Mary Esther Harding (1888-1971) was a Jungian psychoanalyst, born in Shropshire, England, who lived for many years in New York with her long-time companion Kirstine Mann, and wrote books which Jung said, “sketched a picture of the feminine psyche which, in scope and thoroughness, far surpasses previous works in this field.”
In her book Women’s Mysteries, published 1935, Mary Esther Harding writes about the presence of both male and female servants of the Goddess in ancient times. Third-gender people, or those who embodied both male and female traits in themselves, were associated with spiritual gifts and powers in all historical earth-honouring, goddess-worshipping cultures of the planet. This history has not been claimed and understood by the modern, mainstream, LGBTQ+ movement yet – but has been explored in Radical Faerie sanctuaries, at Queer Spirit Festival in the UK and in other sacred queer enclaves, for several decades now. Those of us involved in that exploration are rediscovering and reclaiming those spiritual gifts. Knowing our history can hasten this manifestation of queer light, love and wisdom.
From Women’s Mysteries by Mary Esther Harding:
The Moon Goddess was attended primarily by priestesses, who were sacred prostitutes, pledged to a perpetual service of the Goddess, having dedicated their human love and feminine attractions to her forever. The ordinary woman worshipper, in contrast to this, sacrificed herself once in the temple and then, having performed the service that was required of her, was free to go her way and enter into a secular relation as wife and mother.
Thus the priestess had functions to perform which were different from the acts of worship of the women worshippers. The Moon Goddess also had priests attached to her temple. Like the priestesses they took upon themselves vows which were not required of the ordinary man, nor even of the initiate who was not a priest. The ordinary man resorted to the temple of the Goddess to take part in the hieros gamos, perhaps once in his life, at his initiation, or perhaps more than once. It was a sacrament of union with the divine feminine nature and was also a ritual for the renewal of his powers of fertility. But the priests, who were vowed to the service of the Goddess for life, had a characteristic which seems very strange in the devotees of a goddess of fertility and in a temple where the phallic emblem is so directly venerated. These priests were eunuchs, or they were treated in some way as women, for instance, they wore long hair or feminine clothes.
In certain primitive tribes the priests of the Moon wear feminine garb. Adolph Bastian gives the following interesting reason for this. He said that the men prayed to the active or masculine powers of nature, while the women invoked the feminine power, but that certain priests served both. These priests having learned “the idea of sex change from the moon” wore masculine garb when serving the male powers, and feminine dress when serving the female powers.
Phrygian Cybele is the outstanding example of the ancient Moon Goddesses who were served by eunuch priests. The emasculated men who were dedicated to her worship were considered to be incarnations of her son Attis. Attis was himself also a Moon God, wearing the crescent as a crown and he was, in typical fashion, Son and Lover of his Mother, the Moon Goddess Cybele.
The myth of Attis relates that he was about to wed the king’s daughter when his mother, or his grandmother, the divine hermaphrodite, who was in love with him, struck him mad. (It will be remembered that the Moon Goddess is frequently worshipped as both male and female, hermaphrodite.) Attis in his madness, or ecstasy, castrated himself before the Great Goddess. Annually in a worship dating from 900 B.C., on March the twenty-fourth Cybele’s grief for her son is celebrated. The lamentation for Attis resembles the grief of Ishtar for Tammuz and of Aphrodite for Adonis, of which mention has already been made. But in the worship of Cybele the element which was given greatest prominence was the dedication of the male worshippers who felt themselves to become identified with Attis, the dead son or lover of the Great Mother. The third day of the festival was called the Dies Sanguinis. In it the emotional expression of grief for Attis reached its height. Singing and wailing intermingled and the emotional abandon rose to orgiastic heights. Then in a religious frenzy young men began to wound themselves with knives, some even performed the final sacrifice, castrating themselves before the image of the Goddess and throwing the bloody parts upon her statue. Others ran bleeding through the streets and flung the severed organs into some house which they passed. This household was then obliged to supply the young man, now become a eunuch priest, with women’s clothes. These emasculated priests were called Galloi. The term has become fairly general and is used for the eunuch priests of other Moon Goddesses as well as Cybele. The Galloi after their castration wore long hair and dressed in female clothing.
A similar ceremony of castration took place in honour of Syrian Astarte of Hierapolis, of Ephesian Artemis, of Atargatis, of Ashtoreth or Ishtar, of Hecate at Laguire, and also of Diana whose statue was often represented with a necklace of testicles; sometimes the bloody organs of emasculated priests were hung about her neck. These goddesses were all served by eunuch or emasculated priests.
Other rites which were performed by men in service of the Moon Goddess included circumcision, a symbolic castration, and flagellation. This last rite was apparently never practised by women but in certain communities many boys submitted voluntarily to whipping in honour of the Goddess. The castigation was often so severe as to endanger the lives of the devotees.
Circumcision and flagellation are symbolic of a kind of mitigated castration. They are perhaps equivalent to the mitigated sacrifice of the women, the loss of whose hair was permitted instead of the sacrifice of their virginity, at the time of the dedication in the temple.
These are the sacrifices which the Moon Goddess demands, not, it is true, from every man, but from a few selected or representative men. To them she appears in her dark and terrible form, demanding mutilation or even death, for human sacrifice as we have already seen was included in her worship.
In these bloody rites the dark or under side of the great Goddess is clearly seen. She is in very truth the Destroyer. But strangely enough her destructive powers seem to be directed less against women than against men. The chosen man must sacrifice his virility completely and once for all, in a mad ecstasy where pain and emotion were inextricably mingled. The woman, on the other hand, must present the first fruits of her woman-hood. It was a sacrifice of a very different nature. For as the primitives say “The Moon is destructive to men but she is of one nature with women and is their patron and protector.”
rainbow messenger 