ABSTRACT
The importance of asceticism in major periods of human culture indicates that it has been a popular mass movement, not simply an expression of repression imposed by sadistic authorities from above. But to reduce asceticism to hostility to women, body, and nature fails to do justice to the complexity of the ascetic tradition in Christianity and in human culture generally. In imagining a new culture, feminism cannot totally repudiate the recognition of tension between spirituality and sexuality, intellectual creativity and bodily appetites, which is the basis of the ascetic tradition. Some kind of asceticism, in the sense of a spiritual transcendence of sexuality and materiality, was a typical correlate of this revelation of the feminine. The sun dance was another Indian ceremony involving ritual asceticism. Ritual asceticism is, by its very nature, occasional. Such Indian ritual asceticism seems far removed from Christian asceticism. Thus the history of Christian asceticism presents us with a marked contradiction.
