Sacred Pleasure, Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body

Eisler's absorbing epic exposes the truths about sex that have been swept under the rug of religious dogma and scientific jargon. Showing what has gone wrong between the sexes, it reveals a whole new history of intimate relations - and how these affect and are in turn affected by all our relations, whether in the public or private sphere. It charts our course from prehistory, when sex was a celebrated mystery linked to all that is sacred, through the invasion of Europe by nomadic warriors, when sex became a means of domination, to the earliest Western civilizations, the reign of the church, and into our time of "culture wars" - when women and men all over the world are searching for new ways of living and loving. Along the way, it looks at the economics and politics of sexual and other intimate relations, the modern revolution in consciousness, the epidemic of AIDS, the failure of traditional morality, and the emerging new ethics for sex and spirituality.