In a previous post, we made reference to Rene Guenon‘s claim that at its origin Christianity was an esoteric teaching that then turned exoteric. As an example, we can point to the early practice of the subintroducta. The story of David and Abishag shows that the practice has even deeper roots.

In The Descent of the Dove, Charles Williams makes reference to the practice in the early Church. In his words:

The women — subintroductae as they were called — apparently slept with their companions without intercourse … In some cases it failed. But we know nothing — most unfortunately — of the cases in which it did not fail … [the practice was] dangerous but dangerous with a kind of heavenly daring

It should be clear to our readers that a spiritual exercise that was suitable and beneficial to initiates, would be useless and dangerous as an exoteric practice. In The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter, we find this description of Charles Williams:

Lois Lang-Sims [one of his disciples] alleges that on one occasion he put his arms round her and ‘held me in a strange stillness, a silence so unlike his usual loquacity, a motionlessness so unlike his usual excitement, that nothing could have been further from the kind of behaviour my previous knowledge of him had led me to expect’. At the time she was greatly puzzled, not to say alarmed. Later she thought she recognised in this behaviour a kind of ritual that was sometimes practised by magical sects and even by some early Christians until the practice was strongly suppressed in the Church, a ritual that attempts to heighten consciousness and increase power by harnessing the sexual instinct, and achieving a kind of tension-of-polarity between desire and restraint. If Lois Lang-Sims was right, Williams was actually putting into practice the kind of thing he had hinted at some years earlier in Shadows of Ecstasy, where a young lover sees in his mind the naked physical beauty of his beloved, but instead of aiming his desires towards sexual consummation ‘seemed to control and compel them into subterranean torrents towards hidden necessities within him’.

updated 1 Nov 2020
Related post: The Test