Recon bent, sex and bedroom in a non-Pagan family

[Kaio]

According to ancient sources sexual intercourse rendered human beings inappropriate to religious rituals in several Pagan religions, like the Roman and the Greek ones. I think there are extant rituals for cleansing from sexual intercourse in the Greek lore.

 What if a contemporary Pagan that has a recon bent has just his bedroom for both having sex and doing religious rituals, having a shrine, etc.?

[Darkhawk]

What if a contemporary Pagan that has a recon bent has just his bedroom for both having sex and doing religious rituals, having a shrine, etc.?

 
Close the shrine?  Curtain, cabinet doors?

[Lionrhod]

According to ancient sources sexual intercourse rendered human beings inappropriate to religious rituals in several Pagan religions, like the Roman and the Greek ones. I think there are extant rituals for cleansing from sexual intercourse in the Greek lore.

 What if a contemporary Pagan that has a recon bent has just his bedroom for both having sex and doing religious rituals, having a shrine, etc.?

 
Well whoa! We may be talking at cross purposes that have nada to do with what your asking about. (And if you could restate/rephrase your question that might be really helpful towards your getting an answer.)

The one thing that comes to mind is that sacred prostitutes used to cleanse warriors returning from war via sex. But I've no clue if that's what you're looking for or not.

[SunflowerP]

Well whoa! We may be talking at cross purposes that have nada to do with what your asking about. (And if you could restate/rephrase your question that might be really helpful towards your getting an answer.)

The one thing that comes to mind is that sacred prostitutes used to cleanse warriors returning from war via sex. But I've no clue if that's what you're looking for or not.

 
... I don't think Kaio has either warriors or sacred prostitutes in his bedroom?

I'm not sure what you found unclear about Kaio's question; 'What if a contemporary Pagan that has a recon bent has just his bedroom for both having sex and doing religious rituals, having a shrine, etc.?' seems pretty straightforward to me.

Sunflower

[Kaio]

Close the shrine?  Curtain, cabinet doors?

 Good suggestion! Thank you!
 I think I will buy a small piece of closeable furniture I can put a shrine in. I don't know, however, whether I should do a cleansing ritual in my bedroom before putting the piece of furniture there. And if I should, I don't know how this ritual would be. OTOH ritually cleansing my bedroom seems somewhat pointless because

• the shrine will be closed in the piece of furniture, not openly in my room;

• because I wouldn't know what to do if/when my bedroom got unclean again, and this time with the piece of furniture, and the shrine in it, already there; and

• I don't know if there is evidence of ritual cleansing of rooms in the ancient sources of Roman private religion. There is an account of an emperor that only worshiped on the mornings when he had not slept with his wife on the preceding night. And there is evidence of portable shrines in houses and, according to one scholar at least, there is evidence of shrines in every room of a house. Maybe one sexless day was enough to make a domestic room as pure as a human being regarding religious ritual purity?

 

Well whoa! We may be talking at cross purposes that have nada to do with what your asking about. (And if you could restate/rephrase your question that might be really helpful towards your getting an answer.)

The one thing that comes to mind is that sacred prostitutes used to cleanse warriors returning from war via sex. But I've no clue if that's what you're looking for or not.

 (Bold mine.)
 Can you provide the source of this information? It seems that the notion of sacred prostitution is widely discredited by scholars in most instances where it was formerly thought it happened.

[Darkhawk]

Good suggestion! Thank you!
 I think I will buy a small piece of closeable furniture I can put a shrine in. I don't know, however, whether I should do a cleansing ritual in my bedroom before putting the piece of furniture there. And if I should, I don't know how this ritual would be. OTOH ritually cleansing my bedroom seems somewhat pointless because

• the shrine will be closed in the piece of furniture, not openly in my room;

• because I wouldn't know what to do if/when my bedroom got unclean again, and this time with the piece of furniture, and the shrine in it, already there; and

 
(I can't speak to Roman cultus; it is so very much Not My Department.)

I would not be surprised by cleansing and purification rituals in private having some similarities with cleansing and purification rituals in state religion, myself, though that is perhaps my Kemetic bias.  That is within my personal comfort zone for reconstructionist adaptation, for what that may be worth.

I'm also of the opinion that cleansing rituals are never a bad idea.  Also, doing a cleansing as part of the foundational process of setting up a shrine is different from maintenance, and even if you never feel that it is necessary to do a specific cleansing after the shrine is set up I would personally consider it important to do as part of the installation.

[jsquared]

• I don't know if there is evidence of ritual cleansing of rooms in the ancient sources of Roman private religion. There is an account of an emperor that only worshiped on the mornings when he had not slept with his wife on the preceding night. And there is evidence of portable shrines in houses and, according to one scholar at least, there is evidence of shrines in every room of a house. Maybe one sexless day was enough to make a domestic room as pure as a human being regarding religious ritual purity?

 
From what I've read of Roman cultus, this is about the only place where sexual impurity is mentioned in a domestic sense. Everything else I can find seems to be about the participants in state rituals, like the participants in Ceres' feast who were to fast and refrain from sex for nine days according to Ovid.

Cicero says that mental purity is more important than physical purity (although that's still important). But this could be achieved either through 'sprinkling of water or the passage of a certain number of days.' I mean, in Plutarch's Roman Questions, he tells a story about a priest that locked a courtesan in a temple so that Hercules could have sex with her. This was for the god himself, so it's not quite the same, I know. But it runs counter to 'keep your sex and gods separate,' and it might be worth it to reframe the passage about that emperor from 'something reflective of all of Rome' to 'something reflective of this particular emperor.' Just a thought.

But I do think a closing cabinet and cleansing (most sources seem to indicate pouring clean water over your hands should suffice) before using the lararium should be fine. I very much doubt the poor of Rome were able to house a shrine in an area that had no chance for impurity (given the fact that most of them had no kitchen or atrium, where most wealthy lararia were set up), so it shouldn't be too jarring from a strict recon perspective. And this is all from a Roman POV; other polytheists, other requirements.