From the recent conference in the Human Rights Conference Limits of Restrictions: Religious Minorities in Europe and Asia – Law School, University of Exeter – 30 April 2025 Camelia Marin presented the following: 

I choose to present an emic view of the freedom of religion and belief problems encountered by members of schools that include, among their teachings, sacred eroticism. Not only do I have a long career as a religious liberty activist through the organization Soteria International, which relentlessly advocates for the rights of many different groups, but I am also a yoga practitioner in one of the different schools that follow the teachings of MISA, the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute. This group has encountered several legal problems, as have other movements that include in their teachings sacred eroticism.

I start with a quote from the book Sacred Eroticism, which Massimo Introvigne devoted to MISA in 2022: “The spiritual teachers who proclaimed the virtues of sacred eroticism rarely became popular with the media, police, and prosecutors.”

But who practices “sacred eroticism”? And what is the context of these practices?

Scholars typically include the schools of yoga that practice sacred eroticism under the label “new religious movements.” However, these yoga schools do not regard themselves as “religions,” although they include elements from various religious traditions assembled through a sort of syncretism. Their members come from different faiths, and some are agnostics. Based on my experience and the observation of other similar schools, they are united by standard practices and by “community rules,” such as non-violence, abstention from recreational drugs and alcohol, and helping each other. Perhaps “communities of belief” or “communities of conscience” are better labels than “new religious movements.”

As spiritual paths, they are protected by international conventions on freedom of religion or belief (emphasis on “or belief”). Yet, groups teaching sacred eroticism have been the targets of spectacular police raids in Romania, France, the Czech Republic, and Italy. Their members claim that the police have resorted to what international law calls “cruel and degrading treatments.” Members of MISA took their claims against Romania to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in their favor and ordered the government to indemnify them. Other members of the same movement have filed complaints against the French police. They suspect that the harsh treatment is a way to dehumanize them and express contempt for their beliefs and practices.

I will now focus on the MISA yoga school. It would be a mistake to believe that sacred eroticism is its only or even its central teaching. Its activities and the teachings of its founder, Gregorian Bivolaru, constitute an integral esoteric yoga course. Those who want to complete the full course should follow it for thirty-five years, with 48 lessons per year. The topics of the course cover several areas of​​human life. The written material the students receive during the course consists of more than 14.000 pages. They devote three hours to each weekly lesson and the corresponding practice.

 

I realize that sacred eroticism is what mostly interests outside observers, not to mention prosecutors and sensationalist media. Something less than 10% of the course is devoted to teaching what MISA calls “amorous erotic continence.” Students regard it as a relevant and profound subject, but it is not the only one taught.

 

Amorous erotic continence in a simple understanding is orgasm without ejaculation. MISA is not the only group teaching it. It is taught by the Guru Jára Path in the Czech Republic, by several Gnostic churches and movements inspired by the late Colombian teacher Samael Aun Weor, and of course by Tantric schools in India. The school believes it has euphoric and regenerating effects. For practitioners, the school claims, erotic amorous continence offers the benefit of transmuting the sperm into energy. Transmutation is believed to be a transformation, accompanied by a massive release of energy, of one chemical element into another by a new grouping of its constituent elements into atoms. The school insists that low-energy biological transmutations are an amazing reality, as several scientific experiments demonstrate. In human beings, the processes of atomic transmutation of low energies occur continuously, more or less intensively, in metabolism, in sexual processes, in erotic experiences, in affective states, in mental activity, and in spiritual experiences.

Schools teaching sacred eroticism and amorous erotic continence encounter a paradox. Our Western democratic societies have a significant degree of tolerance for unusual sexual practices. Swinger clubs and others where one can find partners for the practices called BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism) are not illegal. Those who go to these clubs end up having sexual relations with strangers. This is perhaps not generally appreciated by society, but is tolerated. However, initiations and rituals involving erotic elements presented by sacred eroticism groups as part of a spiritual path are not tolerated.

Members do not immediately understand why the media, governmental bodies, and anti-cult groups regard sacred eroticism practices as illegal and abusive by definition. I am not denying that abuses can and do occur. However, most practitioners report that sacred eroticism has made their lives freer, more loving, and more harmonious.

The argument used to conclude that sacred eroticism always hides sexual abuse is that nobody would accept such “strange” or “bizarre” practices voluntarily. That they understand it or not, it is argued that practitioners are all victims of “brainwashing,” “mental manipulation,” or what French law calls “abuse of weakness.” Although scholars of religion contest these categories, they are liberally embraced by the media. Practitioners of sacred eroticism are depicted either as “brainwashed zombies” or as accomplices in the abuses. The media treatment of their groups often amounts to a witch hunt.

Let me repeat, once again, that I do believe both that abuse is possible, in groups teaching sacred eroticism as in religions and movements with very different teachings, and that it should not be condoned. What I criticize is the dogmatic position that all those who go through sacred eroticism rituals and initiations do that because they have been “brainwashed” by sexual predators. I have encountered hundreds of women and men, both in MISA and other schools, who report that their decision to undertake such a demanding path was free, and they derived positive experiences from it, which explains why they have continued the practice for years and even decades.

One tool used to assert that practitioners are not free is that they have joined a “cult” rather than a legitimate spiritual path or school. Regarding the use of the term “cult” for certain new religious movements, leading British sociologist Eileen Barker wrote: “This can mean not only that behavior by one religion, labelled as a ‘cult,’ can be deemed criminal in law whilst the same act performed by a group considered a ‘religion’ could be perfectly legal, but also that ‘cults’ may be legally condemned before they have actually done anything illegal other than being labelled a ‘cult.’”

Courts of law have ruled against public authorities' derogatory use of such terminology. In 2002, the Federal Constitutional Court found the German government guilty of defamation of the Osho movement by calling it a “destructive cult.” In 2022, the European Court of Human Rights in “Tonchev v. Bulgaria” modified its previous case law, which in 2001 had found France not guilty of discrimination for calling the Jehovah’s Witnesses a “secte,” a word that should be translated into English as “cult” (not as “sect”) and serves the same purposes. However, after twenty years, in 2022, the Court noted that language has evolved and now “cult” or the equivalents of the French “secte” are unanimously perceived as derogatory. Thus, it condemned Bulgaria for using “sekti” in official documents, referring to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons, and three local Evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

Another tool used to discriminate against groups practicing sacred eroticism, as noted by Canadian scholar Susan Palmer and others, is the spectacularization of police raids against them. They are carried out in the early hours of the morning by heavily armed police SWAT teams, with a disproportionate use of force against peaceful practitioners, and inviting the media to be present. This is what happened in Romania in the case of MISA. It opened the way to a broad discrimination of MISA practitioners in Romanian society. However, all MISA defendants were eventually found not guilty by Romanian courts of law, except Gregorian Bivolaru in a single and dubious case.

 

The director of the NGO Human Rights Without Frontiers, Willy Fautré, compared the scale of the assault on the MISA ashrams by the police in Paris and Nice on November 23, 2023, to another action by the French security forces: ”For comparison, in late August 2024, the French anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office engaged about 200 police officers [175 were involved in the assault against the ashrams] to hunt a suspect who had tried to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte and caused an explosion wounding a police officer and destroying several cars nearby. The November 2023 raids were not an operation against a terrorist or armed group or a drug cartel. It was a raid targeting eight private places mainly used by peaceful Romanian yoga practitioners.”

In recent years, the French MIVILUDES has played a leading and proactive role in promoting in France and internationally the idea that sacred eroticism always hides sexual abuse, and those who claim to have embraced it freely are victims of “brainwashing.”  MIVILUDES, the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Action Against Cultic Deviances, is a French governmental agency created by presidential decree in 2002 as the successor of MILS (Interministerial Mission for Action Against Cults).

Scholars and human rights activists have repeatedly complained about MIVILUDES’ violations of international principles of freedom of religion or belief. At a side event on France of the 2024 Warsaw Human Dimension Conference of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), participating human rights organizations noted that MIVILUDES’ biases had led to the “targeting and persecution” of groups, “with the police acting as the enforcement arm of this ideological distortion”. They concluded: “We call on France to urgently review its approach to religious minorities, and to ensure that the training and practices of its police and judiciary are aligned with the principles of human rights and the rule of law. Only then can we truly prevent the institutional torture of vulnerable groups in the name of misguided ideology.”

The MIVILUDES has a significant influence over the government’s approach to religious minorities labeled as “cults.” Its biased recommendations are used in sensationalist media communication and by prosecutors. MIVILUDES has also been instrumental in favoring the passing of the 2024 amendments to the 2001 French anti-cult About-Picard law. While the latter incriminated the “abuse of weakness,” the amended version includes a vague notion of “psychological subjugation” that echoes the pseudo-scientific theory of “brainwashing.” It is already used to claim that students of schools teaching sacred eroticism are “victims” even if they strongly deny it. It is alleged that their statements are not credible since they are in a situation of “psychological subjugation.”

Finally, the MIVILUDES, as it reports itself, plays a significant international role, in cooperation with French diplomacy. It supplies information on spiritual groups it targets as “cults” to foreign law enforcement agencies, research centers, and media. It actively tries to export its theories about “brainwashing” to other countries. Recently, they have been used in Argentina in the prosecution against a group called Buenos Aires Yoga School. This is not a group teaching sacred eroticism. The police listened to thousands of hours of recorded courses and lessons and found no references to eroticism. However, based on the accusations of one single ex-member who left the group decades ago when he was a teenager, the prosecutors believe that some students worked as prostitutes and gave the money they earned to the school. All the women, who are middle-aged professionals, vehemently denied they ever worked as prostitutes. However, the prosecutors insist they are not believable since they have been under “brainwashing” for years and remain so today.

The repression of practitioners of sacred eroticism goes beyond the purely legal aspects. It raises the issue of the quality of our civilization. Let’s not forget that what is normal today was once tricky to understand, and what is considered abnormal today was once a common belief.

 

I conclude with a short story, quoting the former Professor for Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford and well-known author Richard Dawkins:

“All religious beliefs seem weird to those not brought up in them. Boyer did research on the Fang people of Cameroon, who believe...that witches have an extra internal animal-like organ that flies away at night and ruins other people’s crops or poisons their blood. [...] Boyer continues with a personal anecdote:

[...] ‘One of our guests, a prominent Cambridge theologian, turned to me and said: «That is what makes anthropology so fascinating and so difficult too. You have to explain how people can believe such nonsense.» Which left me dumbfounded. [...] Assuming that the Cambridge theologian was a mainstream Christian, he probably believed some combination of the following:

• In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved.

• The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.

• The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried for three days.

• Forty days later, the fatherless man went up to the top of a hill and then disappeared bodily into the sky.

• If you murmur thoughts privately in your head, the fatherless man, and his ‘father’ (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and may act upon them. He is simultaneously able to hear the thoughts of everybody else in the world.

• If you do something bad, or something good, the same fatherless man sees all, even if nobody else does. You may be rewarded or punished accordingly, including after your death.

• The fatherless man’s virgin mother never died but ‘ascended’ bodily into heaven.

• Bread and wine, if blessed by a priest (who must have testicles), ‘become’ the body and blood of the fatherless man.”

 

Dawkins is, of course, known for his criticism of Christianity from an atheistic point of view. However, his story reminds us that beliefs we regard as normal look strange to the Dawkins of this world. And beliefs and practices that many regard as strange are normal to others. As long as no abuse is involved—real abuse, different from the imaginary crimes of “being a cult” and “using brainwashing”—we should all be free to pursue our spiritual path and preferred lifestyles, no matter what others think of them.