Roxana-Mălina Chirilă

Reading "Sacred Eroticism. Tantra and Eros in MISA" (Part 1)

In 2022, Massimo Introvigne, an Italian sociologist of religion, published Sacred Eroticism. Tantra and Eros in the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA), a book that I was of course interested in reading. In March 2024, an English ebook version became available on Amazon.

I used to be enrolled in the courses offered by MISA, a Romanian yoga school that became internationally (in)famous because of allegations of sex abuse, human trafficking and other such. For a few years (2002-2010, to be precise), I was a practicing yogi, and I believed in energies, Hindu deities, Christian angels, immortal masters, a worldwide conspiracy of freemasons, and more - however embarrassing it might be to admit to some of my former beliefs now.

In 2008, I met the founder of the school, Gregorian Bivolaru, in a secretive trip to Paris. I stayed in an apartment along with about 20 other women for a couple of weeks, as they prepared for a sexual initiation, and I wondered if I’d been the victim of a colossal misunderstanding. I’d been invited there to talk to Bivolaru, you see, and I took the invitation at its word. Before leaving for my trip, I’d assumed I’d go to Sweden, since that was where Bivolaru had political asylum. I imagined arriving in a small town, and staying in a secluded ashram (a yogi communal living place) with a couple of spare rooms for guests. Being told I’d go to Paris instead was a bit of a shock. It was much more of a shock, however, to be housed in a crowded 3-room apartment we weren’t allowed to leave on our own, while pretending to the neighbors that we weren’t there. It was deeply unpleasant to have women constantly infer that I would also be taking the sexual initiation and change my mind about only wanting to talk.

I won’t repeat my story in detail now, but I will say that the whole trip was one shock after the other. I remember the awkwardness of meeting Bivolaru and realizing he had none of the qualities I’d been led to expect of him. After he regurgitated some details about myself I’d told the other women in Paris and failed an attempt at cold reading, it dawned on me that the wise, enlightened yogi master of MISA didn’t exist in reality. I have some clues hinting at the fact that he didn’t like me very much, either. In stilted conversations in a room as hot as a sauna and smelling intensely of mint, he let me know he believed I was very unappealing, and unable to hold any man’s (sexual) interest. He might have meant it as an insult; I was just relieved he’d leave me alone without incident, even if the women back in the apartment would keep insisting I’d change my mind.

People who know me as someone who talks publicly about MISA tend to see me primarily as a victim (or as a person posing as a victim, depending on where they stand in the pro/anti-MISA debate). Up to a point - sure. Hard as it was to accept the label, I am a victim. MISA made my life a little better, before it made it a lot worse. Being in MISA starts out as a lovely dream in which pressure is slowly applied until you start changing your behavior and while always feeling you’re not doing enough. We were all going through rollercoasters, from the high of “you’re so great and spiritual” to the low of “your ego blinds you, you’re stupid and demonic”. We were wonderful, but we had to change completely. We were divine sparks, but we were entirely unfitting. Yogis would motivate these ups and downs by claiming that criticism helps you evolve, but let’s be honest. It messes with your mind. And that’s even before you get into the whole issue of building your life upon false assumptions. Regardless of handling it well or badly, I’d say a lot of us, if not all, fell victim to this system.

But being a victim at one point doesn’t mean your life must suck forever. People who know me from other contexts or met me recently tend to see me in a very different light. I’m bookish, sometimes too much so. I have an M.A. in British Cultural Studies, and a B.A. in philology. I enjoy fantasy and romance novels. I read scholarship for fun and will e-mail academics if I find their work cool or if I find issues in their books. I sometimes write stories. I work as a translator. I play video games. I knit. I nitpick. I have a podcast analysing Romanian literature. There’s very little MISA in my life, all in all, except when my ever-revolving interests turn back to it again. Some people are shocked to know I was in MISA at all, even if I’ve never made a secret of it, just because it never came up and I “don’t look the type”, whatever that means.

So I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to read a scholarly book on MISA. And while I usually write shorter reviews or more concise analyses, this time around I’d like to take you along on my reading journey. I want share the thoughts I have as I go along, whether they’re more relevant to Introvigne’s point or less.

It’s less of a review. It’s more of a “Roxana reacts”. (Don’t you wish this were a video? I do; except I hate making them.)

The Book Itself

Sacred Eroticism. Tantra and Eros in the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA) is a pretty short book. How short it is depends on who you ask, though. The publisher’s website says it has 144 pages. Amazon claims the paperback version has 152 pages. My Kindle edition claims it has 196 pages, but Kindle page numbers are always wonky.

The book is split into 7 chapters (including the introduction), and also has an appendix containing a bit of MISA terminology, as well as a list of references.

The publishing information is a lot less detailed than it would be for Romanian books. The relevant page only says:

© 2022 - Mimesis International www.mimesisinternational.com e-mail: info@mimesisinternational.com Book series: Social Science, n. 4 Isbn: 9788869773747 © MIM Edizioni Srl P.I. C.F. 02419370305

As not even the author himself is mentioned here (he is mentioned on the cover, though), it’s hard to tell if the book’s copyeditor and translator are simply ommitted, or if they didn’t exist at all. So I can’t tell at a glance if Introvigne originally wrote in Italian, or if he wrote the book directly in English. But whatever. It’s not relevant.

Introduction: Stories That Read Like Novels. 1 - The Elusive Gigliotti

(Note: “Stories That Read Like Novels” is Introvigne’s subtitle for a part of the introduction, not mine.)

Opening paragraphs aren’t always good or memorable, but they often say something about the book. What did the writer find important? What mood did they want to set for their volume?

Introvigne’s Sacred Eroticism begins:

In his 2017 detective novel Le vestali dell’energia, Italian author Franco Gigliotti depicts a “cult” where beautiful Romanian girls sexually initiate new members. The sexual initiations are a pretext used by the group’s leaders to commit various crimes. Authors of detective novels often start from true crime stories reported by the media to create their plots, and it is well possible that accounts of a police raid against the Italian branch of MISA, the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute, founded by Romanian yoga teacher Gregorian Bivolaru, played a role in the genesis of the book.

I find it interesting that Introvigne starts his book by building a castle in the sky. Authors of detective novels often write based on true stories, and it is well possible that Gigliotti did the same and that, doing the same, he based his book on MISA. Nothing is certain, everything is guessed at. Disprove any single one of these assumptions, and you’re left with a paragraph that is, at best, partly false.

But it seems more likely that Introvigne is using this merely as a rhetorical device. After all, the stated theme of his book has nothing to do with mystery novels. So that leads us to the question - what is achieved through this paragraph? Why open with Gigliotti, when he’s ultimately irrelevant to the topic? Well, Introvigne might be on thin ice as far as factual truth goes, but what he’s conveying here is that cults and their members’ behaviors and beliefs often fascinate without being understood. They are sensationalized. The general public loves being entertained by sordid details and outrageous appearances, while discarding the nitty-gritty of reality.

Or at least, that’s how I interpret it.

Regardless, I looked up Franco Gigliotti. I’ve never heard of him before, which isn’t surprising - I know very little about contemporary Italian literature, and even less about Italian detective fiction. The notion of a detective novel even superficially inspired by MISA was intriguing and I wanted to know more. However, googling Franco Gigliotti’s Le vestali dell’energia yielded very few results. There are no reviews for it on Goodreads or Amazon, nor anywhere else I could find (I searched for “recensioni”, theoretically the word for “review”, and couldn’t find anything very relevant).

The book description was likewise missing from several websites selling it, but in the end I found it. It seems to start with a dead young woman, crucified and shot with six arrows sticking out of colored targets painted on her body. Alright, but the colorful chakras are common across many New Age groups, and MISA has seven of them, not six. Are there more connections? Unfortunately, I couldn’t find out anything else about the plot, characters, or fictional cult. Either the book’s not that famous, or Italy’s just not that fond of the internet. Or both.

Now I’m wondering how Introvigne came across Gigliotti’s book. Did it happen to catch his eye in a bookstore? Was it brought to his attention by others who knew he’s interested in cults? Or did he search for fiction villifying cults?

I’m overthinking this. And yet I can’t help but think it’s a weak introduction. I might have written something similar as an undergrad, but after becoming aware of peer review and thesis defenses, I’d think twice about it. Perhaps Massimo Introvigne is more bold, too. And it’s just an introduction.

I look him up, curious about his qualifications. He has a B.A. in philosophy, and a J.D. - the J.D. means he’s a lawyer. Hmm. Ok.

I have no idea what scholarship in Law looks like, but theoretically speaking, philosophy graduates should know how to read and analyse sources, as well as build solid arguments. A quick flip to the back of the book shows a long list of references. It’s a good sign to see a proper bibliography, but I do have to wonder how he used texts such as Bivolaru’s “Significant Mysteries of Enchanted Nudity” or “Urgent Message from Gregorian Bivolaru, Spiritual Guide of the Atman Federation of Yoga, Regarding a Possible Catastrophic Solar Flare”.

I guess we’ll see.

Introduction: Stories That Read Like Novels. 2 - Bad Faith Readings

I probably shouldn’t discuss every paragraph in the book individually, right?

Introvigne tells us that there’s a branch of the Italian police called “Squadra Anti Sette”, S.A.S. for short, that was created in 2006, after a “small Satanist group”, the Beasts of Satan, committed a number of murders. Introvigne doesn’t go into more detail about it. I’ve looked it up, since I’ve never heard of it and it sounds like a pretty extreme cult, but what I’ve found sounds not so much like a cult as a bunch of murders that led to a sort of Italian Satanic Panic. Details are a bit scarce. Oh, well.

In 2012, police coordinated by the S.A.S. raided MISA-related houses. Introvigne says:

On December 7, 2012, ANSA, the main Italian wire agency, reported that a dangerous Romanian group had been raided by the police and accused of engaging in “violent sex, esotericism, and yoga” (ANSA 2012). Mainline Italian daily newspapers reprinted the news without comments (e.g. La 8 Sacred Eroticism Nazione 2012). They did not specify why “esotericism” and “yoga” should be regarded as illegal, and what “violent sex” exactly was.

Besides being a possible inspiration for Gigliotti’s novel, the S.A.S.’ emphasis and the media reaction confirmed the peril of running a new religious movement putting together spirituality and eroticism.

So let’s check ANSA’s article! It’s no longer available in the original, but Introvigne kindly provides a link to an archived version here. It’s very short. I don’t speak Italian, so Google Translate is probably better than any attempt I might make to reproduce it in English:

Violent sex, esotericism and yoga: the branches of an international yoga school attended by hundreds of people were searched in Florence and other cities. Numerous people are under investigation. The Florence Prosecutor’s Office is contesting the crimes of criminal association, slavery, human trafficking and continued sexual violence. According to the investigations carried out by the police’s anti-cult squad, the students of a particular international yoga school, headed by a guru from Romania, were transformed into followers of a sort of sect and, well beyond the teachings of the well-known oriental gymnastic-philosophical practice, they were subjected to acts of sexual violence, also through esoteric and pornographic practices, and in any case bringing them to a state of psychological subjection. Among the advantages enjoyed by the suspects, the collection of money, apparently paid by the members for the fees of the yoga schools, is not excluded. The investigation, coordinated by the prosecutor of Florence Angela Pietroiusti, would have given rise to one or more complaints from students of the school. The searches involved the offices of yoga schools, headed by the movement based in Romania, in various Italian cities and the homes of the many suspects involved. Computers, diaries, documents but also videos were seized, which are now being examined by the investigators. However, people who were not under investigation but were nevertheless involved in the ring in various ways were also searched.

In other words, Introvigne engages in a bad faith reading here. “Violent sex, esotericism and yoga” isn’t an accusation - it’s the title. It’s summing up the main points of interest (it’s about esotericism, yoga and violent sex), rather than the accusations. In the actual article, the accusations are a lot clearer: “criminal association, slavery, human trafficking and continued sexual violence”.

The closest thing in support of Introvigne’s claim is that practitioners “were subjected to acts of sexual violence, also through esoteric and pornographic practices, and in any case bringing them to a state of psychological subjection”. Unfortunately, the translation obscures the original meaning here, but even if it claims that victims were brought through psychological submission through esoteric and pornographic practices, among others, that’s still not the same as what Introvigne says.

Is it possible that there was a wider media reaction, a moral panic linking yoga, esotericism and sex? I guess. But this article itself isn’t enough to demonstrate it, and Introvigne’s sarcasm regarding “why “esotericism” and “yoga” should be regarded as illegal” is entirely out of place. The article never claims they should be.

The bad faith reading of the title as a list of accusations is a bad sign.

Introduction: Stories That Read Like Novels. 3 - The Actual Thesis

Introvigne tells us that the book will be about “the concept of sacred eroticism in MISA”, because the phrase “sex magic” isn’t always accepted by practitioners. Fair enough.

He also says:

Irrespectively of how you call it, sacred eroticism is rarely popular with the media. Rituals involving eroticism are easily described as “sexual abuse” of the followers perpetrated by the leaders, and evidence that sacred eroticism groups are just “deviant cults.” “Deviance,” however, is a category that tells us how others perceive the members of a spiritual movement.

Are erotic rituals easily described as sexual abuse? I’m not sure, but I’m open to hearing the evidence.

I’m also looking forward to finding out how he distinguishes actual sexual abuse perpetrated by cult leaders under the guise of rituals, from legitimate, if strange, practices. I really hope his argument isn’t “abuse is against the doctrine of the movement, so they would never do it”, because that would be very naive, and very disappointing.


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