Author Description

Product Description The Poisoned Embrace is a provocative investigation into the history of sexual pessimism as it has evolved in Western theology throughout the ages. Since the days of the Early Fathers, sex and death have formed a theological equation known as sexual pessimism. This aversion to the carnal, and its consequent elevation of the virginal and the chaste, springs not from Christianity, but from Gnosticism. Osborne examines the art, mythologies, and traditions of Christendom, and distinguishes thematic archetypes: the Virgin, the Witch, the Leper, the Noble Savage, the Jew, the Oriental, the Androgyne, and Don Juan. He traces our now-glorified ideal of sexual passion back to the Troubadours and Northern Mystics, and explores how the Passion of the Cross relates the ideas of sublime passion and therapeutic energy. From Publishers Weekly Defining sexual pessimism as the "equation of sexual love outside the prerequisites of reproduction with death," and musing that it may be "Catholicism's most eccentric trait," Osborne ( Paris Dreambook ) offers a thoughtful, sometimes elegant and somewhat selective history of this theological tenet. Exploring folklore, church writings and history, he traces the source of sex hatred to the cult of Gnosticism. Osborne examines the role of sexual pessimism in the development of the Virgin myth, witch hatred during the Inquisition, 19th-century images of the Jew as sexual predator and archetypes involving lepers, Don Juans, Orientals and Androgynes. He concludes with a look at examples of modern "sexual optimism" in early Soviet communism's promotion of free love and the veneration of fertility in German Nazism, both of which degenerated into blends of promiscuity and puritanism. He does not extend his analysis into the effect of AIDS on views of sex today. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews A vivi