The Metaphysical Meaning Of Veiling, Modesty, Immodesty, And Nudity.
And why all of these states of dress and undress can be used to reach your spiritual goals, depending on what they are.
In exoteric expressions of religion, the type, and amount of clothing, people, especially women, wear is a hot-button topic. For many, they even are identified as the religion and/or spiritual tradition they are part of based upon how they dress, specifically how they cover. If a woman is wearing a chiffon rectangle scarf wrapped around her head, concealing all of her hair, and a long flowing abaya, in the minds of everyone else, she will be identified as Muslim. Conversely, if someone is dressed in a crop top and short shorts, it is assumed she is probably not Orthodox Jewish or Mormon. However, modesty and immodesty are a lot more than ways of dressing, they hold deep spiritual meaning. As well, the way you cover your body can have a profound impact on your ritual practice.
Modesty is an idea that has been reduced to how much skin is covered by an outfit, but it is a lot more than that. In truth, modesty is about hiding the self. The role of modesty is to conceal the body, and the beauty, of the person engaging with modesty, so that they can submit themselves to a higher power. In different religions, the extent of this will vary.
In western Christianity, there is not a clear line of where modesty should be drawn. In the Episcopal Church that I grew up in, the modesty that I saw in the congregants around me was pretty simple—cover your shoulders and don’t have your skirt too high above your knee. The men did the same. As I got older, and met Catholics and Orthodox Christians, I noticed that they recommended hair covering or veiling for women. For the Catholics, the women would wear a white mantilla veil, a Spanish veil that closely resembles wedding veils, in the service. This functioned, in a ritual context during their masses, to represent submission and marriage to God. The use of the wedding veil imagery was to signify that.
In western occultism, veiling is used for several reasons. In some cases, it is to have an extra color correspondence. If you need more white in a ritual, a white headscarf can do the job. In other cases, if you are doing a devotional ritual to a God, wearing a veil can be profound. The vestal virgins, a group of women in the ancient Hellenistic world who swore themselves to chastity and devoted themselves to Vesta, would wear white veils to show their devotion to the Goddess. It should be noted that Pagan veiling customs are not the same as Abrahamic ones and are not always paired with modest dress all over the body. The vestal virgins, for instance, did not wearing highly conservative dress, the focus was more on the veiling of the hair. This was something I did not understand for a long time, but it is a legitimate form of veiling, even if it runs counter to our modern ideas of what veiling looks like.
There are New Age derived practices where people will veil in order to cover their crown chakra or third eye. This is done off a very different line of logic, one based around the idea that that the cloth will protect the energetic center. This is a controversial practice and doesn't relate directly to the modesty versus immodesty conversation, but as this is a growing practice, deserves a note. As well, if someone is engaging with modesty for defensive dressing or body image reasons, they are not making a metaphysical statement. For a long time, I was a modest woman, not out of any particular religious expression, but out of insecurity and fear of men. I would highly advise anyone with this mindset to seek out shadow work. This is how I broke out of this toxic mentality.
If you look outside of the West, to more extreme forms of modesty, the veil goes from simple submission to annihilation of the self. If you begin to cover your face with a veil, whether in the form of the niqab or burqa, you are expressing even more submission. As humans, we recognize each other based upon our faces, so when the face is concealed, the self is annihilated. Interestingly, the religion of Islam also rejects the idea of an image of Allah, which is why they are iconoclastic. To cover your face is also iconoclastic. It is the dissolution of the self.
In western occult rituals, blindfolds are often used. These are to humble the ritual participant and shrink the egoic sense of the self. While it is not full annihilation, it is approaching that. As well, covering your face with a cloth can be incredibly profound, if the goal of a ritual is to have an “ego death” or to annihilate some aspect of the self. However, it is not a practice in western esotericism to veil your face constantly. Furthermore, if you were to do this constantly, you would suffer consequences of concealment. We are meant to challenge our ego, and cause it to have metaphorical deaths, but it is not a good idea to try to actually kill it. The ego is the self, it keeps us alive, and it cannot be destroyed as long as we are living. For this reason, ego death practices need to remain contained, and contrasted with other ritual practices, and not allowed to fully overtake our lives.
Moving away from modesty, and towards immodesty, the first thing to look at it is neutral dress. These are people, and practitioners, who do not consider modesty or immodesty in their ritual practice. There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, most occultists fall into this camp. They will perform ritual in their street clothes, in a color corresponding outfit, or in a Tau robe. This is a neutral position. The way clothing, for people in this category, will impact ritual is based on other correspondences. They may add talismans, lamens, or sashes to enhance their ritual practices. There are many things you can do to create great rituals that do not involve taking on a specific state of dress or undress.
The idea of immodesty having a ritual utility and leading to spiritual growth is a thought that perplexes a lot of people’s minds. In a culture saturated by Abrahamic ideas, it is a transgressive notion, one that could even be shocking. This is why it holds power. Transgression is a notion that is key to many spiritual mysteries. Finding divinity, and seeing the Gods, in things that seem non-divine is a powerful thing, and shows the vastness of the God’s power.
A state of partial undress is used in several rituals. This can look like someone wearing a ritual robe that is open in the front, keeping the correspondence of that robe, but also utilizing the correspondence of nudity. Alternately, this can look like wearing clothes on the lower body, but exposing the upper body. For instance, in the Pre-Islamic Arab Pagan ritual of Hajj, which predates Islam, devotees of the Gods would wear clothes on their lower body, but keep the upper body exposed, and would dance in circles around the Kaaba, in a state of ritual ecstasy. As well, in mystery traditions that involved ritual dance, trance, and Bacchic states, ritual nudity was utilized in various forms.
Taking it even further, there are traditions that utilize full nudity, also known as skyclad dress. In these traditions, ritualists strip themselves of all coverage during worship. This can represent a few different things. In some witchcraft traditions, specifically Traditional Wicca, the witches are nude to represent their freedom. Furthermore, since clothing is a concept that was created by humans to separate ourselves from others and from the natural world around us, the removal of clothing can represent connectedness to nature and community.
As well, nudity can be used, in a very different context, to represent vulnerability. In some rituals, removing garments of clothing as the ritual progresses can be used to symbolize the stripping of the self and the removal of boundaries and barriers. This is particularly useful in rituals that relate to ordeals or shadow work.
At the end of the day, clothing is a boundary and a barrier. It can be a boundary between us and others. It can be a boundary between ourselves and our shadow. As well, it can be a boundary between us and our ego. For this reason, all of these states of dress and undress have a metaphysical potential to them and can play a role in your spiritual journey. The key thing is—do these things with intention. There are many people who dress modestly out of insecurity and many people who dress immodestly out of a desire for attention. Both of these are non-spiritual motivations that will not accomplish the metaphysical gains that you desire. For this reason, when you engage with these ideas and practices, take time to introspect and know thyself.
-GR
Here is a fun fact you may or may not be aware of: I've read that there was a common anatomical belief amongst ancient physicians in Rome/Greece that the hair was a sexual organ. Some physicians believed that the hair of a woman would retain the constituents of semen after they have intercourse. There is some indication of this belief in one of Paul's epistles in the New Testament, which would be one reason why Orthodox and Catholic women have historically veiled themselves. Another more obvious reason is that the fallen angels in the book of Enoch had sexual relations with human women, creating the Nephilim. Since angels are present during the Divine Liturgy, it would be sinful to tempt them into relations due to the exposure of hair.
Footnotes? Bibliography? Suggested reading for those who'd like to know more? Thank you.
E.g. Elite women in ancient Mesopotamia and in the Macedonian and Persian empires wore the veil as a sign of respectability and high status.(1)
1. Ahmed, Leila (1992). Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 15.