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It was in the more advanced parts of the world some 5,500 years ago, namely the Middle Eastern lands, that pagan cults grew into complex, codified religions, especially among the desert wanderers who were the intellectual
avant-garde
of their day. As they developed, these embryonic new religions had a habit of incorporating a heavy and egregious sexual content -no surprise again when orgasms were still the most rapturous physical and psychological experience most people enjoyed, other than those privileged to see burning bushes, receive tablets of God's word on mountain tops and so on. The desert religions that turned into market leaders and survived to the present day, namely Judaism and Christianity plus their modernist rival Islam, have all retained a disproportionate preoccupation with sex and with the tortured relationship for thinking people of all eras between the essential act of creating life and the hedonistic luxury of orgasm.

While the great religions were still under construction, the pre-eminent culture existed in Ancient Egypt. There, acts of human-like sex were credited with having originated everything, even the universe. The Egyptian creation story was told in different versions in different cities, which was hardly unreasonable since the whole thing was patently a myth and flexible in interpretation. But the common thread throughout these stories is (surprisingly in view of later civilisations' taboos on the matter) masturbation.

One of the Pharaohs' most onerous ceremonial duties in Egypt was to bring fertility to the Nile by masturbating annually into its waters. The tradition supposedly went back to a primary event in the various versions of the creation myth of the time, although if you think about it, the creation myth must have been invented as a post-rationalisation of the Nile masturbating ceremony. The supreme being, Atum, myth had it, arose out of the primeval darkness. He masturbated to form Shu, god of air, and Tefênet, goddess of moisture, while he himself became the sun god, Ra, the Supreme Lord of Egypt. Tefênet's vagina created the morning dew and their incestuous
love created the Earth. Or as the Pyramid Texts, Utterance 527, graphically put it: ‘Atum is he who once came into being, who masturbated in On. He took his phallus in his grasp that he might create orgasm by means of it, and so were born the twins Shu and Tefênet.'

The Pharaohs' river ceremony was not so much the sanctification of an act of selfish pleasure as a new recognition of the primacy of fertility. In a landscape where the River Nile so visibly and tangibly made barren land fertile and life possible, it was inevitable that fertility would be as important as it was, overriding entirely any thought of pleasure in sex, especially for women. Magic was also widely employed to aid fertility, the lack of which was a person's greatest worry

What is particularly interesting in the Egyptian creation myth is that Atum's construction of the world was clearly a function of his own physical gratification, rather than a stated desire for parenthood; his offspring were, if Utterance 527 is to be believed, an accidental side-effect of his pleasuring himself.

But while following the example of their sexy gods' potent sexuality was a religious duty for Pharaohs, civil servants and ordinary citizens too are now believed to have aspired to lives as sensual as their king's. Material from excavated middle- and working-class houses (much of it hidden away during the Victorian Egyptology boom) shows that regular Ancient Egyptians covered their walls in explicit, exotic paintings and spent lavishly on their appearance, clothes, make-up, jewellery and perfume – and even dildos, a large collection of which is neatly filed away in wooden drawers deep in the British Museum.

A combination of the weather, the self-confidence of their culture and the green fertility of the Nile delta helped make Egypt an exceptionally sensual society. Under the unrelenting sun, women wore little more than a transparent linen shift, female slaves not even that – just a few beads. The men wore a pleated miniskirt, with an easily discarded woollen cloak for
evenings. How could sex not be on everyone's mind in such an erotic setting?

It would be wrong, nevertheless, to represent Ancient Egypt as some free-love sexual Utopia; it was in no sense a liberal society. Girls were regularly deflowered in arranged marriages at the age of six. Men opted for anal intercourse or vaginal penetration from behind to avoid having to lay eyes on their wife. But a belief pertained that sex was a part of the human condition and, as such, inherently guilt-free. Cleopatra is said to have fellated a thousand men, including a hundred Roman noblemen in one night; the Greeks referred to her as
Merichane
– ‘gaper', ‘the ten-thousand-mouthed woman' and
Cheilon -
the ‘thick-lipped'.

Love poetry was rife in everyday Ancient Egypt. Divorce, affairs, sexual indiscretion, adultery and womanising were not particularly discouraged or sanctioned against. The master of a household was permitted to have children by the servants. Virginity was not venerated even as an ideal. Contraception was practised, notwithstanding the cultural importance of fertility; the Kuhun papyrus, discovered in 1860, cites a variety of contraceptive methods, including the use of a tampon of crocodile dung smeared with honey and salt. Homosexuality was acceptable; the gods Set and Horus are described in sodomist congress, and the British Museum also holds a painting of two male court hairdressers having sex. Even bestiality was not taboo; the local sun god, Mendes, was often represented as a goat, and it was said by Herodotus that the city's worshippers of both sexes practised carnal intercourse with goats.

Paradoxically, anal sex is thought to have been relatively routine among the Ancient Hebrews, who began the taboo against it as part of their drive to establish a more ethical spirituality than the Egyptians who had enslaved them. The Biblical myth of Sodom plainly illustrates the desire by the earliest Jews to distance themselves from the practice of orgasm-without-responsibility. It is interesting, too, that as
part of the de-sexing of humanity in the interests of a higher, more intellectual calling, the Eden creation story was made superficially so un-sexual; the first full-frontal, nude drama appears at first reading to deal with a host of issues, but sex barely seems to figure among them. (It does, in fact, but only to the most sophisticated of readers, and then again, only in the original, not in translation.)

The original writers of the holy texts were actually a good deal more in favour of sexual pleasure than their later translators, even if it is a little fanciful to suggest, as has been done, that the rocking rhythm of the Hasidic student studying the Torah is itself a form of spiritual copulation. Yet the Bible in large part treats sexuality as a gift of God and a central part of being human, and often describes sex without mentioning if the participants are married. There is plenty of what could be described as erotic writing, such as the account in the
Book of Ruth
of Ruth seducing Boaz on the threshing-room floor. The ‘Song of Solomon', to those with half an ear for it, is one long erotic poem. The ancient text is laden with words like ‘pomegranate', ‘vineyard' and ‘garden' that are said by scholars such as David M. Carr, Professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary, a non-denominational graduate school of theology in New York, to be deliberately and overtly sexual images. Raisin cakes are claimed to represent aphrodisiacs. One line, ‘I will go my way to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense', is alleged to describe a man wanting to bury his face in his wife's bosom. Other phrases are less ambiguous: ‘Your two breasts are like twin fawns', ‘Your lips, my bride, drip honey'. And the Song certainly advises a man as clearly as possible to stimulate manually his lover's clitoris: ‘Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me'.

Naturally, the tendentious anti-pleasure post-rationalisers have been working on de-sexing such material for nigh on 3,000 years. The ‘Song of Solomon' is often dismissed as an aberration out of keeping with the rest of the Old Testament.

Many Jews explain it away as an allegory for God's love for Israel, while some Christians excuse it as a representation of Christ's relationship to his followers.

Generally speaking, when Bible translators have happened upon sexual references, they have been assiduous in seeking out neutralising euphemisms like men with a mission to protect unborn generations of virginal Sunday School teachers. Thus is ‘penis' changed in every instance to ‘thigh'. ‘Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh,' Abraham asks his servant in
Genesis
, ‘and I will make thee swear by the Lord, the God of heaven, and the God of earth.' (This is a reference to the custom of ‘testifying', by which anyone taking a vow places their hand on their testicles.

What the early Jews officially thought of ‘testifying' in, you might say, a more proactive sense, i.e. masturbation, has been obscured by the curious business regarding Onan, the son of Judah, who, a simple reading of
Genesis
suggests, was put to death for the practice. This interpretation led to ‘Onanism' being proscribed for thousands of years, although in reality the proscription was not taken very seriously.

There was a sense that in desert communities in which the men needed to produce as many sons as possible, and had as many wives as they liked, both masturbation and withdrawal before ejaculation were a waste of the most precious human resource. But masturbation bothered very few moralists before the eighteenth-century, and at least one writer, the anonymous author of a tract entitled
Hippolytus Redivivus
in 1644, claimed it was a sound remedy against the dangerous allurements of women. Why masturbation later became so very taboo, with the fear of it growing quite hysterical in such prudish times as the Victorian era in England, is something of a mystery. But what we can now say with a degree of certainty is that the Onan described in
Genesis
, who prompted Dorothy Parker to name her canary after him because he kept spilling his seed, was no masturbator. Rather, he was a responsible proponent of
coitus interruptus
.

What transpires from reading the sparse Biblical passage concerned is that Onan was required by the Levirate law of Judaism to sleep with his dead brother Er's wife Tamar, to attempt to preserve the family line by providing her with a male heir. Onan, nevertheless, did not want to get Tamar pregnant. As the passage in
Genesis
states: ‘Onan, however, knew that the descendants would not be counted as his, so whenever he had relations with his brother's wife, he wasted his seed on the ground to avoid contributing offspring for his brother.' Whether withdrawing his penis from her vagina (‘flower') at the critical moment made him history's first recorded gentleman or a prototypical cad is a matter of interpretation. But for practising a basic contraceptive method and thereby failing to provide his dead brother with a son in accordance with Jewish law, he certainly managed to anger God who, we are told, killed him.

Assuming, as one must to maintain a reasonably sceptical outlook, that the part about God killing Onan was made up by scribes, or that he just happened to die anyway, remaining Biblical parables that are overtly anti-masturbation are surprisingly few. This may well be because any sensible person realises that ‘wasting seed' does not always involve either masturbation or contraception; any religion, after all, that advocated not having sex with your wife if she was merely having trouble conceiving would not find many adherents; neither, for that matter, would a faith that believed a man with a low sperm count should not even attempt to have sex because the few sperm he had would most likely go to waste. In
Romans
, believers are told not to use their ‘members' to do sinful acts because the appendages in question belong to God.
Leviticus
makes passing mention of spilled semen staining clothing and bedsheets. Moses warns obliquely at one stage against ‘sowing seeds on rocks and stones on which they will never take root'. More arcane Hebrew writings liken spilt semen to the dead, from which it follows that touching it is as touching the dead. And that is about it.

There is, additionally, not even a hint in the scriptures that women should not fondle themselves, since they obviously have no ‘member' to violate, no semen to spill, nor widowed in-law to decline to impregnate. Why should men have been targeted, if not by the Bible itself, then by its interpreters? Based on contemporary beliefs about the Nature of sexual reproduction, there is at least one humane justification for males refraining from masturbation. To the Hebrews, and to the Greeks after them, sperm were regarded as entities that shot fully formed, but sub-miniature, people into a woman, whose role in reproduction was merely that of incubator. Wasting sperm, by this interpretation, was directly analogous to killing millions of people.

In scriptural matters, knowledgeable interpretation is all. And viewed though knowing eyes, the Jewish Torah and Talmud emerge as little short of practical marriage manuals. The early Jews believed one should enjoy the pleasures of life, sex included, with some rabbis holding that at the last day people would have to account to God for every pleasure they had failed to enjoy.

‘In Ancient Jewish thought sexual congress is a metaphor for God's creation of, and interaction with, His world,' Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes in his book
Kosher Sex
. ‘Sex is said to bring about the celestial unity of masculine and feminine energies … Since our world was created as an arena to demonstrate the unity of God, no other act demonstrates this better than the physical union of male and female, strangers who become lovers, and lovers who are also friends.

‘Long ago, well before Christianity enacted legislation forbidding its clerics from marrying or having sex, the ancient Rabbis were giving explicit sexual advice to married men and women as to how they could enjoy pleasurable, yet holy, intimate relations. The Rabbis made female orgasm an obligation incumbent on every Jewish husband. No man was merely allowed to use a woman merely for his own gratification.' The Bible, he points out, conceives of sex within marriage as the
woman's right and the man's duty, while the Talmud later – a mere 2,000 years ago – declared that a woman's sexual passion is far greater than that of man. Later still, Nachmanides, a thirteenth-century Jewish scholar, explained in his commentary on the Bible that when God said Eve would long for Adam after eating from the tree of knowledge, her craving took the form of an exceedingly great sexual desire for him.