Sexual ritual

Sexual rituals fall into two categories: culture-created, and natural behaviour, the human animal having developed sex rituals from evolutionary instincts for reproduction, which are then integrated into society, and elaborated to include aspects such as marriage rites, dances, etc. Arguably indeed, 'sex in its more ritualized and symbolic varieties...has moulded the shape of civilization'.

Sometimes sexual rituals are highly formalized and/or part of religious activity, as in the cases of Hieros gamos, the hierodule and the OTO. Contemporary sacred sexual rituals have been tagged as 'structured, symbolic, manifestation, ceremonies, tradition, everyday, habit, grounding, magic, solemn'.

Part of the rites of passage of growing up are what have been termed 'rites of separation from the asexual world...followed by rites of incorporation into the world of sexuality'. These may be formal or semi-formal - 'for some students, going to college is partly a sexual ritual, like the ceremonial dances of the whooping crane' - or take the form of a more private induction: 'formal and artificial...the impression that a long-established rite was to be enacted, among Staffordshire figurs and papier-mâché trays, with the compelling, detached formality of nightmare'.

Freud was particularly interested in Ethnological accounts of 'the "ceremonial" (purely formal, ritual, or official) coitus, which takes place' in connection with 'the taboo of virginity'.

Freud also noted that in 'numerous examples of marriage ceremonies there can be no doubt that people other than the bridegroom, for example his assistants and companions (our traditional "groomsmen"), granted full sexual access to the bride'. To his followers, 'the wedding as orgy, with the bride taking on all the men present, is the clear historical reality behind the modern jokes...and the climactic line-up or "gang"-kissing of the bride, by all the men present'.

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