As Spring approaches and a UK General Election looms, the debased and immoral Tories continue their cultural war against so-called ‘gender ideology’, with the vitriol directed mainly at born males who embody a strong feminine energy – transgender, effeminate, epicene, androgyne, mollie, intermediate type, woman-ish man: there have always been terms, in societies across the world, for people who blend or transcend the gender binary. In traditional cultures in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia – and also ancient Europe- genderfluid people were seen as being born with special powers, and were even revered for the spiritual gifts they brought to the community. But for at least a couple of millennia there have also been those who could not tolerate, understand or accept the existence of such beings and sought to remove them from the world.
American author Donald Webster Cory wrote in 1957, “have not the homosexuals been the priests in some societies, the pariahs in other, and both at the same time in still others?”
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.”
Spiritual teachings the world over appreciate and tell us that life is a dance of polarities, one of which is the gender binary, manifesting as the dance of masculine and feminine in all things, in all beings. Instead of being one or the other, we can grow more rapidly and holistically as a person by embracing both aspects within ourselves. This is ancient wisdom teaching, which the modern scientific, materialist worldview ignores – despite the fact that science affirms that all humans start out with XX chromosomes in our mother’s womb, some of us develop the XY alignment, and a minority have a more complex chromosomic make up. Every man started out female – and a fully mature man would surely be one with his inner feminine deeply embraced and nurtured. The modern world has long been encouraging women to act like men – be independent, have a career etc, but is surprised when nature suddenly produces a lot more men who want to be more like women. But this dark attitude is nothing new:
The western world has been persecuting feminine men since the late Roman Empire. Until that time camp, colourful, flambouyant, sensual men had long been a feature not only of the social sphere – the word cinaedi drifts through centuries of Greek and Latin literature (quite simply cinaedi meant a sensual man who was attracted to other men, usually as the bottom) – but also very much of the spiritual world too, the territory of temples, festivals, dance, chanting, divination and – in the pagan culture – of sexual rites.
As historian Will Roscoe puts it:
“At the time of the birth of Christ, cults of men devoted to a goddess flourished throughout the broad region extending from the Mediterranean to south Asia. While galli were missionizing the Roman Empire, kalu, kurgarru, and assinnu continued to carry out ancient rites in the temples of Mesopotamia, and the third-gender predecessors of the hijra were clearly evident in lndia. To complete the picture we should also mention the megabyzoi, or eunuch priests of Artemis at Ephesus; the western Semitic qedesha, the male “temple prostitutes” known from the Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic texts of the late second millennium; and the keleb, priests of Astarte at Kition and elsewhere… These roles share the traits of devotion to a goddess, gender transgression and homosexuality, ecstatic ritual techniques (for healing, in the case of galli and Mesopotamian priests, and fertility, in the case of hijra), and actual (or symbolic] castration. Most, at, some point in their history, were based in temples and, therefore, part of the religious-economic administration of their respective city-states.”
The centuries-long, dark Christian obsession with persecuting same sex relationships began as an attack on the effeminate males working in temples and brothels: after his conversion to Christianity in the early 4th century, Roman Emperor Constantine soon undertook the destruction of the effeminate goddess priests of a temple (in modern Syria) described at the time by Eusebius as a place, “where men unworthy of the name forgot the dignity of their sex and propitiated the demon by the their effeminate conduct.” The Emperor ordered the army sent in, “that this building with its contents should be utterly destroyed.” Eusebius recorded that:
“inasmuch as the Egyptians, especially those of Alexandria, had been accustomed to honour their river through a priesthood composed of effeminate men, a further law was passed commanding the extermination of the whole class as vicious, that no one might thenceforward be found tainted with the like impurity.”
The persecution stepped up under Constantine’s successors. Roman senator Firmicus Maternus wrote a polemic called ‘The Error of the Pagan Religions’ in 346 which firmly associated pagan cults with sexual immorality and especially homosexuality. He was particularly fired up about the effeminate priests – who were regarded by the population as holy men – writing that those of a Carthaginian love goddess:
“can minister to her only when they have feminised their faces, rubbed smooth their skin, and disgraced their manly sex by donning women’s regalia. In their very temples we see scandalous performances, accompanied by the moaning of the throng: men letting themselves be handled as women, and flaunting with boastful ostentatiousness this ignominy of their impure and unchaste bodies…. Next, being thus divorced from the masculine, they get intoxicated with the music of flutes and invoke the goddess with an unholy spirit so they an ostensibly predict the future to fools.”
And from there it all began – the suppression of Goddess priesthoods, of sex-positive versions of Christianity, and of homosexuality – all of which of course went hand in hand with the suppression of women’s sexuality and self-hood, of which the witch trials were the ultimate manifestation of using FEAR to keep women subservient, as had been used against gay men since the 4th century.
Edward Carpenter wrote back in 1914:
“Since the Christian era these intermediate types have been much persecuted in some periods and places…that they might possibly fulfil a positive and useful function of any kind in society is an idea which seems hardly if ever to have been seriously considered… In pre-Christian times and among the early civilisations… the intermediate people and their corresponding sex-relationships played a distinct part in the life of the tribe or nation, and were openly acknowledged and recognised as part of the general polity.” From Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk
In 390, the start of a decade that saw the desecration and destruction of pagan temples by rabid Christians across the Empire, a law focussed on male brothels attacked “the poison of shameful effeminacy”. In 438 this was expanded to call for all who engaged in gay sex to die “in avenging flames in the sight of the people.” The Law Code of Byzantine emperor Justinian, issued in 534, blamed same sex relations for ‘famines, earthquakes and pestilence,’ establishing a legal climate regarding homosexuality that would influence Europe until the 20th century, and his violent actions in 528 CE against men who loved men established a climate of fear that is still around. The Justinian Code expanded an old law from the time of Augustus against adultery to include the death penalty for ‘illicit sex with males’ (stuprum cum masculis).
Trans or effeminate males were the first target of the persecution, but soon all men who loved men were under attack. Same sex relationships had been regarded as entirely natural in the ancient world – Aristotle recorded in 200 BCE that the Celtic peoples of northern Europe, along with other races, ‘openly approved’ the synousia, passionate love, between men. Greek philosopher Posidonius, 1st century BC, traveled into Gaul to investigate the truth of the stories told about the Celtic tribes, and put it very simply: “The Gaulish men prefer to have sex with each other.”
The first attacks were against the trans people of the ancient world – the genderbending, colourful and queer priest/esses of the Goddess temples. But soon men who loved men were the target. The suppression of trans and homosexuality gradually became one of the fundamentals that all Christian denominations could agree on. Political states made laws to enforce the prejudice. Then in the 19th century psychologists and scientists carried it into their fields, calling queer people sick, mentally ill etc – this has only recently stopped, and in fact, as we see in the culture wars today, it is an attitude that still lurks and causes harm in our materialist, post-religious world.
To turn to an ancient spiritual culture – 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 material 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.
The current Prime Minister of Britain is Hindu, yet, from his statements, clearly unaware of his own cultural wisdom. He ignorantly pushes his views that men are men and women and women, calling it ‘common sense’, urged on by other insufferable Conservative politicians such as Liz Truss.
One of India’s most prominent gurus, Mata Amritanandamayi, known as Amma, or the ‘hugging mother’ has said:
“Whether woman or man, one’s real humanity comes to light only when the feminine and masculine qualities within one are balanced.”
But this inner union is not what our modern materialist culture believes in, or prepares us for, instead the scientific mindset divides and separates us into groups by our differences, whereas a truly holistic culture celebrates diversity as the infinite expressive potential of unity. It’s up to those of who believe in it, who seek the union of spirituality and science, not the dominance of either one over the other, and who seek to heal and bring harmony to the world, to become the birthers of that holistic future. Through the inner union of the genders we become Creators, we give birth to our Divine Self.
If the Christians object, then point out to them that Jesus said this very thing in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas: “… 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 heaven.”
rainbow messenger 