The sacred androgyne is the archetype of the Divine Self within us, sitting there both as the eternal Magical Child of the Gods and as the Adult who has achieved maturity, peace, wisdom and lightness, through experience of both joy and pain, and through the inner union of their ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ components.
The sacred androgyne sits in every human being. The Holy Self. At One with the Earth. A Part of The Cosmos Connected to the Stars. A manifestation of Nature’s divine miracle. Not defined by gender, simply being the wholeness of one’s Self.
Sexuality is transformed here into pure Spirit, pure Consciousness, pure Creativity, pure Light. The purpose of sexuality becomes clear. It is to Unite.
The Sacred Androgyne is in everyone, yet is especially strongly present in Lesbians, Gay Men and Bisexuals, experienced by many of them internally, perhaps through intuitions, feelings, visions and inner voices. Gay Men have had to keep the secret of their inner feminine magic hidden for so long, that the spiritual power of their inner fluidity remains largely locked away, gay male culture has been largely absorbed into the patriarchal hierarchical nightmare of consumerism and greed. Only among the global tribe of Radical Faeries has the essential spiritual power of gay love and the inner gender fluidity of gay males been much explored and expressed.
A man who feels sexual attraction to other men has the gift of double pleasure. This sexual desire points to a deeper, inner nature – because we are attuned and able to both give and receive pleasure we embody the polarity of the universe, we carry both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ sensibilities, as society tends to see them. This dance of the genders within us gifts many gay men with creative, spiritual and healing gifts. But because of the prejudice against feminine men that built up over the centuries, from ancient Greek and Roman cultures and which reached its murderous peak in the Christian era, men who love men long ago learned to keep this secret power hidden, to stay quiet about our own inner goddess. Today this manifests in some gay men who see no common ground between themselves and transgender people – they declare that gay is a sexual orientation and trans is about gender identity. History shows us, however, that we have all together been on the receiving end of the same prejudice, the western mind’s idea that God created gender norms of appearance and behaviour and anything that strayed from that was ‘against nature’. A warped idea that is still with us today in the form of ‘biological determinism’, the belief that male and female are two fixed sexes.
Among Transgender people the Androgyne is finding new expression, exterior expression, new presence in the world. As Trans shaman Raven Kaldera said: “Transgendered people have long been robbed of their own spiritual history, not knowing that there were once times and places where ours was considered a spiritual path in and of itself… We are all sacred and it is time that the world knew it.”
The Androgyne’s Time is Coming.
But only those who know the Sacred will be able to see what’s going on.
Oh yes, we’ve always been around: Roman writer Pliny wrote in the 1st century CE that, “there are even those who are born of both sexes, whom we call hermaphrodites, at one time androgyni.“
And we’ve always had a connection to the Great Spirit. Genderfluid, androgynous people were often serving in the ancient temples of the Goddess. “The Mother of the Gods also admits effeminates, and the Goddess would not judge so, if by nature unmanliness were a trivial thing,” wrote Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus in the 2nd century. This was such a global phenomenon that British Victorian explorer Richard Francis Burton wrote that homosexual and cross-dressing practices had “been adopted by the priestly castes from Mesopotamia to Peru.”
The ancient teachings of the Hermetic Cult taught that on the physical plane each person has a male or female physical body, however on the spirit and mind planes each person is androgynous with male and female qualities.
In fact at least one ancient Greek translation of Genesis reads “male and female created He him” not “them.” (gnosis.org) Edward Carpenter speculated on the androgynous Adam in the Garden of Eden is his poem Child of Uranus:
“O child of Uranus, wanderer down all times,
Darkling, from farthest ages of the Earth the same
Strange tender figure, full of grace and pity,
Yet outcast and misunderstood of men – Thy Woman-soul within a Man’s form dwelling,
[Was Adam perchance like this, ere Eve from his side was drawn?]
So gentle, gracious, dignified, complete,
With man’s strength to perform, and pride to suffer without sign,
And feminine sensitiveness to the last fibre of being;
Strange twice-born, having entrance to both worlds-
Loved, loved by either sex,
And free of all their lore!..
“I see thee where for centuries thou hast walked,
Lonely, the world of men
Saving, redeeming, drawing all to thee,
Yet outcast, slandered, pointed of the mob,
Misjudged and crucified.
“Dear Son of heaven — long suffering wanderer through the
wilderness of civilisation-
The day draws nigh when from these mists of ages
Thy form in glory clad shall reappear.”
“Mythological images imply that holiness is hermaphroditic, for holiness is wholeness – the complete human being is at once male and female – the man who has developed his feminine aspect, and the woman her masculine. In Buddhist icongraphy, therefore, the Bodhisvatta is very frequently a hermaphrodite… the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, who, though masculine in name, is always feminine or near-feminine in form, especially in the Far East, where he appears as Kwan-yin, or Kannon – the ‘goddess’ of mercy…. it is not uncommon to find ardhanari or ‘half-woman’ images of Shiva, in which the body is female on the left and male on the right.” Alan Watts The Two Hands of God, ‘The Cosmic Dance’
Hindu sages have long taught that the soul is genderless, but everything in creation results from the interplay of masculine and feminine energies, and everything is in fact birthed by shakti, the feminine power of the universe, including gender itself. Hinduism views the mind and body as the energy of Prakriti, the female spirit, and the soul as Purusha, the male aspect. Deep inside, we are all seen to be the same indivisible, indistinguishable, imperishable and eternal Brahman, who is extolled in the Vedas as the One without a second. Hindu teachings recognise that gender is not permanent, that we all incarnate over time as male, female or transgender due to karmic and cosmic reasons.
In mid-18th century Germany, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, a founder of the Protestant movement known as the Moravian Brotherhood, taught the single brothers that they were only provisionally men and that they would become sisters in the afterlife – Zinzendorf theorized that men were actually “maidens in temporary male housing.” His son, Christian Renatus, had gone so far as to declare all single brothers to be sisters. This eruption of queer, androgynous Christianity was short-lived however, and was denounced in 1750 by Zinzendorf’s son-in-law, Johannes de Watteville, an important Moravian leader.
There is a deep shift happening today in human consciousness. Parts of human nature that have been so long repressed are bursting forth:
“Transsexuality comes to us with all the power of a divine force who will not be denied. If we recognize it and accept it as a true vision of the self from the deepest part of the psyche, if we carry the Goddess with us …..then we may find it opens us to a life of spirituality and joy. If we try to deny or belittle it, or explain it away, it can destroy us.” Rachel Pollack, Archetypal Transsexuality, 1995
The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas contains the famous saying of Jesus that “… when you make the male and the female into a solitary one, so that the male is not male nor the female female… then you will enter the realm.” (Saying 22) Rachel Pollack’s statement above is an echo of this saying from the same Gospel, that: “When you give birth to the one within you, that one will save you. If you do not have that one within you, that one will kill you.” (Saying 70)
Also, “in the lost Gospel of the Egyptians, a Greek work mentioned in Patristic literature, Jesus reportedly says that seekers will enter the kingdom “when the two become one, and the male with the female is neither male nor female.”
“Paul too… recognized that in redemption “there is no longer male and female” (Galatians 3:28). Asexual admonitions of this kind warn that we need to move beyond gender categories in order to enter the kingdom. It is only when gender- based analogies of spirit are relinquished, and their shortcomings transcended, that the seeker will be able to marvel and reign overall.” From “Gender and gnosis: Making Mary male, making Jesus female,” by Lloyd D. Graham (2015) online at https://www.academia.edu/19327057/Gender_and_gnosis_Making_Mary_male_making_Jesus_female
We should be celebrating the awakening of the inner genders – especially the inner feminine waking up in MEN. Humans are not simply these bodies. We are the immortal, androgynous Self exploring and expanding in space and time. We are waking up to a queer multiverse of divine possibilities.
rainbow messenger 