Photos by Jesse Rieser Goddess Divina performs massage on a ‘seeker.’ At the Temple of One church in Phoenix, clients are called ‘seekers,’ and the women who work there are referred to as ‘goddesses’ and ‘practitioners.’Place your photo caption here

Tracy Elise is preaching her gospel of transcendence through
pleasure to the Valley, which raises one big question: Can sex be a religion?

There are no Corinthian columns, no marble steps. Just a double-story, Spanish-style office building straight out of the 1970s, its stucco the same color as the graveled banks of the canal it overlooks, the kind of building that even if you drive this section of 24th Street south of Thomas Road every day, you’ve probably never noticed. Despite a camouflaging coat of paint, the name of the building’s former occupant, Gosnell Development, is far more prominent than the sign on the door announcing the current tenant: Temple of One.

It’s the fifth home for the temple since its founder, Tracy Elise, a former housewife from Alaska turned self-anointed mother goddess and mystic sister, drove to the Valley two years ago in a used Dodge Caravan with $1,200 and what she describes as her spiritual calling: to bring the art of “sacred sexual healing” to Phoenix.

Last year, she got her 15 minutes of fame, though it probably amounted to substantially less if you totaled up the 30-second snippets on the local news chronicling the controversies that surrounded her fledgling church and its move from one rental house to another – two in Scottsdale, then two more in tony Phoenix neighborhoods.

“Reporters would come, and we would talk to them for a long time, explaining our beliefs,” she says. “But we just got dubbed the ‘sex church.’”

The script was more or less the same no matter where the Phoenix Goddess Temple, as it was then called, ended up. First, neighbors would notice all the cars and strangers, mostly men, coming and going. Then someone would stumble across the postings on Craigslist.com or Backpage.com that advertised “Tantric massage,” “erotic pampering” and “full-body bliss” for an “all-inclusive offering of support” – upwards of $200 per hour – to the goddess of your choice.

If it seemed obvious to angry residents that they had a not-so-cleverly disguised brothel in their midst, the case wasn’t so clear-cut to the police who investigated. Unable to bring charges, officials instead chose to run the goddesses out on a raft of code violations that included inadequate parking and exceeding occupancy limits for a home-based church.

Tracy Elise stands in front of her Temple of One church in central Phoenix, where she claims to bring ‘sacred sexual healing’ to those who need it.

The process culminated last May with a public forum hosted at the Camelback Bible Church by Phoenix Councilman Sal DiCiccio, after the temple relocated to a house in his district. DiCiccio seemed eager to get in front of a moral issue that didn’t have anything to do with the banes of most local politicians (budget cuts, traffic abatement), and after glad-handing nearly every one of the 30 or so people who showed up – mostly retirees or those on the cusp – he stood in front flanked by a vice-squad detective and city attorney and explained: “The law says that churches can operate in neighborhoods, but they have to comply with certain codes. I’m just asking you all to be very vigilant, and to let my office know if you spot anything.”

It wasn’t hard to pick Elise out of the crowd of women in Ann Taylor separates and men with tucked-in golf shirts. A placid presence in a sky-blue summer dress, of the sort she tends to favor – loose-fitting, flowing – with a faux sapphire in the middle of her forehead, her benevolent smile never seemed to waver, even as it became obvious that most everyone there thought she was a madam.

DiCiccio grudgingly ceded the floor to Elise, and almost no one turned to look at her as she rose from her place in the back to explain that she was raised a Christian. “I still identify with the teachings of Jesus,” she said. She admitted that the brouhaha may have been caused by her attempt to introduce herself to her neighbors, going door to door handing out fliers inviting them to attend free seminars such as “Sex Education for All.” Nevertheless, she announced, almost as an afterthought, the temple would be moving once again, to an office building on 24th Street.

“But I would be very happy to explain why what we do is not prostitution,” she said.

No one took her up on the offer. DiCiccio looked at her and said, “I’ll be blunt: I wish you weren’t in my city at all.”

To be sure, most illicit activity trades on a semantic sleight-of-hand, words spoken as if they are in quotes, and at first glance it seems Elise has simply put a New Age gloss on the world’s oldest profession: There are no clients here, there are “seekers;” no escorts but “practitioners.” A massage table is an “altar of light,” a bed “the high altar.”

Elise freely admits she’s walking a thin line. “Without any reference to the Goddess and sacred sexuality,” she says, “it would be a brothel.” But she’s adamant, evangelical even, in defense of practicing what she says is perhaps the world’s oldest religion: worship of the Goddess, the female aspect of the divine.

She points to the work of writers such as Riane Eisler and archaeologists such as Marija Gimbutas at the University of California at Los Angeles, who argue that the very origins of religion lie not in worshiping a male god but a female one. Stone carvings depicting voluptuous female forms litter a variety of Neolithic archaeological sites that date back 10,000 years. Once dismissed as relics of a “fertility cult” (by a lot of men, Elise points out), more scholars today are suggesting that these may have been primary objects of devotion, evidence that ancient people associated the power of divine creation with the feminine.

Elise, 48, left her husband of 12 years and her three children in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1995 after she says she prayed to God to put her on “the right path.”

At 48, with her wide hips, glasses and blond hair pulled back in a wild knot, Elise evokes a kind of New Age Mother Goose, prone to periodic exclamations of “Goddess bless.” It’s an image that can be hard to square with that of a former Miss Harvest Queen at the Alaska State Fair and a married mother of three in Fairbanks running a catering business on the side. It’s harder still to picture her at the local Pentecostal church, where she says she spoke in tongues and served as precinct captain for Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential bid (“I truly believed we needed a godly man in the White House,” she says).

But underlying it all was an intense spiritual restlessness, a “deep wanting to know how the universe really worked,” she says, something her husband, a traditional Catholic, didn’t share. Twelve years after their divorce, Elise continues to praise him as “a wonderful man,” but as she became frustrated both with the lack of intimacy in their marriage and the Christian concept of God (“I wanted God to be kinder, more loving and less cruel,” she says. “I wanted God to make sense.”), the spiritual and the sexual seemed to merge into one big welter of discontent.

“I remember I was in my little tract home, folding laundry, watching this A&E documentary about Simone de Beauvoir, about all the lovers she had, and thinking, ‘I’m never going to have that kind of life, that kind of excitement,’” she says.

She started frequenting the only New Age bookstore in Fairbanks, attending lectures on everything from angels and auras to developing psychic abilities in children, and listening to Deepak Chopra on tape while she was making dinner. “Once I turned my back on the church, I began to see all the ways people could seek a path to God,” she says. She announced to her husband that she was dropping both her married and maiden names because of their “patriarchal” associations (Elise was originally her middle name). Not long after, she says she “prayed the prayer of no return,” asking “God to take me and put me on the right path, no matter what.”

She describes the first two years after she left her family as the most painful of her life, “like having a body of broken bones and trying to crawl across shards of glass,” but she roots her justification for leaving in the Bible. “It was Christianity that prepared me to put my faith above my husband and my children,” she says, citing Matthew 10:37 (“He who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me”).

She moved to Seattle, where she worked a string of odd jobs, including a long-term stint at a massage parlor, and had a relationship with a man who introduced her to Tantra. Ultimately, she joined with a woman named Rainbow Love to start a temple where practitioners (mostly women, including Elise) could give private, one-on-one sessions to seekers (mostly men), teaching them the ways of Tantra in exchange for a hefty suggested donation.

Leela Sullivan, 47, is a former bank CFO from Maryland. She says of her experiences with her seekers, “I really want them to feel loved.”

Elise and her other goddesses are quick to distinguish between pop culture’s use of Tantra as an exotic synonym for “kinky” and its true practice, which they compare to yoga, both because it originated centuries ago in the Far East and because, in its most dedicated form, it is designed to achieve a sense of spiritual well being through evermore advanced mental focus and physical technique.

But apart from Tantra’s central place in Elise’s life and that of her temple, where nearly a dozen local goddesses receive seekers full-time, most during normal business hours, it’s hard to determine what, exactly, the goddesses believe. It seems nothing like a system of belief but instead its opposite – an anti-system.

There is no single sacred text, no structured theology. In one conversation, Elise can toss off references to Buddhist philosophy, Biblical scripture and Celtic legend, throwing in a Taoist aphorism for good measure. Chakras are important, as is “life-force energy.” This magpie approach is reflected in the temple itself, which inside is set up more like your average day spa than a church. There’s a reception area and a series of private rooms (“healing chambers”), each with its own “high altar” and “altar of light” and decorated to reflect what Elise calls a separate “spiritual lineage”: Hindu, Taoist, Egyptian, American Indian and so on. The furniture is mostly of a mismatched, second-hand variety, artfully concealed with throws of diaphanous cloth, and the decorative bric-a-brac (an Isis tea light holder, a statue of Shiva, a Buddha head) is as culturally jumbled as the clearance table at Pier 1.

Elise describes the world most of us live in as a “gray flatland,” devoid of profound spiritual experiences, and she herself seems to believe most fervently in what she calls “direct downloads from God,” immediate communication from the divine that can take the form of signs, omens and physical sensations.

The most powerful of these? The orgasm.

“An orgasm is a sacred and holy moment,” Elise says. “You have absolute peace, you do not fear death, and you have no experience of lack or separation. The point of religion is peace of mind, returning the physical body to what is eternal, so I have to ask, how is what we’re doing not religion?”

Detective Chris Bray, for one, isn’t buying it. A 30-year veteran of the Phoenix Police Department, Bray was the detective at DiCiccio’s public forum, and while he declined to confirm whether the temple remains under investigation, he makes no secret that he thinks the whole operation is a sham.

“You can call it sacred or a sacrament or whatever,” he says, “but at the bottom line, it’s sex for money, and it’s illegal. What’s to stop me from starting the ‘Church of Chris?’”

Not much, as it turns out. The judicial fidelity to the First Amendment that has kept prayer out of schools and the Ten Commandments off courthouse lawns goes both ways, and judges generally have been squeamish when it comes to the state determining whose religious beliefs are valid and whose aren’t.