Just as gamers today gather both virtually and physically to celebrate fantasy, roleplay and pushing the boundaries of imagination – ancient societies openly explored sexuality as an integral pathway to rapture and renewal rather than a road to ruin. Let us respefully gaze into some steamy pasts for inspiration to passionately yet consciously celebrate all facets of our shared humanity.
Neurochemical Highs: Ancient Revels vs Modern Gaming
The Roman festival of Bacchanalia lives on in spirit at ComicCons and gaming raves today. In springtime frenzied throngs worshipped Bacchus, god of wine and unbridled ecstasy by surrendering to wild music, dance and questionable liquids under torchlit skies.
Like gamers donning costumes to become legendary heroes or villains – the Bacchanalia saw Roman nobles and commoners alike shed status to merge joyously as sacred yet profane beings called Bacchus and Bacchae. The air overflowed with wine, hormones and hypnotic chanting amid a procession of giant silica phalluses representing fertility gods. Young maidens under trance willingly submit to goatskin whip lashes from older men in a symbolic mating ritual designed to bless virgins into motherhood under Bacchus’s divine patronage.
Clearly the ancients knew how to trigger otherworldy neurochemical highs well before psychologists identified runner’s highs, TED talks on flow states or Ritual theory!
Just like gaming transports us to altered states of consciousness – the ancients used mythology, frenzied dance, substances and sexuality to activate magical mindsets and wire our brains to nature’s infinite creativity.
GenderPlay in Ancient Cultures vs Gaming
Unlike the Bacchanalia that upheld traditional gender roles – the ancient Celts recognized nine genders as part of their mystical druidic worldview which Christian colonists later destroyed. Both men and women ruled as warriors and druidic healers, their myths full of shape-shifting tricksters and potions bestowing sexual fluidity. Women boasted more rights than medieval Europeans. The warrior Scathach trained the legendary Cuchulainn while Queen Maeve led armies to avenge stolen bulls in the epic Ulster Cycle stories.
Irish Brehon laws allowed women to inherit property, divorce freely and receive compensation for domestic work from husbands. lesbian romance bloomed alongside male bonding further enhanced by the ancient openness to sexual exploration compared to Judeo-Christian mores.
Similarly Norse sagas and evidence from graves like the Oseberg ship burial contain shield-maidens and noble ladies alongside cisgender, third gender seers and shamans accorded respect like the revered volva called Heith in their myths. The god Loki memorably shape-shifts into a mare to distract a mighty stallion and sires an eight legged foal – a metaphor for his genderfluid role as trickish intermediary between the shining male Aesir and chaotic giantesses of Jotunheim!
Just as modern inclusive games like Baldur‘s Gate 3 and Hades allow playing as trans characters or saints row 4 lets you shift gender at will – ancient myths contained space for sexual minorities and gender fluidity. Of course like gaming itself, biases and discrimination existed too among ancients. Yet the openness of some past societies on gender diversity contrasts with even some recent gaming worlds tending to stick to fixed tropes.
Erotic Arts and Poetry in Antiquity vs Gaming
Gamers delighting in romantic subplots or questionable manga styled adult artwork share much with the ancients who skillfully merged eroticism with fine arts, myths and lyrical verse rather than marginalize desire to hidden spaces.
Frank erotic imagery openly adorns Hindu temples celebrating kama as one of life’s proper goals, the Khajuraho complex brimming with fine-limbed celestial nymphs in graphic detail – scenes that would make even a Witcher blush! Similar lush friezes appear at Kônârak sun temple with a 24 spoked stone chariot wheel replacing sundials, yet ingeniously aligned to cast symbolic shadows in intimate areas during annual fertility festivals!
Like romantic subplots in gaming epics, Japanese Heian era nobles penned exquisite erotic poetry and manuscripts celebrating desire poetically not pornographically. The famous Pillow Book by Lady Sei Shonagon brims with lush metaphors, elegant intimations of longing and playful voyeuristic sketches of trysts behind gossamer curtains –
"In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful as the last remnants of night linger seductively in the awakening garden, almost as beautiful as my lord aroused from our perfumed chamber hers. How charming he looks indeed, with lusty energy yet gentle restraint waiting for my linens to slip enticingly.."
The ancients interwove frank sexuality with exalted arts that respected erotic dimensions without reducing lovers to mere bodies. Unlike airbrushed fantasy characters blindly catering to base appetite, the candour of ancient artists restored sacredness to intimate beauty.
Like graphics mods that can enhance immersion or descending into the uncanny valley – erotic arts faced similar dilemmas on balancing realism, stylization and emotional resonance.
Enhancement Herbs and Devices: Ancient vs Modern
Long before dodgy web ads offered performance boosters for desperate youth – the ancients openly developed arts and concoctions for exactly that! Yet traditional approaches framed sexuality holistically – identifying ideal times, foods, practices – even potent prayers to align the psyche and energize the masculine ‘vajra‘ and feminine yoni or ‘lotus’ as metaphors for cosmic principles.
China saw extensive literature on sexual cultivation arts like Sun Simao‘s famed Prescriptions Worth a Thousand in Gold with recommended visualization, breathing, massage and intercourse techniques supplemented by decoctions containing ginseng, epimedium leaves, cinnamon bark and deer horn thought to boost yang essence. Areas like Dali were famed for helping older men regain vigor in their 80s with local herbs! Daoist alchemists sublimated their sexual energy into qi and shen spiritual force while the dominant Confucians valued moderation and self-restraint.
The Kamasutra too discusses supplements like triphala myrobalans, licorice and sugar crystals cleverly categorized under types of embraces! Ayurveda offers extensive advice from oils like bala for strength to diets avoiding tamasic foods. Practices like vajroli mudra involved muscle control to draw fluids upwards from stimulation as a repossession of sorts, also benefiting the partner.
Unlike suspect quick fixes from the internet, traditional sexual enhancement works holistically with comprehensive lifestyle changes for subtle gains. Just as gamers invest in better computers, ergonomic furniture, wrist guards, nutritional supplements and master optimal key or controller hold techniques for better performance – ancient arts advise natural preparatory cultivation for sustained holistic gains rather than chemicals promising robotic rigidity!
Tantra vs Gaming: Balancing Hedonism, Spirituality and Life
Unlike modern fixation on mechanistic ‘humping’, authentic tantra sees sexuality as a celebration of cosmic oneness through sacred embodiment. Tantrics were radical antinomians flouting religious conventions, even as they served society as alchemists, doctors, teachers and temple dancers.
Like gamers alternating between everyday responsibility and enjoyment of fantastical escapism, tantrics embodied a holistic balance. Their flamboyant appearance and shocking rituals paramountly proclaimed freedom from conditioned existence through confrontational reversals while their philosophy allowed for periodic immersive hedonism by seeing all experience as manifestation of divine consciousness – poison transformed into nectar.
Tantrics were like lucid gamers playing GTA fully aware it is a fictional realm created by the mind, yet intentionally choosing experiences including risky ones like violence albeit in detached awareness. For them substance use was not profane escapism but sacred portals to altered archetypal realities beyond habitual mental limits. They sought to harness hedonism‘s gripping neurochemical power to override cultural conditioning and boundary-dissolution to glimpse liberating insights about reality behind the game we mistake for unconditional truth.
And just like how emerging technologies from VR to omnisensory body suits and networked teledildonics that allow intimacy over distances promise new frontiers for gaming experiences – some modern explorers also foresee transformational possibilities blending hedonic euphoria, spatial presence and pagan ritual theory to architect erotic embodied transcendence akin to tantrics and their taboo practices for spiritual liberation.
Aztec and Mayan Sexual Rituals – Parallels in Gaming
Watching the riveting human sacrifice scene in Mel Gibson’s Apocalytpto or the elaborate brutal raid boss sequences in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft – one notices mythic parallels with rituals of ancient Mesoamericans like the Aztecs and Incas. Though outwardly gruesome with priests tearing out still pulsating hearts off captives and maidens to nourish the sun and earth gods so as to perpetuate cosmic cycles of life – the theatrical violence masks deeper psychological tensions.
Firstly, creation myths of Mesoamerican cultures including Mayans and Aztec contain violent sexual elements – the earth and heavens only coming into being through sacrifices and dismemberment of primordial creator beings followed by procreation between the mutilated parts of their bodies giving birth to humanity. Destruction enables creation. Violence and sex intertwined as creative cosmic forces.
Secondly, historic evidence indicates their lavish ceremonies aimed less at brute domination of their neighbors as stereotyped in colonial accounts. Instead intricate alliances existed with flower wars designed to obtain high status captives as offerings for escalating cycles of prosperity. Just as gaming clans forge tight symbiotic bonds around friendly competition and ritualized in-game warfare. Surviving pre-Colombian poetry uses religious metaphors to celebrate rulers as intimate sustainers of their subjects as beloved.
However the psychology behind Aztec ceremonial violence likely served to relieve intra-civilizational tensions from population pressures in vulnerable ecologies through displaced symbolic sacrifice of outsider others. Similar to how gamers relieve frustrations by blasting hordes of dehumanized, demonized or racialized enemies in fictional gameplay violence curiously never applied in real world contexts.
On balance, the Aztec worldview wove sex and death as two faces of nature’s callous fecundity yet relieved through communal bonding rituals framed mythically as appeasing cosmic forces.
Conscious Gaming and Celebration of Our Shared Humanity
Reviewing ancient evidence, we realize cultures deemed primitive or cruel by modern societies turned out matriarchal, gender fluid, sex positive with erotic arts and hedonic rituals galore dedicated to cosmic deities of creativity, love and life itself! They didnt divide sex versus spirit but aligned intimate energies with planetary powers to harness Shakti and Shiva in mystical union as above so below, within so without.
Unlike simplistic assumptions about progress – ancients were far more open-minded, physically free yet more profoundly metaphysically aware than our own institutionalized cultures high on industrialized consumption and digital dopamine yet suffering surging psychopathologies around relationships, body-image, addiction and nihilism behind our technological shells.
Truly free societies humbly balance hedonism with wholeness, consumption with conservation, privilege with responsibility, the individual with community and crucially, the virtual with the real – principles upheld in their essence by ancients and worthy of resurrection.
Just as gaming can unite humanity across borders, bypass divides of race, gender identities and ideologies through cooperative quests – we too must celebrate our collective humanity, take delight in diversity yet foster equity through new narratives that uplift the oppressed by including perspectives excluded.
Let intimacy become ceremony not commodity, pleasure be purposeful beyond passing gratification and frontiers give way to fellowship. By rediscovering sex-positivity with responsibility, grounded truths behind idealized myths and youthful verve guided by wisdom gathered over millennia – may we walk trails together trodden by ancients.