Hieros Gamos – From Marriage into Divine Union
Regular readers have met my husband – you know him as The Lover. He is still The Lover and he is also Husband.
He was the man I met for a casual sexual encounter who I found I couldn’t see only the once. He was, and is still, the most incredible lover and there was also something more about him. More than I have ever experienced in any other man. It intrigued me, it excited me and it deeply healed me. Meeting him turned my world upside down.
Until I met Husband I was leading a pretty ordinary middle class, middle England life. I turned that life on its head so that I could keep experiencing him. Sitting here now, in our garden, writing this blog post as Anabelle, this all seems so ordinary and normal. Then I view myself through “normal eyes” and laugh. Here I am, a whore writing about the man who fucked me senseless when I was married to one man and deeply in love with another!
I have always had courage, others would say, sometimes too much. To which my reply is my courage is intuitive. Intuition is your body’s guidance system. If you want to truly trust your decisions, follow your intuition, it’s your subconscious making itself conscious and is far more powerful than your narrow and highly programmed conscious mind.
With more courage than I consciously knew I had, I held onto The Lover who in 2022 became Husband. The love we felt on the first day that we met has never waned. It has grown stronger with every challenge and with every passing year until we found ourselves here, in the Autumn of 2026, with him freshly returned from a retreat during which he fully stepped into his King energy.
I write a lot about the damage patriarchy wreaks on men. This is because I am a lover of many men, a wife to one man and the mother to two more. I see the damage. I have written about witnessing it happening. It causes me immense grief. I grieve for men and I grieve for us women who are in turn harmed by the men that patriarchy has damaged.
I know to the depths of my being that men are beautiful beings – my intuition tells me this is true – and yet, I am one of millions upon millions of women who have been deeply wounded by men. Not men as a concept. Specific men who chose badly and acted badly because they were following their programming and/or acting from their wounding instead of from their Truth.
Husband knew he wounded me. I told him often enough. And he could feel in his bones that he was causing me pain. He saw how the woman who had courageously fought social programming, conditioning, judgement and exile to be with him was wounded by his wounding. He wanted to be better but he’d tried traditional therapy and it sucked for him (one actually kept checking her watch during the session in which he was trying to connect to, and speak of, his pain – can you imagine?!)
His pain at witnessing how his wounding hurt me was matched by a terror that I would grow tired of the cycle of arguments that plagued our otherwise beautiful relationship and simply give up on our magical union and my beautiful, beautiful man.
The arguments followed a similar pattern: first I would express an annoyance, irritation or need (in an admittedly tense voice because I feared what would come next) he would respond with denial and defence (because he’s a pleaser and has a deep need to be perfect for me) which just irritated me more.
My tone of voice would then become harsher which would trigger his childhood wounding so he would withdraw to keep himself safe. I took his withdrawal as abandonment which triggered my childhood wounding, filling me with rage.
In anger my words are chosen to be as cutting and as cruel as I can make them. Unsurprisingly he would withdraw deeper to lick his wounds and hide from the angry woman his beloved had morphed into. I took his further withdrawal as further proof of abandonment, even rejection, and so we would spiral. Sometimes for days.
It was exhausting. And incredibly painful for us both.
Intellectually I knew what we had to do. I could see the pattern. I am fully aware of, and am horrified by, his childhood wounding, as he is of mine. I have done a lot of training and am invited by couples to help them when a similar dynamic affects their sex lives. But it takes two people to commit to and build a beautiful and loving relationship. One person cannot, on their own, nourish a relationship.
It does take two.
Two people have to fully commit, heart, mind, body and soul to the relationship. To do that they have to have the courage to be vulnerable.
It is deeply, deeply vulnerable – and so incredibly brave – to commit 100% to another person. What if they’re faking it and have only committed 99%, or 95% or 90% or less?! If you commit yourself 100% you are super vulnerable to being hurt by the one who has committed less and has maintained an “out” option. So, most of us keep “out” at least a couple of percentage points, as a reserve, just to keep ourselves safe.
I don’t think this retention of a couple of percentage points is conscious. I think, on the contrary, that most people believe they are fully committed to their beloved and are surprised and a bit confused when either, their partners tell them that they are not 100% there or, the argument spiral kicks off and they’re planning their departure within minutes (again).
Fully committed is, as the vow in church says, “In sickness and in health, until death do us part.” How many of us actually commit to those words even as we say them? How many of us commit ourselves 100% to the other so that they feel safe enough to do the same for us? How many of us commit ourselves 100% at the risk that the other hasn’t?
This is the relationship minefield. It takes great courage to walk through it.
As I have told you, I have great courage.
Husband wanted to commit 100% to me. But he always found a bit of wiggle room. Nothing too easily identifiable, but enough of a % for me to feel it and even see it on occasion. I really thought I was committed to him 100%, that I was raw, honest, open and vulnerable with him, but as you will learn if you keep reading, I wasn’t.
In his desire to be the best he could be for me – to break our hideous argument spiral cycle -he announced one day that he was going to bite the bullet and do some “men’s work.” Neither of us were entirely sure what it entailed, but I had heard that it was transformational and we knew someone – a friend of a friend – who offered this work so Husband reached out.
Over an intense weekend he “did the work.” In a nurturing and caring community of men he was supported to express his anger at the people who caused his childhood wounding. He learned about the four masculine archetypes: Lover, Warrior, Magician, King and how patriarchy pushes these beautiful archetypes into the shadows from where they wreak havoc in men’s lives. He learned how the damaged masculine violates and desecrates the feminine and that in order to be Divine Masculine you have to honour and revere the Divine Feminine. Finally, he was initiated into his King energy.
The work is not over. It will be, like my work is, a lifetime of commitment, lapsing, recommitting, re-learning, learning anew – a spiral, rather than a linear, personal evolution. But he made the commitment and he returned to me a King.
While Husband was on retreat with a group of courageous men walking the same path, I made my way over to Glastonbury for my first ever visit and my first ever yoni massage. Glastonbury is the earth’s heart chakra, I have long wanted to visit, to climb to the top of Glastonbury Tor, drink from the Chalice Wells and generally mooch around a small English town that is a magnet for heart opened souls from across the world.
Whilst wandering around I came across a mural on the side of an ordinary row of cottages that made me cross the road to look closer. It depicted Hieros Gamos – the union of Divine Masculine (Hieros) with Divine Feminine (Gamos) which I have read about but never seen a modern illustration of.
I spent quite a while looking at them. Especially at Hieros. Husband was on retreat connecting with his King energy and when I looked at Hieros I saw King. Not a patriarchal – male monarch on a throne exerting power over others version of King. Instead, a primordial, ancient essence arising from the sun and fire of the natural world version of King. His gaze is direct and strong yet soft, loving and deeply penetrating. He is saying with his eyes, and his outstretched arm, “I am here for you. I’ve got you. Join me. Be my love.”
In contrast to the fiery, action taking heat of Hieros – Gamos is calm, serene, patient, receptive. The moon to his sun, cooling water to his hot fire. Her stance is powerful and strong, this is not a weak woman, but by contrast to Hieros she is not taking action and reaching out for him, instead she is absorbed in the beauty of the water falling through her hands.
(Murals by Jon Minshull)
My eye was drawn to the white water flowing from her sacral chakra. These murals are on the wall of cottages on the road leading up to the sacred wells of Glastonbury – one flowing with iron rich red water, the other with calcium rich white water, but it’s not lost on me that the waters flowing from her strongly resemble amrita.
The more I looked at these two images the more I was drawn to Hieros. He depicts everything I have always found deeply attractive in Husband – the safe, strong, outstretched arms, the intense eyes, the physical power, the raw masculinity, the unapologetic presence.
I was less sure that I felt aligned to the image of Gamos who appears so very passive and patient as she waits for his love – a softly feminine presence which my bold, courageous, fiery Boudica energy doesn’t easily identify with. But I loved her peaceful watery setting – being immersed in bodies of cold running water is how I reset and recharge – so her space looked like heaven to me.
I took photographs and walked on. I climbed up the Tor which was breathtakingly beautiful in the evening light and made sure to go to bed early for my yoni massage the following day.
The tantrika giving me my yoni massage opened her session, as I do, with a short meditation in which she said the words, “I see your beauty. I see your strength. I see your wisdom. I see your power.” The words she spoke were accompanied by the blissful sensation of ostrich feathers stroking my arms, face, neck and breasts. My pleasured body happily received these words from a complete stranger and they floated around in my body/mind throughout the session.
At the end, as I lay on the massage table, my body humming and vibrating with orgasm, the words whirled around installing themselves as part of my identity. It felt a bit like magic. It’s because sexual energy, when used with intent, is magic.
Soon after my massage I left Glastonbury and headed back to Dorset to wait for Husband in a little shepherd’s hut tucked away in the rolling hills of Hardy’s England.
Waiting was an unfamiliar experience for me. For years I have been the action taker. I haven’t waited patiently for a man in eons! It was uncomfortable too. I knew he was going through an intense experience. Retreats are intense. They change you. The carefully selected and managed practices (aka rituals) are designed to bring about change at the primal level.
You can learn facts in a classroom or by reading an article online but facts don’t change your programming. Rituals do. Husband was on retreat. He was going through a rigorous programme of transformational rituals. He would return a changed man.
I had enjoyed my yoni massage. It had been deeply pleasurable but I was unsure it had been transformational in any way. I have a lot of yoni love in my life and although I wanted my massage to have unlocked something in me, I had a feeling that it hadn’t.
In the shepherd’s hut I found it difficult to settle to anything. Usually, I love to walk and swim. Without Husband to accompany me I did neither. I couldn’t read or write – I had days on my own, ample opportunity to do both, but I had the craziest energy and couldn’t settle myself body, mind or spirit. I was worried about Husband. I felt sure that my unsettled energy was my energy body picking up that he was having an intense and emotionally challenging time.
By Sunday afternoon I gave up and took to bed. The day outside was beautiful, late September sun warming the hut so I was able to undress and lie on the bed overlooking the valley and pleasure myself to peace.
It worked. My body was super receptive after the yoni massage two days earlier and she missed Husband probably more than I did! Whenever I felt myself about to come, I would quickly stand up, allowing my amrita to flow over the wooden floor (easily cleared up with kitchen roll) to keep the bed dry for Husband.
And so it is that I spend a sunny afternoon waiting for Husband, making myself come over and over again, soaking the wooden flooring of the little shepherd’s hut in the Dorset countryside. Gamos waiting – in pools of sacred water – for my Hieros to return.
Finally, he did. That’s the beautiful thing about time, if you are patient enough it will eventually pass.
My man joined me in my little space and he filled it. He has always been a broad, big-hearted man, you always feel his presence and when he returned to me, hoarse, his voice not much more than a whisper and exhausted from the most intense four days of his life he was undoubtedly a King. He called me his Queen, we made love and went to sleep. He was too tired to share much and I just wanted to receive the invitation of his strong arms.
We had both taken time away from our everyday to integrate his experience together. I have been on retreat and found re-entering normie world very jarring. When you return to the demands and mundanities of everyday life it is hard to hold onto the person the retreat’s rituals have reconnected you with – your true essence, your Truth. We chose to create a bubble for ourselves in which we could first reintegrate with each other.
We needed it. I had taken care to wash my hair with my regular shampoo so that when we were back in each other’s arms I smelt like me. I wanted to send a very strong signal to his nervous system that I was still me.
But it was MY nervous system that needed the managing. First there was his voice – something that is so important to me had gone, replaced by a strange croak – then there were the words he was using which just sounded so strange coming from my man’s mouth.
Then there was a palpable shift in the balance of power. I was no longer the only one to have “done the work” he has too and it was clear he was no longer going to be the push over that I had grown used to.
When we woke on our first morning it didn’t take much from him to reduce me to tears. He shared ways in which our relationship would be different going forwards, I misinterpreted his words (which he admits were a bit blunt and over enthusiastic) and thought he was offering me the dreaded ultimatum. Hieros telling Gamos that she wasn’t good enough for him. Or that’s the way I took it.
My upset kicked off a day of the most appalling stomach cramps. He expressed concern, but what can you really do for someone who’s belly has swollen to three times its usual size and keeps bending over in agony? I endured them for a large part of the day as we talked, him reassuring me of his love for me and sharing details of the retreat as I tried desperately to push out the fart that would end my agony!
Something reminded me to check in with Louise Hay to see what she has to say about abdominal cramps, so I put my question into DuckDuckGo and was served my answer. Oh how incredible, incredible, incredible the body is at communicating if you only have the tools to listen and understand!
According to Louise Hay abdominal cramps are a symptom of fear and a desire to stop the process.
Identifying what the body is communicating to you is the first step. The second is to release the pattern so that you can let go of the symptoms. Her guidance is to say, “I am willing to release the pattern in my consciousness that has created this condition” followed by the affirmation for your particular symptom, which in my case was, “I trust the process of life. I am safe.”
So, I did as Louise Hay prescribed. I said repeatedly throughout the day, sometimes whilst looking into my King’s powerful eyes, “I am willing to release the pattern in my consciousness that has created this condition. I trust the process of life. I am safe.”
The cramps didn’t disappear just like that but they did get better and by the time we went to sleep that night they were more of a memory than a direct, intense feeling. When I woke the next morning everything was different.
My resistance to the changes in him had just gone. I saw my beautiful man, my King, my Hieros and I simply melted.
That night as we sat in the Swedish bath on the balcony of our shepherd’s hut, we had our first test. He had lit the fire for the bath hours earlier, we had eaten and played Uno (I won!) whilst we waited for the bath to warm up and then as the newly waning moon climbed high into the sky we undressed and climbed into the bath. The warmth of the sun was long gone, we had been sitting under thick woollen blankets as we played cards, so the air was fresh and sharp around our shoulders as we sat in the heat of the bath.
It was utterly perfect. Gamos was in water in the arms of her Hieros. I don’t think I have ever felt happier. We laughed and noted it was our first ever bath together – what a way to experience it! We admired the moon, we revelled in the feel of each other’s bodies, we inhaled the fresh air and we chatted easily. Then he threw in a statement that sabotaged the evening.
It was easy for me to see – in hindsight – that it was sabotage. We were getting on too well, we were deeply, deeply intimate, his nervous system became unsettled – vulnerability alerts were fired and click, just like that, the unhelpful statement was uttered. Hieros dropped his Gamos, the King failed to protect his Queen.
The sacred power of the masculine is to hold the feminine safe. This is true of the two energies inside your own body or between two people in a relationship. Husband had spent a weekend healing his wounding so that he could be deeply present and hold his Queen, or Gamos, safe in those beautiful, strong arms of his. Safety includes how we talk to each other and the care with which we broach sensitive topics.
That was how I knew, fairly quickly, that this unhelpful comment had not come from my King but from a shadow in his subconscious. Shadows are the part of our psyche that we don’t see – by virtue of being in the shadows – until we shine a light on them. Shining a light onto the shadows is part of the work he had been doing on retreat it is also, I believe, a beautiful opportunity in relationships – if you are courageous enough to go there.
I knew a shadow of his had shown up to sabotage our evening. For a few hours he didn’t agree and was just angry with me. And it was in those hours that I learned how much my yoni massage had transformed me.
Sitting in water, my safe place, my place of power, I had no need for words or anger, I patiently waited, Gamos personified. And I heard the words used in my yoni massage circling around my body and mind.
I see your beauty.
I see your strength.
I see your wisdom.
I see your power.
The weather turned windy and rainy as we sat in the bath, so whilst our bodies were emersed in hot water our heads and shoulders were whipped by cold wind and rain. It was incredibly elemental, primal and raw. With the rain soaking my hair and running down my face, I felt the power of Boudica radiating through my body but this time joined by the peaceful, serene presence of Gamos.
I see your beauty.
I see your strength.
I see your wisdom.
I see your power.
My King at the other end of the bath was dealing with his shadows. Ordinarily his silence would make me furiously angry and by now I would be expected to unleash a torrent of cruel words on him. But I felt different.
I felt quietly powerful. I felt strength in my calmness. My understanding that his poor words had been an act of sabotage by one of his shadow parts made me feel wise. Under the light of the moon I felt as beautiful and bold and at peace as I have ever felt in my life.
We moved inside, in the warm soft bed of our hut we found each other’s arms and he claimed his Queen. His strength softened me and I yielded to him more deeply than ever before. And then an incredible thing happened. Instead of pulling my body to his so that he could penetrate me deeply with his cock, he pushed my legs wide apart and went down on me.
You will know from reading my other blogs that I love, love, love receiving oral sex. But, perhaps surprisingly, I have always resisted receiving oral sex from Husband. Whenever he positioned himself to gift me this pleasure (he reads my blogs too!) I would manoeuvre my body out of the way and pull him up a bit so that his cock found my cunt instead.
It was too vulnerable for me to receive oral sex from a man who I feared rejection from.
If a client leaves a session thinking to himself, “That was a great session, but oof she was a bit ripe,” I don’t know it and I don’t care. I care about my clients but I have no emotions invested in the sex I share with them. I am giving the experience. It is my job to do so.
With Husband I am receiving him and that is a completely different level of vulnerable. And thus far in our relationship, I had been unable to receive the oral sex that he knows I would love and which would delight him to give me.
Until this particular night in the shepherd’s hut, I had never laid back and opened my legs wide for Husband. I had never experienced the power with which he eats cunt. I had never tasted my juices from his beard. I had never allowed myself to fully surrender to my man. I had never trusted him enough to be this level of vulnerable with him. I had held back a couple of % points.
At last, held by his newfound strength, I had the courage to. Silently instructed by his powerful eyes, I opened my legs wide for him. He feasted on me. He licked my vulva and bit my clitoris. This wasn’t just gentle honouring, this was a King devouring his Queen. I moaned with pleasure, he grunted with satisfaction and animal desire. Then, when he judged that the time was right – and not before – he pushed into me. My orgasmic muscles contracted around his cock as he fucked me deep and hard
Over 10 years of holding him at arm’s length whilst believing I was 100% committed to him were over. I finally trusted my man enough to be fully vulnerable with him. There is nothing I hold back from him now. He is my King. I am his Queen.
We have shared an incredible journey of healing and connecting. Parts we did away from each other. He did his in the companionship of male love and support. I did mine in the hands (literally) of one woman and then alone in the hut as I waited, like Gamos, for my Hieros to reach out for me. Reunited, we did the final bit together. Eyes locked, commitments made, affirmations repeated, love strengthened and grown.
This is why you do “the work”. You don’t know how it is going to evolve or where the path will lead, you just have to choose your person and trust the process. Then the miracles happen.
Recommended Further Reading:
“You Can Heal Your Life” by Louise Hay
“Getting The Love You Want – A Guide For Couples” by Harville Hendrix
“Warrior, Magician, Lover, King – A Guide To The Male Archetypes Updated For The 21st Century” by Rod Boothroyd
For those interested in exploring men’s work for healing and growth this is the group that Husband is working with: https://www.theunmaskedman.co.uk/
The Swans pictured are one of many breathtaking sculptures in Sculpture By The Lakes Dorset
