As I posted yesterday, I will be blogging on each of the points of the Iron Pentacle. As areas which need healing for almost all individuals, these concepts can be triggery, can be upsetting, and can bring up issues and objections for people. For that reason alone I’ve put this post under a cut.

If you are worried and still want to read: I do not, in this post, talk directly about specific experiences, or outline anything that is unsafe for work, as it were. If you do not want to read, please pass on by…

Everything begins and ends in Sex.

So, too, the Iron pentacle.

Sex, the creative impulse. Lifeforce, drive, desire. That which flows through us… and connects us to the world.

Every breath taken is, on the Iron Pentacle, an act of Sex.

Why ‘Sex’? Why choose this word, when there are others, for a point that essentially represents lifeforce?

Because life involves sex, as intercourse. Almost every human life begins with a sexual act, and many non-human lives do also. Healthy sexual acts, alone or with another, involve vulnerability, opening to sensation, and thus to life lived as an embodied being. They involve communication between all the parts of ourselves; minds, bodies, hearts; and between ourselves and the other involved, so does life.

Communication, connection, surrender to life.

Presence, awareness, being here.

Good, healthy sex involves all these things.

To immerse oneself in orgasm requires surrender to life, to physical pleasure.

To name the point where we begin, the point of life, ‘sex’, is to invoke all these things.

And… sex as sexual acts has often been abused, misused, degraded and damaged. A healthy act of sex and sexuality, and even sensuality, can be hard to come by. For those who have had sex used against them, it can damage in an unimaginable way. Even when it was in a way that we may barely notice… in many pagan paths sex is considered sacred. An act of love and pleasure, an act of connection and surrender to beauty, and act which honours the body and the earth. Sex, for us as a culture, is something to be reclaimed from the corners it has been wedged into. Sex, for us as individuals, is something which it would help us to heal around.

I encourage you, then, to go out and hug a tree. Feel the energy in the tree that flows from earth to sky, sky to earth. Notice the way the tree accepts energy from the world, and feeds it back. That clean flow of lifeforce, that acceptance of lifeforce, that sharing with no expectation, which allows only what is not needed to flow back out to the world around it, these things are things we can learn from trees. That flow of life through us, without blockages, without guilt in loving life, with pure joy in being sensual beings that can experience the world in a unique way… that connection and communion. That is Sex.