Tova Olsson*

LUCE IRIGARAY AND THE SOMATIC TURN, A FEMININE FORM OF LIBERATION: THE INFLUENCE OF TANTRA ON WESTERN FEMINIST THEORY
Belgian philosopher, psychoanalyst and linguist Luce Irigaray has received both praise and critique over the years: she has been called one of the most important voices in the quest for female subjectivity, as well as a gender essentialist. In this article, Tova Olsson explores the profound influence of Yoga and Tantra on her writing, particularly in her interpretation of masculinity, femininity, and polarity, showcasing how these embodied practices have distinctly shaped her work.

* Tova Olsson is a PhD-student of Religious Studies at Umeå University, Sweden, currently researching gender constructs in contemporary, European tantra. She has taught yoga for almost 20 years and runs an online-school called Saraswati-Studies, where she teaches courses on the history, philosophy, and mythology of yoga and tantra. Her book Yoga and Tantra: history, philosophy and mythology was published by Motilal Banarsidass in 2023.

“What I have learned from yoga – beyond or on this side of my Western culture – are things about existence that are both very simple and very subtle” (Irigaray 2002:50)

Introduction: Feminist Theory and Feminine Practice

Philosopher, psychoanalyst, and linguist Luce Irigaray has been celebrated as a heroine and a visionary, as the voice of sexual difference and her uniquely female subjectivity. She has also been criticized for over-simplifying and enhancing heteronormative binary structures (seemingly suggesting that the difference between men and women matters more than all other forms of social differences) and for essentialising woman as a structural concept (Moi 1999; Stone 2006). The focus of this article is something slightly less talked about, namely Irigaray as a practitioner of Yoga and Tantra. Its purpose is to examine how Irigaray’s physical practice and her embodied understanding of the mentioned traditions have influenced how she relates to and expresses femininity, masculinity, and polarity, bringing Tantric concepts into the world of feminist theory. Morny Joy has problematized this side of Irigaray’s authorship, arguing that:

“In order to comprehend fully the complexity and significance of Irigaray’s work, I believe these dimensions of her religious and spiritual orientation have to be addressed […] it becomes apparent that the more spiritual Irigaray becomes, as with her adaptation of eastern religious practices, particular yoga and meditation, the more conservative are her views (Joy 2006: 4)”.

Joy believes that the late Irigaray can be criticized for being both spiritually apologetic, orientalist and essentialist and compares Irigaray’s use of the word ‘spirituality’ with how ”new age practitioners” use it (Joy 2006: 124-125). Joy further believes that Irigaray’s later texts, such as I Love to You (1996) and Between East and West (2002) run the risk of ”simply reinforcing rather than reforming the existing polarities between women and men” (Joy 2006: 140)².

Advancing the argument, this article suggest that Irigaray partakes in what might be referred to as the ‘material’ turn within academia and the ‘somatic’ or ‘embodied’ turn within contemporary (female-dominated) spirituality³. Within the bounds of academia, the turn emphasizes the materiality and every-day lived experience of religion⁴. Within contemporary spirituality, the turn enhances matter and body as well as the intelligence and storytelling of the living flesh and bones. It works as a pushback against ‘spiritual bypassing’ and intellectual transcendence, against the patriarchal longing to dispose of the body with its constant needs for maintenance and its constant expressions of desire and aversion⁵. The body acts as a reminder of failure, old age, death, and decay, making Buddhist practitioners as well as adherents of classical and ascetic forms of Yoga throughout the ages declare: sarvam duḥkham: all is suffering⁶. In contrast, many practitioners of contemporary Yoga and Tantra outside India are moving away from an ascetic view of the body and instead use what they call ‘somatic practices’ (the word soma meaning ‘body’ in Greek and ‘nectar’ in Sanskrit) including free movement. These practitioners frequently use terms such as ‘integration’ and ‘embodied consciousness’ when explaining the importance of not neglecting the physical, but trusting its ability to give valuable information to whomever can get the ‘felt sense of it’. This notion of integration between the immanent and the transcendent, between spirit and matter mirrors (sometimes purposely) the philosophies of classical Indian Tantra (White 2000; Samuel 2008)⁷. It is not uncommon within these strands of contemporary spirituality to reference this integration as a ‘feminine’ form of awakening, a notion which Irigaray’s writings seem to echo.

Evidently, I am not the first to notice that there is something irrefutably ‘Tantric’ about the way Irigaray expresses her thoughts and experiences. In her Goddess Durga and Sacred Female Power (2010), Laura Amazzone uses Irigaray’s voice to express “the need for us to deconstruct everything in the patriarchal world in order to experience our female consciousness” (Amazzone 2010: xiii). Amazzone further states that:

“Irigaray’s theories of male and female sexual differences (which are considered so potent and essential to Tantric rituals), might give key insights into how sexuality and biology impact our consciousness and self-expression within this world (Amazzone 2010: 36)”.

Many practitioners of contemporary Yoga and Tantra outside India are moving away from an ascetic view of the body.

She also writes that “parallels between Tantra and Irigaray’s philosophies are intriguing – especially the ideas of woman and man as divine” (Amazzone 2010: 37). Likewise, in her Traveller in Space (2002) June Campbell refers to Irigaray’s concepts when examining gender identity and the role of the female practitioner within patriarchal institutions, particularly Tibetan (Tantric) Buddhism, asking the question if “after patriarchy any religion, as we now know them, could possibly survive in a recognizable form?” (Campbell 2002: 19). Though Irigaray’s tremendous impressions on the field of feminist theory should not be reduced to how she has been interpreted by the above-mentioned scholars, they indicate that female scholars who are also practitioners of Yoga and/or Tantra share an interest in her theories, perhaps because her theories mirror her (and their) embodied experience.

Irigaray’s ‘Tantric’ Understanding of Female Liberation

Rosi Braidotti (2019) has called Irigaray’s approach one of replacing sight with touch, of no longer resting in the visual experience of the world, of being the observer, or the witness as the ‘masculine’ spiritual traditions would have it⁸. Irigaray instead (much like classical Indian forms of Tantra and indeed many contemporary Western forms of Tantra) proclaims touch the highest of the senses, because you can’t touch another without experiencing the touch yourself⁹. She writes: “Touch is a more subjective, intersubjective sense; it is somewhere between active and passive; it escapes the possessive, mechanical and warlike economy” (Irigaray 1994: 21). Touch is physical and affective, it demands closeness instead of separation, placing it in stark contrast to the concept of liberation [kaivalya] in the classical Yoga of Patañjali (grounded in the philosophical system of Sāṃkhya) which translates to ‘autonomy’ or even ‘aloneness’ where the ability to separate the ‘seer’ from that which is seen enables freedom from suffering (Stoler Miller 1998). To Irigaray the goal is something quite different. Her spirituality, her Yoga, is one of embodiment, of entering into relationship with flesh, earth, creative life. To her, renouncing desire is a question of refining, to be able to turn to with greater sensitivity, rather than to turn away from¹⁰. She writes:
“ Spiritual progress is therefore not separated off from the body nor from desire, but these are gradually educated to renounce what harms them. To be sure, it is not a matter of renouncing for the sake of renouncing, but of renouncing what impedes access to bliss in this life (Irigaray 2002:9) ”.

This search for access to bliss in this very life seems to echo some of the Tantric siddhas (‘perfected ones’)¹¹. But although liberation while alive [jīvanmukti] is a well-known Tantric goal, Irigaray seems to be after something more gender-specific, because to her, the awakening of a woman is thoroughly different from that of a man; it is an awakening that calls for engagement, embodiment, and relationship¹². She writes:

“ The awakening of consciousness for woman, is situated at a spiritually higher level: not only to not destroy the life on the other, but to respect his or her spiritual life and, often, to awaken the other to a spiritual life that he or she does not yet know […] It is a question of physiological identity, and a question of relational identity as well. Born of woman, her mother […] the little girl possesses from the beginning, within herself, the secret of human being and of the relation between human beings. The little girl is born with familiarity to the self, to the natural world, to the other. She intuitively knows the origin of life. She knows that the source of life is in her, that she need not construct it outside of herself […] Woman also remains in greater harmony with the cosmos (Irigaray 2002: 89, 85, my cursives) ”

Touch is physical and affective, it demands closeness instead of separation, placing it in stark contrast to the concept of liberation [kaivalya] in the classical Yoga of Patañjali.

Irigaray further states that “God in the masculine is further away from micro- and macrocosmic nature than a feminine divinity” (Irigaray 2002: 86), echoing the śākta tantra traditions where Devī (“goddess”) or Śakti (“power” or “creative capacity”) is understood as the creator and very fabric of the world (Tigunait 1998; McDaniel 2004). Irigaray’s use of the concept ‘Woman’ and ‘Man’ could be criticized for denying plural femininities/masculinities and diverse sexual expressions (White 2019). Instead, they seem to present essentialist categories, archetypes moving as individuals, participating in predictable forms. Seeing this, one could argue that Irigaray encourages what she set out to problematize – the limitations that concepts and lingual structures provide and further, as Joy claims, that she has adapted the viewpoint and vocabulary of holistic spirituality. This becomes especially relevant when Irigaray refers to an idealized matriarchal past, mirroring countless established (and proclaimed feminist) teachers of contemporary Yoga and Tantra¹³. Irigaray writes:

“We must not forget that in the time of women’s law, the divine and the human were not separate. That means religion was not a distinct domain. What was human was divine and became divine. Moreover, the divine was always related to nature […] In a patriarchal regime, religion is expressed through rites of sacrifice and atonement. In women’s history, religion is entangled with cultivation of the earth, of the body, of life, of peace […] patriarchy stripped women of divinity, taking it over in places where men are amongst themselves, and often suspecting women’s religion of devilry (Irigaray 1994: 10-11) ”.

Perhaps Irigaray’s writing is best regarded as a performance of narrative mimesis, where she creates a story about women that she believes will have an expanding effect on them, rather than producing a text meaning to proclaim a historical reality¹⁴. But regardless of how one chooses to read Irigaray, her vision is one of embodied spirituality, of earthly enlightenment, professing that “Hell appears to be a result of a culture that has annihilated happiness on earth by sending love, including divine love, into a time and place beyond our relationships here and now” (Irigaray 1994: 112). The emphasis on the ‘here and now’ is everywhere present in the milieus of contemporary spirituality, echoing through book titles like Ram Dass’ Be Here Now (1978) and Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now (1997). What this article proposes is, not only that Irigaray has been influenced by this discourse, but that her practices have provided her with a type of embodied knowledge that, at least to her, is undeniably ‘feminine’.

Irigaray’s ‘Tantric’ Understanding of Polarity

Irigaray enhances the need for respect for female ‘virginity’, which she understands as woman’s independence, her right to her own body and sexuality (Irigaray 1994: 74-75)¹⁵. Yet she doesn’t seem to believe in separatism, the point of view that women need to come together in exclusively female settings in order to develop subjectivity (a perspective that is quite common within the ‘women circles’ of contemporary spirituality). On the contrary, the further along she moves in her authorship (and possibly in her own practice of Yoga and Tantra), the more she seems to think through the concepts of polarity, rhythm, and attraction. Alison Stone seeks the roots of Irigaray’s nature-philosophy in Goethe and his thoughts on polarity and intensification (Stone 2006: 92). I propose the Tantric doctrine of spanda (vibration/rhythm) as a possible influence, especially in regard to its discourse on expansion/contraction (Dyczkowski 1987). Stone writes:

“For Irigaray then, all natural phenomena have poles, which are placed in their polar relations to each other by the complimentary rhythms at which they suck in fluids (expand) and expel fluids (contract). In so far as this rhythmic bipolarity inherent in all natural processes and phenomena makes them ‘sexuate’, this is because this bipolarity approximates in structure to human sexual difference. The way each pole depends upon its other and yet follows its unique rhythm parallels the situation of the two human sexes, which differ fundamentally yet also depend upon one another within the overall process of human life, which regenerates itself through sexual reproduction (Stone 2006: 90-91)”.

Irigaray suggests that out of all life-forms, humans are most able to express their bipolarity, making her worldview a hierarchical and anthropocentric one. Moreover, she tends to present her theories rather than as thought propositions, as conclusions based on absolute experience, which places her in stark contrast to the self-reflexivity so characteristic of postmodern feminist theorists like Rosi Braidotti, who appear to take a rather non-dualistic as well as non-anthropocentric stance (Braidotti 2011, 2013). The voice of Irigaray is a commanding one, undeviating, perhaps because, as this article suggests, it is rooted in her own lived, embodied experience. In contemporary spirituality, especially in so-called ‘neo-Tantric’ milieus, the concept of polarity is often used to describe notions of erotic tension or attraction between male and female practitioners, whether generated for spiritual uses or simply to improve one’s relationship and love life. The idea here is basically that ‘opposites attract’, meaning that the difference between the partners in a relationship assures its vitality, often resulting in the encouragement of women to strengthen their ‘femininity’ and men to strengthen their ‘masculinity’ (Olsson 2023).

Now, Irigaray’s theory of sexual difference can be interpreted to say something similar, though it originally was not intended to be understood as synonymous to sex difference (the biological difference between males and females) but instead would point towards “an interpretation of sex difference which is embodied in language” (Stone 2007: 120). The female subjectivity that the early Irigaray envisioned was still unheard of and was not in opposition to the masculine view of itself (leaving women to embody what the male self-perceived he lacked). In discussing this theory of Irigaray’s, Braidotti wrote that the former had striven to:

“Voice and embody in her texts women’s own and yet unexplored ‘feminine’, as distinct from the kind of ‘feminine’ that is simply annexed to the logocentric economy as ’the second sex’ […]; the fact that ‘the feminine’ is the blind spot of all textual and theoretical processes means that women’s voices are buried underneath someone else’s, man’s own words. There is therefore a direct equivalence between the process of metaphorization of ‘the feminine’ and the phenomenon of the historical oppression of women […] The ‘feminine’ she is after is a woman-defined-feminine, and, as such, it is still a blank; it is not yet there (Braidotti 2011: 94, my cursives) ”.

But again, the further Irigaray moves into the domain of Yoga and Tantra, the more her view on sexual difference and polarity seem to take on the distinctive linguistic flavour of those same traditions. In The Way of Love (2002), she writes:

“The human in what it is objectively ever since its beginning is two, two who are different […] In order to carry out the destiny of humanity, the man-human and the woman-human each have to fulfil what they are and at the same time realize the unity that they constitute. The unity that they form, from the beginning, as human species is of course only a first reality which to initiate human becoming. What the ultimate unity will be, we cannot anticipate: it will depend upon the cultivation of one’s Being by each one and upon the cultivation of the relation between the two. This end cannot be dependent upon only one being and it escapes representation (…) The difference between man and woman already exists, and it cannot be compared to a creation of our understanding. We have to take care about thinking it and cultivating it, to be sure, but starting from where it exists (Irigaray 2002b: 105-106, my cursives) ”.

The difference between ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ in Irigaray’s view, cannot be compared to a creation of our understanding (meaning, we cannot construct it, nor have we yet fully understood it), but it “already exists […] objectively ever since its beginning” (meaning, it is essential or inherent). Reading Irigaray’s ideas about fulfilment and unity brings to mind the Tantric iconographical and mythological form of Ardhanārīśvara – the ‘half-woman lord’, where Śiva and Śakti share the same midline, forming an androgynous figure. The inner manifestation of this epicene (is it both or neither?) is sometimes described as the end goal of Tantra¹⁶. Perhaps, this is what Irigaray refers to as “the final blossoming” which “cannot be attained through this simple complimentary” (Irigaray 2002b: 139). As the afore mentioned quote shows, Irigaray’s notion of essential difference does not boil down to the same simplified logics of ‘opposites attract’ as does contemporary ‘neo-Tantra.’ Instead, she writes that:

“The masculine and the feminine are in no case the inverse or the opposite of each other. They are different. This difference that holds between them is perhaps the most unthinkable of differences – difference itself […] The exclusion of such a difference from thinking ends in making the two parts between which it exists and the relation between them fall again into a simple naturalness. To be man or to be woman would represent a natural identity to overcome culturally, while fulfilling the task linked to what is called a ‘biological destiny’: reproduction” (Irigaray 2002b: 106, 108-109) ”.

The difference that Irigaray is after is thus neither a question of opposites, nor of othering. No, the “blossoming”, she states:

“Depends upon two dimensions: vertical and horizontal. Here again, our culture has favoured verticality, the relation to the Idea allegedly at the summit of approximate reproductions, the relation to the Father, to the leader, to the celestial Wholly-Other (Irigaray 2002b: 144-145) ”.

Here, Irigaray, seems once again to be referring to divinized, or archetypal, human beings, whose ‘blossoming’ or perhaps liberation, depend on a reintegration (not least psychologically) of the Mother, of the Goddess, and of the immanent, what she refers to as the ‘horizontal’. This wording is not unique to Irigaray, but is used both within the study of religion, where it is described that a (striving for) vertical transcendence has given way to a horizontal one (Streib/Klein 2016) and within circles of contemporary spirituality, where it is talked about as the ‘return of the goddess’ (Whitmont 1999) or ‘rise of the feminine’ (Kempton 2013)¹⁷. Once more, this points towards Irigaray’s creation of theory as part of the ‘material’ or ‘somatic’ turn, which might simultaneously be described as a turning towards ‘earlier’ forms of feminism¹⁸.

The ‘Tantric’ Return to Second Wave Feminism

Perhaps Irigaray’s writing, as some of the more gender-normative teachings of ‘neo-Tantra’, answer to a longing for ground-stability, security and predictability. But it could also be understood as a return to second wave feminism; focusing on specificity and difference as opposed to equality, linked, as Campbell suggests, to “an upsurge in interest in marginal movements concerned with such things as spirituality and ecology” (Campbell 2002: 16)¹⁹. Second wave feminism has been criticized, for example by Julia Kristeva, who points out that “the second wave feminists, by focusing on the specificity of the female subject […] failed to acknowledge the multiplicity of background, experience and need to be found amongst women themselves” (Kristeva 1990: 201). In the same way, Irigaray can be criticized for forgetting about her own geographical, cultural, racial, sexual, educational, and linguistic background as she weaves her theoretical tapestry. In To Be Two (2000) Irigaray writes:

“My experience as a woman demonstrates, as does my analysis of the language of women and men, that women almost always privilege the relationship between subjects, the relationship with the other gender, the relationship between two […]; instead of the feminine universe’s relationship between two, man prefers a relationship between the one and the many, between the I-masculine subject and others: people, society, understood as them and not you (Irigaray 2000: 7, original cursives) ”.

Beyond covering Irigaray’s thought on women and relationality, this quote encapsulates what stands as the foundation for her theory, namely her own ‘experience as a woman’. Maybe what should be added to this is her experience as a practitioner of Yoga and Tantra¹, which as this article argues, has significantly coloured her perspective.

Conclusion: Irigaray Exemplifying the ‘Somatic’ Turn

Though Luce Irigaray’s oeuvre cannot be reduced to the few texts treated in this article, it argues that her theoretical development over time coincides with her increased interest in spiritual practices like Yoga and Tantra. And that her development, in turn, corresponds with a ‘material’ or ‘somatic’ turn within the academic world, as well as the world of contemporary spirituality. This has been exemplified by Irigaray’s use of terms like ‘masculinity’, ‘femininity’, ‘polarity’ and her description of a distinctly feminine form of liberation, characterized by relationality and worldly engagement. Throughout this article, therefore, I have suggested that Irigaray should be regarded as a practitioner, expressing in the world of feminist theory what is at the same time being voiced within contemporary spirituality.

Eventually, the pendulum will swing again, inviting a new theoretical take on an old perspective. But for now, the somatic turn seems evident, as practitioners (many of them female) are voicing their embodied experience, in Yoga studios and Tantric retreats, as well as within the world of academia, suggesting that our time is one of engaged enlightenment.

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1. Though the concepts of both ‘Yoga’ and ‘Tantra’ are notoriously difficult to define, since they include a multitude of traditions which have changed over time, some useful definitions of ‘Yoga’ can be found in Foxen and Kuberry (2021, 3-9), while some useful definitions of ‘Tantra’ can be found in Brooks (1990: 55-72) and Padoux (2017: 7). The boundaries between Yoga and Tantra have historically not been clearly outlined, neither are they in contemporary spirituality (for example, a Yogic practice might have Tantric elements, such as mantras or deities, or Tantric concepts, such as kuṇḍalinī and cakra, incorporated into it).
2. Lynne Huffer (2011), on the other hand, has argued that we need to take Irigaray seriously when she writes that her position has never changed and that it is a mistake to believe otherwise. See also Roberts (2015) and Lehtinen (2014), the later claiming that “the debate on Luce Irigaray’s essentialism and the dismissal of her thought as heterosexist have obscured her work as a manifestation of open and dynamic feminine being with great generative potential” (Lehtinen 2014: 1).
3. Also described as ‘holistic spirituality’ or ‘New Age spirituality’ and generally characterized as “de-institutionalized religion” (Sutcliffe and Gilhus 2013: 9) or forms of “lived religion” (McGuire 2008). For more on the high representation of women in contemporary spirituality, see Woodhead (2016).
4. See, for example, Pintchman, and Dempsey (2015).
5. Wouter J. Hanegraaff (2003) has termed it a “a turn to life” and Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas (2005) “the subjective turn” or “the turn to the self.” The turn has been described as a rejection of “mind-matter” and “subject-object” dichotomies (Moberg 2016) and as a reaction against immaterial abstraction, Derrida’s constructivism and Foucault’s discourse analysis (Bräunlein 2016).
6. ‘Classical’ Yoga refers here to the Yoga of Patañjali, see White (2014). See also comment below.
7. The concept ‘classical’ can be viewed as problematic. So can the prefix ‘neo- ‘as it assumes the existence of a singular, solid tradition of ‘Tantra,’ from which ‘neo-Tantra’ differs – as Richard King argues with reference to the term “neo-Hinduism” (King 1999: 107). When I use the description/delineation ‘classical’ in this text, it refers to nondual Śaiva Tantra or Trika Śaivism, which has also been named Kashmir Śaivism (although this term has been criticized for not taking into account that the tradition in question was not geographically limited to the area of Kashmir). For more on Kashmir Śaivism, see Dyzkowski (1987) and Muller Ortega (1989). In writing that they are sometimes purposely mirrored, I mean that many of the teachers of ‘somatic’ or ‘embodied’ forms of Yoga are influenced by Tantric philosophy, especially as it has been taught in the Siddha Yoga organization, founded by Swami Muktananda and carried forward by teachers such as Sally Kempton. For more on Siddha Yoga, see Williamson (2010), Kripal (2017).
8. As in, for example, the dualistic philosophical system/school of Sāṃkhya (Larson 2017).
9. The Sanskrit word sparśa (touch or contact) is also the name for consonants in classical Tantric literature. In Tantric cosmology, the consonants are associated with the descent of the word [vāc] into manifest matter, that is the ‘lower’ tattvas. This is, according to Tantric scholar André Padoux, because the lower tattvas can be ‘touched’ by the senses and are formed through a process of creative contraction, just as the consonants are produced through a restriction of the mouth and contact between the tongue and different parts of the mouth (Padoux 1990: 309). For more on the connection between touch and speech in Tantric traditions, see Biernacki (2007).
10. Lehtinen calls Irigaray a “philosopher of love and desire” (2014: x). She writes: “detached from the metaphysical presupposition of the hierarchical dichotomy of the soul and the body, love and desire appear as permeating all the dimensions of the subject – embodiment, affectivity, and spirituality. Understood in these ways, love and desire are prone to open us not only more fully to the actual but also to the potential in our relations to ourselves, to others, and to the world” (2014: x).
11. For more on the notion of Siddhas in Tantric tradition, see Muller-Ortega (1997).
12. For more on women, religion, and relationality, see Woodhead (2001).
13. See, for example, Kempton (2013), Dinsmore-Tuli (2014), Chinnayan (2017) and Shunya (2022).
14. “Of course, we must first remember that language is not neutral and that its rules weigh heavily on the constitution of female identity and on women’s relationship with one another” (Irigaray 1994: 27).
15. In a similar manner, the Goddess in Tantric traditions is often described as a virgin [kumārī] in the sense that she is “completely independent, always given to play” (Lakshmanjoo 2007: 46).
16. In Kashmir Śaivism, for example, these two cosmic principles, often translated as consciousness (Śiva) and power (Śakti) are understood to form an eternal unity even as they are experienced as separate because of the creative process of moving into form and diversity (Isayeva 1995).
17. Kempton writes: “In our time, the Goddess has come roaring out of her hiding places […] and we are beginning to recognize uniquely feminine kinds of power” (Kempton 2013: 5).
18. For a comprehensive outline of the historical developments from first to second wave feminism, see Kingsley Kent (2012: 28-38).
19. For an example of second-wave eco-feminism, see Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, who wrote, in a similar manner to Irigaray, that: “It is women, remember, whose brains are evolutionary structured to experience sexual and spiritual illumination as one” (Sjöö and Mor 1991: 225).