Sacred Sexuality in Ancient Egypt

SEXUALITY / ANCIENT EGYPT"Utilizing material sequestered away in museum and university archives and rarely seen, evidently because of its explicit sexuality, Ruth Schumann Antelme reveals an aspect of Egypt that many have suspected but no one to date has demonstrated: an intense and joyous eroticism that plays out in the human sphere but is intimately tied to a profound metaphysical and cosmological Egyptian understanding--sex as a sacrament."John Anthony West, author of The Traveler's Key to Ancient EgyptSacred Sexuality in Ancient Egypt is the first book to fully explore the sexual philosophy and practices of the ancient Egyptians. Until recently the papyri, whose explicit illustrations of Egyptian sexual practices were judged too shocking, were off-limits to all but a few scholars. Now Egyptologist Ruth Schumann Antelme provides us with a new view of the provocative sexual life of the ancient Egyptians, revealing the intimate details of a society in which sexuality was a dynamic principle of the divine world.Richly illustrated with more than 160 black-and-white reproductions and 23 color plates, Sacred Sexuality in Ancient Egypt explains the symbolism of the erotic images found on the inner walls of temples and tombs, as well as those carved into pieces of limestone and sketched on papyri. They reveal the Egyptians attitude toward love, as well as specific common and uncommon sexual practices. Schumann Antelme and Rossini also examine in great detail the astonishingly erotic scenes illustrated in the Turin Papyrus, images that have long been kept from public view. The authors show us the connection of sacred sexuality to Egyptian cosmic symbolism as well as demonstrate that every level of Egyptian society was imbued with sexual power.RUTH SCHUMANN ANTELME is an Egyptologist, an eneritus researcher of the CNRS in France, and a former professor at the Ecole du Louvre. She is author of Becoming Osiris and and is a resident of Paris. STEPHANE ROSSINI illustrated Becoming Osiris and Reading and Writing Hieroglyphics. He lives in Paris.