Sex and Religion | Page 4

enable those who consider sex a sacred, or at any rate serious, beautiful and dignified thing, to express their meaning. The old question, 'What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,' is in this respect to be answered most emphatically 'Everything is in a name.'
The word sex and most of its derivatives have become contaminated in the minds of a large proportion of people. The result of this is that whenever one who has something to say uses the word (as of necessity it must be used in dealing with the subject) deep inhibitions, reactions, obsessions and antagonisms are roused in some or many of those who hear the word, and the result is a condition of mental conflict in which the new and sweet ideas suffer as do small boats tossed in a tempest.
I am convinced that the majority of decent people to-day are not inherently opposed to the ideas which those who would reform sex matters in our midst are desirous of placing before the public. Yet as the ancient word 'sex' has not the conveyance of a single or simple concept but is an omnibus packed with ill-assorted, conflicting ideas, some of them foul and obscene, the whole 'bus load seems to be indited by their presence.
Let us think what the word sex denotes to the average mind a swift, hazy, kaleidoscopic series of half-blurred pictures of the worse than bestiality in dens and haunts of degraded mankind; of the barbarities of the male savage towards his female; of the refined horror of modern prostitution; of the purely physical relation of the mating animals. Try as he will the modern man cannot free his own mental concept of sex from some fringe, some hazy aura of all these things because the word sex is applied to them all and they, therefore, fantastically appear to be aspects of the same thing which he and his noble and beautiful beloved are living together. The life that he and his beloved are living together is, however, not comparable nor is it soiled by the attributes of these other phenomena. It is, in my opinion, a freshly evolved, nobler, subtler, immensely richer and more beautiful thing than the primitive dr the aberrant forms which it has passed and outwinged on its way upwards.
For the modern relation between man and woman mated or living in the innumerable interdependencies, the mutual obeisances, the mutual respects which are not paralleled at all in the sex relation of the primitive peoples or in the debased lives of the violently depraved, a clean, fresh, subtle word is wanted, and instead of the soiled and degraded word 'sexual' life, for this new and elevated interplay between man and woman I propose the word 'erogamic' life.
Erogamic is a new word coined here and to-day for the purpose of crystallising a vital idea that is in our midst though barely recognised. It is derived from the Greek: eros love, zndgamos marriage or mating. I mint it with the intention that it shall designate that noble flower of the duality of human life, the mating and relation together of man and woman in all three planes physical, mental and spiritual.
Erogamic life, and not sexual life, is that which we who would reform the relation between man and woman hold up as a standard. I desire to set this idea free in all its potential power and beauty to do good in the world. The physiological aspects of normal sex we all have as a physical basis in our lives; for the evolved interplay of man and woman we can speak of erogamic life and leave the word 'sexual' to those who still roll in the filth and who delight in the unclean echoes of the centuries.
For dictionary purposes the new word erogamic may be defined as: All that relation, in cultivated communities, between man and woman as mated pair which involves their mutual interplay and interdependencies in physical, mental and spiritual life.
I trust that the fresh word for the fresh and beautiful concept (essentially characteristic of this century) of nobly and completely mated man and woman may replace the soiled and bedraggled collection of ideas and themes at present lumped together under the words 'sex' and 'sexual.' Indeed I feel acutely that the world has rightly sickened of 'talk of things sexual.' The word is itself sickening, but that nobler thing which has grown in our midst is a great and beautiful Fact which we can sense better when it is defined and described in a word giving a clear, fresh picture.
All human beings with but few tragic exceptions (and these are pathetic, abnormal and misformed individuals) are clearly and completely of one type or the other of the human duity. I revive the