Sex With Noncorporeal Beings: A Pleasure Pie Sex Salon Talk

[lb_lee]

Sex With Noncorporeal Beings: A Pleasure Pie Sex Salon Talk

Summary: “By placing it into the hands of physicians, spirit sex is relegated to the status of a disease that must be cured. […] by regarding sex with spirits as a psychological disorder of the mind, it can be dismissed as a mere fantasy or illusion, probably induced by some childhood trauma, that has no value to or significance in the so-called real world. The view is that once a person who is under the ‘illusion’ that he or she is having sex with a spirit has been successfully counseled, the aberrant notion will simply fade away like a forgotten dream.” (Tyson, 25)
Series: Essay (sorta)
Word Count: 3000ish
Notes: Rough transcription and expansion of a talk I gave for the Pleasure Pie Sex Salon in November 2023; it was the blow-out winner of the writing poll! Mentions of psychiatric abuse, exorcism, rape, violence, harassment, negative side effects of tantric training, and suicide. Despite all that, this is a happy essay.

Hello! We are Rogan and Mac of LB Lee. We are multi (multiple personalities by popular parlance), we’ve been together since 2007, and we’ve been making comics about it since 2008!

Pretty quickly in, we realized that people had no idea how we have sex, and there was no way for them to learn, asides from asking us rude, intrusive questions. There were no books, no pamphlets, no guides—even the Internet barely mentioned such things, except as “this happens” and “what a freak show!” So we started making works like Alter Boys In Love (2010-2017) and Multi, Orgasmic (2022). But this is a live talk, not a comic, so let’s get into the nuts and bolts: what, exactly, do you do with a noncorporeal partner?

Before we begin, a couple quick notes: we are using “noncorporeal partner” as a flaccid, makeshift term to describe any being you are choosing to be intimate with who lacks a body here in what mainstream America would call “real life.” This includes alters, headmates, angels, ghosts, gods, lwa, fairies, soulbonds, imaginary friends, and more. We are coming from a multi/soulbonding background, but there are many, many others, and different beings have different upsides and downsides. (For instance, I would never want to bang a god. That is far too rich for my blood. But many other people have!) Also, for ease of explanation in this talk, I’m separating these techniques out, but people often mix and match them.

Corporeal Proxies

This is probably the easiest for people to understand: if your partner lacks a body in consensus reality, you find them a substitute! This can be animate or inanimate.

For example, there was a certain person infamous on Livejournal for a time (no, I will not name or cite her) who had a Fae lover. She was exposed to ridicule when a “friend” outed her, connecting her fandom account to her sexual one, where, among other things, she described making an anatomically correct doll of her lover for sexual purposes. Other people may not build a whole doll, but buy/build other sex/kink toys—a dildo reflecting the being’s tastes or anatomy, for example, a ring or collar representing the relationship, or a violet wand for someone wanting to experience Zeus’s thunderbolts more materially.

Other folks find living proxies for the noncorporeal lover, though we ourself cannot. Much to my dismay, my earliest citation for a medical multiple banging their headmates comes from Ralph fuckin’ Allison, a therapist who went down the rabbit hole, up his own ass, and started exorcising his multi patients in 1973, one of which committed suicide later that year. He’s a crank and I dislike him, but nevertheless, he reports the following:

“Dennis wasn’t an alter-personality; he served no purpose, nor could I pin-point the time of his ‘birth.’ By his own admission, he remained with Elise only because he was sexually aroused by Shannon. Shannon was one of Elise’s alter-personalities [...] I asked Dennis how he expected to have sex with Shannon […]. He explained, […] that when Shannon was in charge of Elise’s body, Dennis would get inside whatever man she was dating. When Shannon went to bed with that man, Dennis would be inside him, enjoying the sensation. […] [Shannon] confirmed everything he had said” (Allison, 168).

To be clear, Dennis was a jerk. None of his headmates liked him, he participated in a gang rape of Shannon, and he ended up getting exorcised, as was Shannon herself. I would be inclined to distrust Allison’s account, except that I’ve heard such things reported elsewhere, firsthand and far more consensually, by Megan Rose in her account of spirit marriage. Her Faery Beloved found a willing vessel with a corporeal man she calls “the Druid”:

“My Faery Beloved began to move through the Druid […] This man would often become overshadowed by my Faery Beloved, channeling him […] At first, the fact that my Faery Beloved was moving through a human was confusing. I began to think that this man was actually my Faery Beloved or that he was meant to embody him all the time. However, it quickly became clear that this expectation was not only unreasonable but potentially dangerous.” (Rose, 280-281)

Heed Rose’s warning. If your noncorporeal lover does take possession of a corporeal person for the sake of intimacy, make certain all of you have ways to discuss the complications of consent and identity involved. What does the “horse” consent to the “rider” doing with their body? If the “rider” demands something that the “horse” doesn’t want, can they trust the other partner to stop things? What is “horse” and what is “rider,” and how will they handle ambiguities or blurring? We can’t afford to go in-depth, but if you do this, work to be very clear about who may do what, when, and where, how to share bodies and time safely, and how to treat each other kindly. There is a reason that spirit possession in Santería and Haitian Vodou tends to be limited and without shared-memory; there is a certain social safety in keeping horse and rider clearly separate. Alas, we do not live in an accepting society, so we often have to learn “on the job.”

Body Sharing

This is basically animate corporeal proxy, just cutting out the middleman. Those of us who share a body, like us, can share it erotically as well, controlling different muscles and swapping that control and sensations back and forth. We can share control of the body’s hands, use toys on each other as we inhabit different parts of the vessel, and so on.

This is a taboo subject, but I’ve found sparse records of people doing it; we found it discussed in a 1993 Multiple Personality Disorder newsletter by Daphne of Marianna: “The sexual act itself has taken some time to work out. It’s all a question of whose hand is whose and whose foot is whose and who is stroking and holding who, when and where. [….] We can simultaneously get the sensation of holding and being held with the help of a nest of pillows” (Many Voices Press, 2). More recently, there’s the autobiographical pornographic multi story, Metastasis, that describes it; check it out (OrchardWrites)!

Go Somewhere Else and Bang There

This is another common solution to the “no body” problem: simply go somewhere that doesn’t matter! Where that place is depends on the people: dreams, the astral plane, headspace, the spirit world… it’s all up for grabs.

For instance, we knew an Australian woman (who we will not name or directly cite) who was married to the ghost of King Louis XIII of France. Nice man, mediocre king, and he seemed happy to have given up all the royalty stuff to live a quiet life of cozy sweaters and tea. The woman we knew had a life with him in a place she called Home, in the spirit realm, and their marriage mostly transpired there.

Getting to a spirit realm can be challenging or impossible for some people, but damn near everyone dreams. Dream sex has the earliest record of any form of noncorporeal intimacy I’ve found. Very serious men of the Catholic faith were analyzing the exact theological ramifications of demon jizz by 1223 CE, out of concern over hypnagogic demon sex (Caesarius of Heisterbach, XII, 163; Springer and Kramer, Part 1 Question III). Yes, go ahead and laugh, it’s funny, but the important part is, part of why these Catholics were concerned was: to them, this was real sex! This was not mere fantasy to be dismissed.

Dream sex is still a thing people do today! Megan Rose first met her Faery Beloved through dreams: “I […] began to have dreams and visionary experiences of being contacted by spirit-beings, often with an erotic component. In this hypnagogic or hypnopompic states, and sometimes while completely asleep, I would perceive a presence making love to me” (280-281). We ourself can share dreams, sexual and nonsexual alike, and regardless of type, we consider them a special intimacy (Lee, “Shared Dreams”). Once, a whole gaggle of us ended up at a physics-defying water park and going on a water coaster. It was wonderful.

We ourself have very little control over our dreams, but if you’re interested in learning such things, there’s a lucid dreaming book free online that’s pretty solid (879CoDe et al). Check it out if you like, but heed the warning: it can increase sleep paralysis, decrease sleep restfulness, and also runs the risk of weakening your grip on consensus reality. Be aware!

Thoughtleak/Erotic Presence

Some beings give off an ecstatic aura just by hanging around! This also has a long precedent in Catholic mysticism, most famously St. Teresa of Avila. Does anyone here know her? Yes? Ah okay, sir, you’re the only one, good on you. Those of you who don’t recognize her by name might know her for “the Ecstasy of St. Teresa,” the really horny statue Bernini made from 1645-1652. Lest you think he was taking creative liberties, the scene he sculpted comes from this part of her autobiography:

“I saw in [the angel’s] hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet was so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. […] It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God in His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.”

Due to time limits, I also have to cut discussion of one of her contemporaries, San Juan de la Cruz/St. John of the Cross. You might know him as the coiner of the “dark night of the soul,” but the original poem he wrote about it was all about becoming a bride for his heavenly bridegroom:

On my flowering breast
All kept for him alone —
Left sleeping there —
And I gave myself,
And the cedars gave the air their smell.

The scent of his brow
When I spread his hair,
His calm hand
Hard on my neck,
And all my senses suspended. (Rosenbloom, 1999)

This poem is apparently beloved by some queer Catholic men, and for good reason. Give it a read! It’s quite good.

Now, you might argue that all this is purely spiritual ecstasy, but where does ecstasy end and eroticism begin? Megan Rose makes it clear that they can mix; she was originally raised Pentecostal, and according to her, “Being filled with the Holy Spirit every Sunday felt a lot like having an orgasm—although I would not make this connection until my adult years” (243). Her mentor, Orion Foxwood, who she interviews in Spirit Marriage, also describes his spirit wife as having similar effects on him:

“Brigh and I make love the same way that the roots of a tree make love to the soil, that the stars make love to the night sky […] in the deepest meaning of making love, interpenetrating like honey in a honeycomb, filling and flowing in and out, producing and inspiring creative reflection and expression from each other.” (82)

We ourself lack such aura (and thank goodness; that sounds intense) but we often leak feelings and sensations on each other. We have learned, through trial and error, to blast pleasure at each other without using bodies at all, but it’s a pretty hamfisted process and feels like being run over by a sexy truck. Not exactly something for everyday.

These skills can be trained, though, at least in some people! So can the skills of physically feeling touch and sensation that aren’t physically present. Ida Craddock, who married a spirit in 1892, seems to have done just that, taking advantage of earlier dance training to really get into the sensations of her body. As she describes it, “The union was satisfactory in every way, physically and mentally. Iason, the German physician, [a different spirit friend] assisted me, as he sometimes does, by helping me to rotate and perform other abdominal movements” (Craddock and Chapell, 28).

If you’re interested in learning such tricks, we’ve found some success in using ASMR videos on YouTube. We didn’t set out on learning anything, just relaxing and brushing each other’s hair, but we discovered that after a year or so of just casually using them, we felt phantom sensation significantly more clearly! It’s worth a shot. (See also: Lee, Multi, Orgasmic, “Phantom Nerves.”)

If you do choose to do this, a word of warning. Our bodies and minds have certain limits for very good reasons! How many here know Janet Hardy, the Ethical Slut lady? Ah, lots this time, good. Well, in the process of researching for a book, she did some tantra exercises that caused a massive kundalini awakening, which manifested as uncontrollable full-body ecstatic orgasms any time she concentrated too much on her body. If you think that sounds fun, it was very much not. Here’s how she describes it:

“I began to scream, and I kept screaming. I tipped over backward, arched up off the floor, borne only by the crown of my head and the soles of my feet [...]. it was the deepest ecstasy I’ve ever felt, like orgasm times a hundred, from the tips of my hair to the ends of my toenails. I couldn’t remember how to stop. I thought I might die. It actually lasted, I’m told, about a minute and a half, but a minute and a half is a very long time to scream at the top of one’s lungs without pause except to suck in more breath, or to lift one’s own 200-pound weight and one’s partner’s 175-pound weight on one’s feet and head.”

She was unable to much fuck or do BDSM for at least ten years afterward. And that’s just the records I have; for all I know, it was longer. So, for the love of your horny god, be careful! Mind your limits.

Art

This is the biggie. Not everyone can lucid dream, body share, possess another, or radiate ecstasy, but in damn near every noncorporeal love affair I know of, the involved parties have made art of it, in whatever medium they’re capable of. That doll woman on Livejournal made many dolls of her Fae lover, both sexual and not. The Australian married to Louis made photo collages of him, and I drew him for her once. Craddock and OrchardWrites wrote prose, San Juan de la Cruz wrote poetry, and Mac and I make comics and zines. They can be the raunchiest of porn, the most intellectual of histories, or the sweetest portraits. The options are limitless.

There are benefits to art. Even if you find no way to share physical intimacy, you can still remember and enjoy each other artistically: making it together, or leaving it for the other to discover. We generally can’t take photos of each other, so this art can be our way of remembering each other, recording our relationship so it doesn’t fall into a black hole of silence. Plus, depending on the art’s content, you can make it in public without anyone looking at you funny, and that can be a life-saver.

Of the people I described here, damn near all of them faced intense push-back due to their relationships. The doll woman on Livejournal was ridiculed off the Internet; the Australian married to Louis deleted her accounts and I have no idea what became of her. Dennis and Shannon were both institutionalized and exorcised. Ida Craddock had to flee the country twice to avoid institutionalization (one failed, one successful), got arrested, and finally committed suicide in 1902, only to then be retroactively studied as a madwoman; most of her work only survives because a Freudian analyst got really fixated on writing shrink fanfic about her sex life (Schmidt). I myself was threatened with institutionalization after I married, plus exorcised, barred from both housing and employment, and various and sundry harassment, online and off. My life has been majorly rearranged and many sacrifices made so I can exist in public and show these words to you, and I regret nothing.

Xavia Publius argues that “the ghosts of our (straight cis) ancestors get funerals, genealogies, canons. Our queer ancestors get theatre […] They are the ghosts who suffered the damnatio memoriae of a love that could not speak its name and thus was never archived.” What she says applies to other art forms as well. When this body dies, we will leave no corporeal family, no spouse to remember us. Memory of us and our relationships will quickly fade, and all that will remain, if anything, are our drawings, our zines, textual transcripts of talks like this one.

Remember us, reader. Remember us.

Citations

Allison, Ralph, and Schwartz, Ted. (1980, 1999). Minds In Many Pieces: Revealing the Spiritual Side of Multiple Personality Disorder. Paso Robles: Cie Publishing.

879CoDe et al. (n.d.) Lucid Dreaming (PDF version). Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Lucid_Dreaming.pdf

879CoDe et al. (n.d.) Lucid Dreaming (web version). Retrieved from https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming

Caesarius of Heisterbach. (1929). The Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Retrieved from https://dn790005.ca.archive.org/0/items/caesariusthedialogueonmiraclesvol.1/Caesarius%2C%20The%20Dialogue%20on%20Miracles%20%28vol.%201%29.pdf

Craddock and Chappell, Vere. (2010). Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock. San Francisco: Weiser Books.

Hardy, Janet. (2013). My tantric “awakening” turned me off sex. Salon. Retrieved from https://www.salon.com/2013/03/17/my_tantric_awakening_turned_me_off_sex/

Lee, LB. (2017). Alter Boys In Love. Boston: self-published. Buyable at https://healthymultiplicity.com/loonybrain/ShopHome.html

Lee, LB. (2022). Multi, Orgasmic. Boston: self-published. Buyable at https://healthymultiplicity.com/loonybrain/ShopHome.html

Lee, LB. (2023). Essay: Shared Dreams [blog post]. Retrieved from https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1269566.html#cutid14

Lee, LB. (2023). Linkdump of Noncorporeal Sexual/Romantic/Queerplatonic Relationships. [blog post] Retrieved from https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1259626.html

Many Voices Press. Many Voices: Words Of Hope For People With MPD or a Dissociative Disorder. (1993, Oct.) Vol. V. No. 5. Retrieved from https://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1993_10.pdf

OrchardWrites. (2023) Metastasis. Retrieved from https://archiveofourown.org/works/46571485

Publius, Xavia. (2021). “We Other Fairies.” Intonations, Vol. 1 Issue 1 61-82. University of Alberta. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351214134_We_Other_Fairies/fulltext/6396252e095a6a777420c8b2/We-Other-Fairies.pdf

Rose, Megan. (2022). Spirit Marriage: Intimate Relationships with Otherworldly Beings. Rochester: Bear & Co.

Rosenbloom, Eric. (1999). “Noche Oscura.” Retrieved from https://rosenlake.net/er/poetry/nocheOscura.html

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. (2010). Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman. New York: Basic Books.

Sprenger, James and Kramer, Henry (Summers, Montague, trans.). (1486, 1928). Malleus Maleficarum. Part 1 Question III. Retrieved from https://sacred-texts.com/pag/mm/mm01_03a.htm

Teresa of Avila. (1562-1565). The Life of Teresa of Jesus. Chapter XXIX; Part 17.

Tyson, Donald. (2000). Sexual Alchemy: Magical Intercourse with Spirits. St. Paul: Llewellyn Worldwide. Retrieved from https://ia802601.us.archive.org/24/items/sexual-alchemy-magical-intercourse-with-spirits-pdfdrive/Sexual%20Alchemy_%20Magical%20Intercourse%20with%20Spirits%20%20%20%28%20PDFDrive%20%29.pdf