consider
"Donne, who may have influenced English romantic poetry almost as
much as Shakespeare, attended Oxford while Bruno was lecturing there
and seems to have picked up some of the Nolan's doctrines. The fact that
Donne's poems often have double and triple meanings, concealed jokes and
Hidden symbolism is a critical commonplace, but this has not usually been
* Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, n.d.) In The Spirit of Romance, with
roore clarity but equal caution, Pound grants that what was involved was a yoga utilizing
the opposite polarities of male and female." De Rougemont in love in the Western World
leaves no doubt that it was classic Tantric yoga, prolonging the sex act into a trance in
which the "souls" or "magnetisms" are, to some degree, visible.
related to the use of similar red herrings by the "Hermeticists" like Bruno
who always sought to conceal their sexual teachings from the Holy
Inquisition by such devices. In this connection, Donne's The Ecstasy is notable
as a poem that has almost always been misunderstood by scholarly
commentators. Here are the key stanzas, with emphasis added by me in the
form of italics:
Where, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest
The violet's reclining head,
Sat we two, one another's best.
So t' intergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures on our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.
As 'twixt two equal armies fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls, which to advance their state
Were gone out, hung 'twixt her and me.
And whilst our souls negotiate there
We like sepulchral statues lay;
Allday the same our postures were
And we said nothing all the day.
This is generally described as an exemplar of "Platonic love," but it is
almost certainly nothing of the kind. Readers unaware of the Tantric-Sufi
tradition in Tibet, India and the Near East and its transmission through the
Templar-troubadour cult and the various "alchemists" and Illluminati
assume that if Donne and his lady "sat" together they must have been
without sexual contact. Actually—see any Tibetan painting of the yabyum
position, as it is called—sitting in each other's laps in the double-lotus
position is basic to all sexual yoga. According to some writers there are
neurological reasons for this—it allegedly diverts the sexual energy or
bioelectricity from the central nervous system and sends it into the
autonomic (involuntary) system—but, from a Freudian point of view, it
restores the male to the purely passive role of the infant at the breast and thus
represents the oralization of the genital embrace. Not unexpectedly, the
purpose of this is to recapture Freud's "oceanic experience" or the "trance or
Unity" as mystics call it. In some traditions, influenced by Gnostic magic
ideas, the couple stares into each other's eyes; cf. Donne's "and pictures in
our eyes to get / Was all our propagation." This method is also a form of
birth control, since it allows the male to experience orgasm without ejaculation."