| Article Index |
|---|
| Phoenix Goddess Temple: RAIDED |
| The Other Guy to Consider |
| A Struggle Centuries in the Making |
| A Long March to Sexual Liberty |
| All Pages |
When the Phoenix police department's SWAT Team raided the Phoenix Goddess Temple on Sept. 7, 2011, the news rocked not only the tantra world, but mainstream media finally started giving the goddess some attention – unfortunately it was all negative attention. That day, the Phoenix police arrested 18 people and a total of 33 people have been indicted by a grand jury. Those additional 15 healers are now being "hunted down". Phoenix police spokesman Steve Martos said, "They were committing crimes under the guise of religious freedom. It's a sad situation when people are trying to hide behind religion and church to commit a crime." It was the largest Arizona prostitution bust since authorities broke up the tri-state "Desert Divas" ring in 2008, but this time it's much more topical as it deals with the separation of church and state.
One question: Did we really need an entire SWAT team to take down a dozen dakinis? I mean, how fast can they run away from the cops, barefoot and in sarongs?
Anyway, instead of just reporting about the case, which the media will do anyway since it's sweeps week, I'd like to present a tale about two people, who are both role models and directly involved in the matter of illicit sex in the Southwest. The first person is Phoenix Goddess Temple founder Tracy Elise, who prefers to refer to herself as "Mystic Mother," and was one of the 18 arrested Wednesday.
The Temple Priestess
Tracy has stated the Goddess Temple's mission clearly on her website: "The Mystic Sisters of the Phoenix Goddess Temple serve our world and our community through a Sacred Labor of Love. We are an ordained sisterhood, having dedicated our lives, fortunes and soul/body to walk on earth as the in-formed wisdom and grace of Mother of All. We are in 'right livelihood' as our work expands happiness and connection to soul. We cultivate and celebrate the ensouling of light in physical form. We believe our temple to be an island of light where all are self-sovereign in their own bodies, all are guardians of their own thoughts and feelings, not to be put upon by others. We are a not-for-profit free church; our wealth does not accrue to one person or for-profit business concern, but rather to our mission of furthering the Goddess presence on Earth."
In Mesopotamia, female devotees of Inanna (aka Ishtar and Aphrodite), the goddess of sexuality and love, regularly engaged in sexual intercourse in return for a payment to their temples. The Greek historian Herodotus reported a "wholly shameful" custom by which every woman "once in her life" had intercourse near the temple of Aphrodite with the first stranger who threw "a silver coin" into her lap. For a single day they had to stand offering their beauty for sale... open to foreigners only, and the payment became an offering to Aphrodite. Early Christian writers accused these pagans of indulging in orgies in honor of Aphrodite as well. Tracy Elise is truly a modern day equivalent of a sacred temple prostitute, and she fervently believes that she has re-discovered a primal religion that brings together sex and spirituality.
Tracy Elise constructed the temple of her vision in Phoenix, offering two floors and eight rooms she calls "transformation chambers" – each decorated in a different theme, including a "Judeo-Christian room" (all white with paintings of Jesus), an "Egyptian room" (black and gold), and a blue "water chamber" featuring a nice big bathtub. Every room includes a massage table (which they call an "altar of light"), as well as a bed (which all the goddesses refer to as the "grand altar").
The Goddess Temple bases its practices on the Hindu concept of chakras, energy centers believed to permeate from points on the physical body. Tracy Elise has explained that their work focuses on the Root Chakra. The idea is that women take energy in through their hearts and men's energy flows out through the Root Chakra. And if a man's root energy is blocked, it creates problems.
"Lately, I'm seeing so many men who actually have no red ray energy. Their red ray magnetic has been off, meaning what's supposed to be a positively charged channel has been neutralized — neutered," Elise says. "They're cut off, because there's so much guilt and shame and fear around the energy of the root. There's no science and provability about this healing system... but it works."
Tracy Elise a definitely an interesting person... she claims she's had sex with more than a thousand people and had as many as 80 orgasms in one month. Also, she was once Miss Harvest Queen at the Alaska State Fair. Her transformation to temple mother started in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1995, when she had what she calls "a kundalini awakening." At the time, she was married with three children and was stuck in a traditional lifestyle. Then she had an enlightening experience with another man. "It actually happened not in a sexual moment, but the first time we held each other," she says. "It was almost like a special effect in a movie — where you see it, and then suddenly it's glass and it shatters to pieces and falls to the floor. It was just like that. I could almost see and sense all of my structures just shattered."
Elise found herself on a new path, one on which she could manifest her inner goddess. "Certainly, I couldn't have become this and stayed married to a very moderate Catholic man," she says. "I prayed the prayer of no return . . . I drove away from my home, my husband, my catering business, everything."
Elise landed first in Washington State, where she eventually ended up at the Tantra Temple in Seattle, and lived there for six years. Eventually, she had a vision of bringing sacred sexuality to the Southwest, and moved to Scottsdale, where she opened up her first Arizona temple in a residence near 68th Street and Exeter Boulevard. In February 2009, Scottsdale police visited the residence after neighbors complained, but couldn't determine whether allegations of prostitution were true. Nevertheless, officials charged the temple with city code violations, including inadequate parking for a home-based church.
Unable to operate under Scottsdale's zoning code, Elise moved the temple to a larger residence near 59th Street and Shea Boulevard. The temple went through two more homes in upscale Phoenix neighborhoods before opening at its current commercial location near 24th Street and Thomas last March.
Whereas Tracy Elise provides the emotional center of her temple, the theoretical basis for its theories of sexual healing are better explained by her partner, Wayne Clayton. Several months ago, Wayne Clayton moved from Chicago with his wife to become director of the temple's new learning center, the School of 1, where his wife is the school administrator. He teaches a variety of intriguing courses like "Stem Cell Reactivation" and "Spanking as a Healing Modality."
Clayton specializes in healing those who have been sexually abused and people suffering from illnesses like cancer, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson's disease. He's been practicing his techniques — which include role-playing and " yoni release" — for 20 years. He explains that he first tried these techniques after surviving years of sexual abuse at the hands of his late father. He tried psychotherapy and says that at one time in his 30s, he was on 37 different medications. None of it worked for him, so he started looking into things like acupuncture, massage, and shamanism. He says they worked for him, and they work for others, too.
But some of Clayton's claims go far beyond therapies, like acupuncture, that are now considered almost mainstream. He says one of his clients in Chicago lost a breast to cancer, and after several healing sessions with him... he claims that she actually grew her breast back. He says another woman in Chicago, this one suffering from cervical cancer and a subsequent hysterectomy, grew her female organs back through energy work. Eventually, she bore children
[Ed. note: If there is any truth to these claims, they deserve to be validated so scientific research can be performed on these radical techniques.]
