Seven years ago, Robert Morgan was hosting a pagan safer sex party in a dungeon space in San Francisco. Naked people were writhing on the floor, unsnapping black lacy bras, sucking tits, condom-covered cocks and cunts. A leather dyke fisted a woman in a sling. A man in full leathers chained another woman to a St. Andrews Cross and flogged her. Everything was going as planned. But when the Pagan ritual began, the man in leather and the woman on the St. Andrews Cross left the room in a huff.

Morgan found them anxiously puffing on cigarettes by the front door.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"You're devil worshippers," said the woman. "You're Satanists."

Morgan carefully explained that he was not a Satanist, but a Pagan, meaning that he was a polytheist, one who worships many gods. Satan was a Christian invention, he told them. Early Christians called all deities other than Yahweh "devils," and eventually personified evil as one Devil, the archenemy of their god.

"We're Baptists. We can't stay here," the woman said.

Christians have long painted a picture of "pagans" and "witches" as Satan worshippers, conjuring demons, sacrificing babies, and wantonly copulating with humans and devils around a bonfire in the woods.

Although Pagans certainly don't worship Satan or sacrifice children, some of these stereotypes contain a grain of truth. For instance, Halloween is a sacred holiday for Pagans. We call it Samhain (pronounced "sow-in"), the Pagan New Year. As a form of religious imperialism, the Christian church appropriated pre-Christian polytheistic holidays, much as the church built Christian cathedrals on the sites of old pagan shrines. Thus Samhain became Hallowe'en—the eve of All Hallows or All Saints Day.

Many Pagans claim that Pagans don't have orgies. But Pagan sex parties are alive and well in San Francisco, as anyone who's stepped into a room of naked Pagans in the throes of passion knows.

"Many practitioners of the craft think we should be assimilated into the mainstream public. They think we should look like everyone else, dress like everyone else, and have sex like everyone is supposed to," says Morgan, who has provided alternative sexual space for pagans, queers, and their admirers for the past 15 years.

In this predominantly Christian culture, having sex "like we're supposed to" means conforming to Christian mores. Most Christian churches teach abstinence from pleasures of the flesh and sex for procreation only: hence the Christian prohibitions against abortion and homosexuality. Pagans, by contrast, hold the earth and worldly pleasures sacred. "All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals," reads the "Charge of the Goddess"—calling all Goddess-loving Pagans to lick, fuck and suck simply for the sake of pleasure.

"All acts of love and pleasure" makes no distinctions between bisexual, transgender, homo-, hetero-, intra- or extramarital, threesomes, foursomes or fifteensomes. As long as they're "acts of love and pleasure," they're rituals in the Goddess' eyes. Thus, the exclusion of alternative sexual practices would abolish some of the Goddess' rites.

"A lot of Pagans want the orgies to go away," says Morgan, "but that's trying to make the secret rites go away. They'll never go away. Orgyist traditions exist in every culture." Morgan points to the example of the Baptists who showed up in leather at the sex party. "You can't make mammals not have sex," he says.

Morgan produces an average of four Pagan sex parties per year. One of these parties falls around October 31st—Samhain. But why a sex party on Samhain?

Many Pagans think of Beltane (May 1), not Samhain, as the sex-related holiday. Beltane (also called Cétsamhain, the opposite of Samhain) marks the end of winter and the beginning of summer. In contemporary Pagan mythology, the Goddess never dies, but the God dies every year and is reborn at Yule. At Beltane, he reaches maturity. His mother the Goddess takes him as her consort, and they conceive a child, who will be born next Yule. At Samhain, the end of summer, the (sun) God dies. Since Beltane marks the conception of the new (sun) God, many Pagans celebrate Beltane as a holiday of sex and fertility. On Samhain they honor the dying God and our ancestors who have died.

But waiting until a fertility festival to have a sex party would be like honoring sex for the purpose of procreation, and Paganism encourages us to be sexual simply for our own pleasure.

As Paganism teaches us that both sex and death are ordinary parts of life, Samhain teaches us that life and death are not separate, but part of the same cycle. Paganism is—literally—an environmentally friendly religion: everything gets recycled. Beltane marks the passage from winter to summer, the light half of the year; Samhain, or "summer's" end," the passage to winter and the dark half of the year. As the day between summer and winter and between the old and new year, Samhain is, in a sense, a time outside of time. The veil is lifted between past, present and future and between the living and the dead—making Samhain a propitious time to contact the dead and see into the future through divination and prophecy. According to the historian Ronald Hutton, Samhain is also among the very few contemporary Pagan holidays the ancient Celts actually observed. Thus Samhain also lifts the veil between past and present in the sense that it is one of the very few links between contemporary Pagans and ancient Celtic polytheists.

Contemporary Pagans celebrate Samhain by honoring our dead and our ancestors.

For Morgan, a sex party on Samhain is a way of commemorating our ancestors, by "doing as the ancestors would have done." Our ancestors had sex, but mainstream American culture has "shame about being sexual around the dead or thinking of the dead as sexual." Mainstream culture avoids both sex and death period. Both should be done in private, behind closed doors.

"San Francisco has seen plenty of sex, and plenty of death, since the 1970s," says cultural sexologist Dr. Carol Queen. "One way I see sex on Samhain as spiritually significant is that it allows us to honor and remember our lovers who have died—many queers here have lost someone, or several someones, with whom they shared erotic bonds. When you don't accept Christian structures and limitations around family, you're free to create 'families of choice,' something many queers and Pagans have always done, and certainly our lovers become part of that family. Having sex while acknowledging them connects the past and the present, helps us weave our loved ones together."

Queer Pagans may have an easier time embracing their differences from these mainstream mores. After all, queers have already come out of a closet as a sexual minority. According to Morgan, "one of the main differences between queer Pagans and Pagans in general is that queers acknowledge their sexuality as more central to their Pagan practices. Queers have created structures in which to meet and be sexual with each other," he explains. Since same-sex sex was forbidden, our recent queer ancestors had to find and create places to have sex. "Their locations used to be secret. Now, with the internet, they're no longer secret."

Although leather-clad Baptists may get antsy at Pagan sex parties, many heterosexuals are grateful to queers for creating these spaces.

"I don't self-identify as Pagan," says Victoria, a heterosexual woman who has been going to Pagan sex parties for eight years. "But I think of sex as being one of the ways I experience what you might call a higher power. I don't define God as a supreme being. I define God as a spiritual energy that links things together, and I feel very connected to things when I have sex. I enjoy the rituals more than I thought I was going to. It joins everybody together, and it changes the space for the evening. Both these aspects add to the party."

For more information on sex-and-Pagan issues, including sex parties, read Carol Queen's interview with John Sulak in Modern Pagans (RE/Search).