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The myth of the sacred marriage of Acca Larentia to the god Hercules, which tells of a union between a courtesan and a statue, is only one of many similar accounts whose derivation is to be found in very ancient fertility rites. These rites, whether celebrated as the nuptials of the King and Queen of May, or the Sacred Marriage of the Sun and Earth, or the union of Zeus with the goddess Demeter, have been widely interpreted as efforts to maximize the fertility of nature, of crops and livestock, by means of sympathetic magic.
In all such enactments, including those not yet wholly symbolic, in which both principals are human or in which an entire community participates without restraint, it is evident that the expression of sexuality is encouraged as something sacred. It would seem that we are confronted with a ritual—and a prototypic one, moreover—which, far from effecting the repression of its underlying impulse, permits the public gratification of a very private wish. Evidently nothing has been interdicted, and in the interest of fertility everything that is unthinkable, even for archaic man, is allowed to manifest itself in the open.
If this is truly a case in which sublimation is not called for, in which no forbidden wish stands in need of being denatured by ritual transmutation, then we must admit of a very serious limitation on the general theory of sexual repression. Unless, of course, there is a special reason for the repression of sex in everyday life, related specifically to its expression on the secular or profane plane. This is my point of departure from the point of view of psychoanalysis, which