such preposterous domination, or to return to the primal
swamps from which organic nature has so slowly and painfully emerged.

I say it was the entry of self-consciousness into the sphere of Sex, and
the consequent use of the latter for private ends, which poisoned
this great race-power at its root. For above all, Sex, as representing
through Childbirth the life of the Race (or of the Tribe, or, if you
like, of Humanity at large) should be sacred and guarded from merely
selfish aims, and therefore to use it only for such aims is indeed a
desecration. And even if--as some maintain and I think rightly (1)--sex
is not MERELY for child-birth and physical procreation, but for mutual
vitalizing and invigoration, it still subserves union and not egotism;
and to use it egotistically is to commit the sin of Separation indeed.
It is to cast away and corrupt the very bond of life and fellowship. The
ancient peoples at any rate threw an illumination of religious (that is,
of communal and public) value over sex-acts, and to a great extent made
them into matters either of Temple-ritual and the worship of the gods,
or of communal and pandemic celebration, as in the Saturnalia and
other similar festivals. We have certainly no right to regard these
celebrations--of either kind--as insincere. They were, at any rate in
their inception, genuinely religious or genuinely social and festal;
and from either point of view they were far better than the secrecy
of private indulgence which characterizes our modern world in these
matters. The thorough and shameless commercialism of Sex has alas!
been reserved for what is called "Christian civilization," and with
it (perhaps as a necessary consequence) Prostitution and Syphilis have
grown into appalling evils, accompanied by a gigantic degradation of
social standards, and upgrowth of petty Philistinism and niaiserie.
Love, in fact, having in this modern world-movement been denied, and its
natural manifestations affected with a sense of guilt and of sin, has
really languished and ceased to play its natural part in life; and a
vast number of people--both men and women, finding themselves barred or
derailed from the main object of existence, have turned their energies
to 'business' or 'money-making' or 'social advancement' or something
equally futile, as the only poor substitute and pis aller open to them.

(1) See Havelock Ellis, The Objects of Marriage, a pamphlet
published by the "British Society