder, she who has poured out her own blood that another might have life, a life polluted, made always already impure by the very fact of blood (her fault!): she has survived a journey he will never can never make and she has returned, not alone. Both gifted and condemned to life by her, he lauds and magnifies, loathes and fears her name and body.² Woman the Mother embodies precisely "the infinite quality of the sacred, that inexhaustible reservoir from which all differences flow and into which they all converge." (Girard, p.242) His very being utterly dependent upon Mother: how excessive, and excessively disturbing.
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Virgin, Whore, Mother. Numinous subjects, only to be found at the conjunction of immanence and transcendence.
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It is only in the flesh, in the moment, in the absolute of pleasure or pain, only, that is, in immanence that a self is known, remembered to be, to participate in and partake of Reality: a self able to reach out from a here and now, this place, this moment, into an unknown future. Should a self choose not to reach, not to move, then would transcendence never be actualised. The 'beyond' that is transcendence is a nothingness until the instant it is pulled into the present - made immanent by a self whose memory lies in her flesh. Fleeting, finite moments of bodily pleasures and pains, felt, known, remembered, standing out in their differences from an otherwise monotonous sameness, interrupting the timeless never of transcendence, providing moments of distinction.
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The logic of pure transcendence is the logic of pure, undifferentiated potentiality, infinite, unrealised possibility. Forever unknown, it is the logic of absolute uncertainty. Eternally unbecome, yet it is, paradoxically, the logic of being, of ontology. The logic of pure immanence is the logic of pure actuality, of the particular, distinct, specific, and uniquely real. Fully known, it is the logic of absolute certainty. Only ever fleetingly present, yet it is, paradoxically, the logic of knowledge, of epistemology.
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Sacrifice the sacred, and the link between immanence and transcendence is severed. Certain subjects disappear, cut out of the symbolic order structuring culture. Virgins become pubescent teens, whores become sex workers, mothers become women with dependants.
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Once upon a time the logic of the western symbolic universe was clear, distinct. There was no need to claim that it was shaped and sustained by a religious (Christian) world view; indeed, one would have been ridiculed for stating the obvious. Once upon a time, quite recently, I was asked by a feminist theorist of some renown why I bothered to think and write about 'the sacred' at all. Somewhat stunned by the question, in response I said that I could not imagine living in a world in which the sacred, the holy was absent. This was and is still true, but incomplete, of course. What I left unsaid, having assumed that it was obvious, is that I could not imagine a sacred-less world because neither I nor anyone else in that room could step outside of a cultural imaginary which includes a religious imaginary. Further, and less obviously, I believe the religious imaginary includes both a sacred symbolic order and a theistic symbolic order. Though they are intertwined, they are not the same. Grace Jantzen puts it this way. "If it is the case that human life and culture is saturated with a religious symbolic so that even ostensibly secular positions do not escape religious structuring of consciousness, then the question is not whether or not we are religious, but rather whether we choose to become conscious of the way the … imaginary expressed in the religious symbolic permeates thought and social structures, or whether we remain unconscious of these ways." (Jantzen, p.224) I am trying, then, to become conscious of the ways, within the religious imaginary, the theistic symbolic order (which is ruled over by a masculine god) and the sacred symbolic order (which is utterly unruly) are intertwined, distinguishable if never entirely separable. To quote Catherine Clément, "it seems to me that the sacred predates the religious." (Clément and Kristeva, p.29) Could it be that religions themselves were developed in part simply to manage the sacred, to temper and contain the all-consuming force of it? "The fact is that it doesn't take long for the experience of the Numinous to unhinge the mind." (Eco, p.6) Which does not change another fact: without the sacred there would be no reason for religion.

Religions require the sacred, but most of them prefer it in small doses: controlled, manageable, non-threatening. They seek to bind the sacred to their service. In Christianity this was accomplished, brilliantly, through the Marys. The Virgin Mary, the Mother Mary, and Mary Magdalene. The sexual body, immanent, immediate presence, pleasure, messiness, physical knowledge, all this was strictly sectioned off, granted to Mary on the condition that she already had renounced it all, that the sins and demons of her flesh had already been washed away, driven off. Thus was the Whore tamed, thus was the Whore suffered, demanded to be. Always already in the past tense. And now, another Mary. The unbearable presence of the wholly other, the question never to be answered yet never to be escaped, the transcendent, unknowable Mary, quick - make her into the eternally untouched Virgin - but no, it's not enough, bodies seek out bodies, virginity is too uncertain, add another Mary to the mix but say that she's the same. There must be a Mother, there is always a Mother but we'll pretend that she did not give life, that she was just a vessel, a pouch, a sort of bag in which the child was carried for a while. Still, give her a small body to look after and the Virgin will be satisfied, will not seek the touch of any other. Say that God is the Father, the only giver of life, that He did not have to enter the her, and the Mother (the whore? the virgin?) will no longer threaten with her devouring power; she'll just be tender, gentle, loving. Brilliant. Power, being, life, knowledge, flesh, joining, ecstasy, love…the very stuff of the sacred neatly divided, parcelled out between the Marys. Controlled, manageable, non-threatening.

And it does not bother anyone that Mary the whore and Mary the virgin and Mary the unentered mother had to be invented, made up, that they were fantasies laid upon the bodies of those women, the Marys. The point, the issue is that they had to be…without them, too much of the sacred would have been missing from Christianity. Could it be that with them, too much of the sacred is still present?
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Within the western christian symbolic universe, the Protestant Reformation brought the elevation of the subject-role of wife. The virgin became a shrew - no longer the immanent, immediate presence of transcendence; the mother - a woman simply doing no more than her job; even the whore, through God's own grace, could be reformed, tamed like a woman-made-into-wife. All women could become respectable, if only they would become well-behaved, white middle-class wives.

January 17, 2002