Christianity was, at the outset, a love movement. What was not generally know until just before the end – so fiercely was all knowledge of primitive Christianity suppressed – was that it was a charitic religion – that I, a religion in which the congregation participated, in the hope of having a genuine religious experience, an experience later called theolepsy, or seized of God. Man of the early Christians did achieve this state, and often; many more achieved it but seldom, and yet kept going back and back seeking it. But once having experienced it, they were profoundly changed, inwardly gratified; it was this intense experience, and its permanent effects, which made it possible for them to endure the most frightful hardships and tortures, to die gladly, to fear nothing.
Few dispassionate descriptions of their services – gatherings is a better term – survive, but the best accounts agree on a picture of people slipping away from fields, shops, even palaces, to be together in some hidden place – a mountain glade, a catacomb, anywhere where they might be uninterrupted. It I significant that rich and poor alike mingled at these gatherings: male and female. After Agape, eating together – genuinely, a love feast – and invoking the spirit, perhaps by song, and very likely by the dance, one or another might be seized by what they called the Spirit. Perhaps he or she would issue forth in what was called "speaking in tongues," but these exhibitions, when genuine, were apparently not excessive nor frenetic; there was often time for many to take their turn. And with a kiss of peace, they would separate and slip back to their places in the world until the next meeting.
The primitive Christians did not invent charitic religion, not did it cease with them. It appears throughout the ages in many forms. They have in common one element – the subjective, participant, ecstatic experience – and almost invariable the equality of women, and they are love religions. Without exception they were savagely persecuted. Why?
There are two direct channels into the unconscious mind. Sex is one, religion is the other; and in pre-Christian times, it was usual to express them together. The Judeo-Christian system put a stop to it, for this reason: A charitic religion interposes nothing between the worshipper and his Divinity. A suppliant, suffused with worship, speaking in tongues, his whole body in the throes of ecstatic dance, is not splitting doctrinal hairs nor begging intercession from temporal or literary authorities. As to his conduct between times, his guide there is simple. he will seek to do that which will make it possible to repeat the experience. If he does what for him is right in this endeavor, he will repeat it; if he is not able to repeat it, that alone is his total and complete punishment. He is guiltless.
How could such a thing so change? … see page 129-130
Homo sap. claimed to be searching for a formula to end its woes. Here is the formula: a charitic religion and a culture to go with it. The Apostles of Jesus found it. Before them the Greeks found it; before them, the Minoans. Since then the Cathars found it, the Quakers, the Angel Dancers. Throughout the Orient and in Africa it has been found repeatedly … and each time it has failed to move any but those it touched directly. Men – or at least, the men who moved men – always found that the charitic is intolerant of doctrine, neither wanting it nor needing it. But without doctrine – presbyter, interpreter, officiator – the men who move men are powerless – that is to say, not superior. There is nothing to gain in charitism.
Except, of course, the knowledge of the soul; and everlasting life.
Excerpted from Theodore Sturgeon's book, Venus Plus X (page 127-133)
