Historically, sex and spirituality have been two things that have not been received well in the same sentence. While some ancient religions did include sexuality in their own rites, others sought to control sexuality, either by suppressing it or by severely limiting its expression. .
Most of the dominant religions in the world today are preaching the suppression of the sexual urge or the channeling of that urge into socially acceptable forms. For example, Roman Catholics used to be very sexually explicit and open people. After a man who, in his youth, was sexually explicit converted to Catholicism and pledged selibacy for himself; he became a priest by the name of St Augustus. St. Augustus arose the birth of moral laws in Christianity when the first law he brought into public light was that there would be no fornication unless it was for strictly procreational reasons. In any case, this moral law led to making adultary illegal, just as it is by today's standards. .
Though many people today do not necessarily follow "moral laws" or, even their own religion's belief about sex, there is still a connection between sex and spirituality. There are ancient practices such as tantra, tao sexology, and (namely) Kama sutra, which tends to be the most practiced and well known of the three in western culture. .
Which ancient traditions chose to include sexuality as a spiritual act? Some sects of early Christianity incorporated sexual rites into their religious practices; all of these sects were persecuted into extinction by the Roman Catholic Church once it was able to successfully inundate its political standing on Roma as the sole religious institution of Europe.
The Sumerians performed the Sacred Marriage, a union between a priestess of their goddess, Inanna, with a priest-king, as a means of obtaining the favor of this goddess for their cities. Greece referred to this type of ritual sex as the Hieros Gamos; and as evidence has shown, it was also practiced by the Egyptians in the cult of Isis up until the Roman era.
