Sex Gods & Goddesses:
The Hindu God Shiva

Chicago Faeries Archive 1995
Resurrected from Internet Wayback Machine

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Whoever worships my linga will have the desires of their heart fulfilled forever. (from the Shiva Purana, Vedic scripture)

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In his/her true form, Shiva is more infinite and incomprehensable as the cosmos (Shiva is also neither male or female, or rather both male and female). Only great souls can realize the universal form of Shiva.

Lord Shiva is the third person of the Hindu Trinity: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. In many ways, he is very similar to the Holy Ghost of Metaphysical and Mystic Christianity, as well as Shekhinah of Kabalic Judaism and Sophia of Gnostic Christianity.

Among his many traits, Shiva is ascetic par excellence. Shiva's contemplation takes him to the reaches to human experience, which includes experiences of the spiritual as well as physical bodies. Unlike Christian or Buddhist Monasticism or Jewish Orthodoxy, sexuality is sacred to Shiva. Sex is a means of reaching ecstasy, the outer limit of life, where life and death, the physical and metaphysical (or supernatural) meet.

Shiva's sexuality is indiscriminate. In his ultimate sexual experience, Shiva is trampled to death by Kali, one of his wives, who is also the Goddess of Destruction and Rebirth. Shiva is so enraptured by his own death that the dead Shiva gets an erection (the erection to surpass all erections!) and impregnates Kali in a sexual act so robust that it destroys not only the world and the universe, but existence itself. Kali, then, gives birth to a reincarnated Shiva and a new universe.

At another time, Shiva was having sex another of his wives, Shakti. They were engaged in intercourse for millennia, and Shiva still had not ejaculated. In their passion, the two became one being, a half-man and a half-woman, in perfect union. Their copulation was interrupted by someone at the door. Shiva, unabashed, answered the door in his resplendent nakedness with his magnanimous erection for all to see. A young, handsome Indian boy was at the door, and Shiva was overwhelmed by the boy's beauty: Shiva lost control and immediately came all over the boy, drowning the boy in his semen. The boy emerged a God.

The central private acts of worshiping Shiva are unabridged sex and hermetic meditation, the two extremes of physical and spiritual experience. The primary public act of worship is pouring libations of milk, yoghurt, curds, cream, honey and oil over Shiva's altar-phallus called a Shiva Lingum. Every Hindu temple in the world (except for the Krishna temples) has such an altar to Shiva.

Meditating on Shiva

Shiva has been worshiped by Hindus for four to five millennia now. The worship of Shiva's nameless, pre-Indic, pre-Indo-European predecessor dates back to about 25,000 B.C.E. As such, his worship is second only to the worship of the Great Goddess herself, who preceded him by approximately 10,000 years (the Great Goddess is the supreme, omnipotent, universal Mother-of-Creation deity of most non-Judaic-Christian-Muslim religions; she is like a motherly, loving, caring Jewish Super-Yahweh, a Christian Super-God-the-Father-the-Son-the-Holy-Ghost or a Muslim Super-Allah).

Many of Chicago's Faeries are devotees of Shiva.

Information losely gathered from Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's Siva: The Erotic Ascetic and Alain Danielou's Shiva and Dionysus.