My closet pagan friend and I share a strange history. Decades before we met, we were both members of an obscure super-fundamentalist Christian cult. We may have even seen each other in the multitudes of a cult tabernacle in Big Sandy, Texas back in the early 1970s, never knowing that years later in another region of the planet, in a whole other universe, we'd actually meet as healers and pagans.

We had different experiences of that cult. Vera was baptised into it and married within it. She accepted its teachings and rituals as an adult. I was brought in at age 13 by my parents who converted. I was there as a teenager, mostly obedient at first, but slowly growing more rebellious in mind, spirit and even (heaven forbid!) in appearance. By age 19 I had a beard and hair long enough to touch my collar (much shorter than Christ's hair probably was). A minister in Texas said that I could not come back to services until I cut my hair, and I guess that's why I didn't cut my hair for decades after. I was never baptised, and in my heart I only came near to accepting the teachings of that cult, but didn't quite cross the line.

 I think its fair to say that Vera is a sexual healer. She's passionate about helping people recover feeling within their own body. She came to this for she herself knew only erotic death all her life, and especially all her marriage within the church and beyond it. She was divorced and in her 40s before she even knew that women were able to experience orgasm. She believes that this profound disconnect between her body and her spirit started before she entered into the sexual legislation of the church, but there's no doubt that as she became a hand-maiden sort of biblical patriarchal wife serving only the most primitive procreative urges of not her husband, but of his emotionally detached penis, this alienation from her erotic soul was profoundly intensified.

 She asked me how I fared in the church as an adolescent teenager. Well, I knew exactly what that church expected of me in terms of sexual conduct. I kid you not, they fully expected that from age 13 until age 26 I should have no sexual experience at all, no orgasm, no exploration of my body, no masturbation, no "fornication" (pre-marital sex). I was suppose to fight my sexual nature during its most powerful age and devote myself to material security so that I could afford a wife (ideally about 19 years old). The two of us virgins were to marry in the church and remain together for life devoting our entire sexual awakening exclusively to a codified connubial conduct which forbid female-pleasuring techniques like cunnilingus.

I knew that this was expected of me, and I made attempts not to masturbate, but my body had a wild erotic spirit in it that simply refused to let me be repressed. The more I abstained from masturbate the wilder my spirit got. It led me to explore all of my body. In trying to not to touch my genitals I experiences my legs, my arms, my anus, all these other places where erotic energy flowed. Inevitably in some super intense way of trying to avoid masturbation I generally ended up masturbating in some extravagant and intensely erotic way. The spirit was not to be leashed, and I actually realized at some point that I had better surrender to the fact of masturbation as a way to have a halfway modest adolscence.

Today I realized that it was that Sacred Eanthar. He-and-she was in me all my life. It was this same erotic spirit that woke up full of protest that one day I convinced myself I should seek baptism. I remember it well. I was descending a set of stairs to approach a minister to ask for baptism. The pagan spirit in me starting saying, turn-back! turn-back! and then started shouting it. He made sure I felt his protest. I felt as if I were descending into cold, deep arctic water growing more and more dense pushing with more and more pressure. Finally, my spirit friend took control of my body (he was always good at that during those times I tried NOT to masturbate). He spun me clean around and made me walk right out of the church. It was such a vigorous commandeering of my body, I actually took heart. I felt that maybe an angel or some sort didn't want me to be baptized just yet. That it was this Christian god's plan that I wait for some other time in his scheme of things.  This was a comfort, for in my heart I only submitted to the attempt at baptism out of a feeling of compulsion.

 I am much more clear in my mind these days exactly who and what my "angel" was. He's my sacred eanathar, and he may also be called Eros. He's the pagan angel that gave me shocking red hair at my birth. My hair quickly cooled in color, but his heat was always in my blood. That Church couldn't kill my reverence for Lord Eros the way it killed Vera's. The sacred eanathar simply wouldn't hear of it, simply wouldn't tolerate it.

These days, I have a different more accepting sort of relationship with my Sacred Eanathar. I know that its because of him that I am gay. I never even dreamed I was gay back in Yahweh's desert. In coming to accept my sexuality, I begin to see that the Eanathar gives me certain gifts, and lately he's been pushing me to use them. Of all my vocations in life, I am foremost a writer, and today I was realizing that my Eanathar was my muse. He made my attempts to write an extremely erotic exploration of self and of soul. These days I'm serializing a novel about my erotic escape from the fundamentalist cult. It's about my inner healing life, too. If you are interested it's available on myspace at Seamus zipcode 18801.