There seems to be conflation with innocence and purity, and I believe that’s a Victorian idea still lingering around, wrecking the place and never paying rent.
It’s wrong.
I don’t really know how else to put it. We often describe kids as innocent but if you’ve spent any time around kids you know they’re anything but pure. In both literal and figurative senses — they play in the mud, they hang out with frogs, and they’re interested in sex at a young age. Not in the same way adults are interested in sex, which is why I think people have such trouble with imagining kids as young human beings who think about sex.
Nowadays when I think about sex it’s mainly in the vein of augh when can I get some of that it has been too loooooonnnggg (that may change in the near future, because the boyfriend and I will no longer be long-distance, come September). Or that sounds good right about now *pounce on boyfriend in a consensual manner*. Or dear gods I really want these two fictional characters to make out but that will probably never happen so I will spend my sexual frustration with my boyfriend, who somewhat enjoys my fangrrlish obsessions when they end like this.
When I was a kid I thought about sex a lot. I was fascinated by it. I read books about the great machine that was the human body and learned about conception and the role sex played in that. I thought it was really cool that people had sex and then fetuses got formed from sperm and eggs and then nine months later there would be a baby. That was just fucking awesome to me.
And I asked my mom questions about sex, too, and if she didn’t always tell me everything about a certain subject matter, she was always honest with me. I even learned about queer sex, so I knew early on that sex was for more than just procreation. It was supposed to be fun.
When I got a little bit older but was still just a kid — think about six years old, here — my best friend and I played “doctor” in a hidden corner of her backyard, behind a copse of Scotch Broom. Later, she became my first sexual experience — when I was about nine. There was no sexual drive for me, at the time; there was just interest, and exploration of almost a scientific nature. I’d even go so far as to say that as a child I was asexual in that I wasn’t interested in it the way I am now, which is like unto a dog gone into heat — I was just interested in it because it was interesting, and I was a kid who wanted to know everything about everything right now. I also saw that it was tied to genealogy, and that was one of my obsessions from the get-go — I needed to know how everyone related to each other. It was important. (And it still is.) But there was no sexual drive for me until puberty hit.
None of these experiences stole my innocence; innocence is the ability to connect to the energy of the earth and the energy of creation with wild, unabashed joy. This doesn’t mean having a sex drive or needing sex with other mortals — when you truly open yourself up to that energy of creation, when that energy pulses through your body, the feeling you get is a lot like sex. And you don’t need a sex drive to pursue magical or spiritual pursuits.
That feeling, that pulsing, happens for me during especially powerful ritual or spell work. It happens when I do my godslavery work for the Morrigan. It happens when I drop the learned bullshit behaviours of my time in adult-hood, when I drop all the stuff I carry around all day, and let my core self become one with the earth. It happens when I dance with wild ecstasy, whether in honor of Dionysos or just in honor of feeling my body move.
And yes, it happens during sex, too. Not all the time, but sometimes we hit that vein of pulsing energy that runs through the earth’s skin, and then I black out from all the joy.
These instances are me re-connecting with my innocence. I’m re-finding what was taken from me when sex became about coercion and power instead of love, connection, or pleasure. I’m re-discovering what it feels like to see the earth as another living being, instead of a thing that I own by virtue of being human. I’m allowing myself to be playful again, with all the danger that that entails. I’m allowing myself to walk between the worlds without a safety net.
I’m shedding the myth of purity and allowing myself to get righteously dirty in the soil and the loam; making myself one with the earth that loves me.
I see innocent as the absence of shame and guilt. I am not sure how I see purity. People use it in different ways. Like “purely evil” or “pure unadulterated dumbass” (a friend I have says that one). I have to read it in context to know what is meant by it.
I think sex can connect people to innocence. To being without shame or guilt. What a wonderful freeing thing. It’s just like the way we come into the world.
I really think you are on to something here. Innocence = inner sense / 6th sense / intuition / connection to the universal soul mind. When understood this way, you can’t lose innocence, just forget you have it. Remembering what you lost/forgot is remembering how you were as a baby before your connection to the earth and creator was “blocked” by guilt, shame, and other artificial and synthetic concepts someone dreamed up and decided to impose on the world. I wonder if this isn’t what is really meant when Jesus (or whoever that was) said “a child’s angel always sees the face of the father” and “unless you change and become as a child, you will never see the kingdom of heaven.”