Collected Essays

“It is held in the world,” Noyes writes in Bible Communism, “that the sexual organs have two distinct functions—viz: the urinary and the propagative. We affirm that they have three—the urinary, the propagative and the amative., i.e. they are conductors first of the urine, secondly of the semen and thirdly of the social magnetism…” After Mrs. Noyes had come dangerously near to death as the result of repeated miscarriages, Noyes and his wife decided that, henceforth, their sexual relationships should be exclusively amative, not propagative. But how were the specifically human aspects of sex to be detached from the merely biological? Confronted by this question, Robert Dale Owen had advocated coitus interruptus; but Noyes had read his Bible and had no wish to emulate Onan. Nor did he approve of contraceptives—“those tricks,” as he called them, “of the French voluptuaries.” Instead he advocated Male Continence and what Dr. Stockham was later to call Karezza. With the most exemplary scientific detachment he began by “analyzing the act of sexual intercourse. It has a begi

The Oneida Community endured for thirty years and its members, from all accounts, were excellent citizens, singularly happy and measurably less neurotic than most of their Victorian contemporaries. The women of Oneida had been spared what one of Noyes’s lady correspondents described as “the miseries of Married Life as it is in the World.” The men found their self-denial rewarded by an experience, at once physical and spiritual, that was deeper and richer than that of unrestrained sexuality. Here is the comment of a young man who had lived in the community and learned the new Art of Love. “This Yankee nation,” he wrote to Noyes, “claims to be a nation of inventors, but this discovery of Male Continence puts you, in my mind, at the head of all inventors.” And here are Noyes’s own reflections on the psychological, social and religious significance of his discovery. “The practice which we propose will advance civilization and refinement at railroad speed. The self-control, retention of life and advance out of sensualism, which must result from making freedom of love a bounty on the chastening of sensual indulgence, will at once raise the race to new vigor and beauty, moral and physical. And the refining effects of sexual love (which are recognized more or less in the world) will be increased a hundredfold when sexual intercourse becomes a method of ordinary conversation and each becomes married to all.” Furthermore, “in a society trained in these principles, amative intercourse will have its place among the “fine arts.” Indeed, it will take rank above music, painting, sculpture, etc.; for it combines the charms and benefits of them all. There is as much room for cultivation of taste and skill in this department as in any.” And this is not all. Sexual love is a cognitive act. We speak—or at least we used to speak—of carnal knowledge. This knowledge is of a kind that can be deepened indefinitely. “To a true heart, one that appreciates God, the same woman is an endless mystery. And this necessarily flows from the first admission that God is unfathomable in depths of knowledge and wisdom.” Male Continence transforms the sexual act into a prolonged exchange of “social magnetism”; and this prolonged exchange makes possible an ever deepening knowledge of the mystery of human nature—that mystery which merges ultimately, and becomes one with the mystery of Life itself.

Noyes’s conception of the sexual act (when properly performed) as at once a religious sacrament, a mode of mystical knowledge and a civilizing social discipline has its counterpart in Tantra. In the twenty-seventh chapter of Sir John Woodroffe’s Shakti and Shakta the interested reader will find a brief account of the Tantrik’s sexual ritual, together with a discussion of the philosophy which underlies the practice. “Nothing in natural function is low or impure to the mind which recognizes it as Shakti and the working of Shakti. It is the ignorant and, in a true sense, vulgar mind which regards any natural function as low or coarse. The action in this case is seen in the light of the i

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Male Continence, sex as a sacrament and coitus as a long-drawn cognitive exchange of “social magnetism” have been discussed in contemporary medical terms by Dr. Rudolf von Urban whose book Sexual Perfection and Marital Happiness is one of the most significant modern contributions to the solution of an age-old problem.