Judith Grahn,Another Mother Tongue, 1982:
The tribal attitude said, and continues to say, that Gay people are especially empowered because we are able to identify with both sexes and can see into more than one world at once, having the capacity to see from more than one point of view at a time.
David Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, 1988:
The archaeological record suggests that shamanism dates back at least to the Upper Paleolithic period… Men wearing animal skins appear in cave paintings in Spain and France beginning about 35,000 years ago, and later in Scandinavian and North African rock carvings. These figures are usually interpreted as shamans engaged in sympathetic hunting or to increase magic, though it is also possible that they represent the “spirit of the animals.” Rock carvings of men with erections (or conceivably wearing penis sheaths) suggest that Stone Age dances or rituals may have had a sexual component.
Edward Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas 1906:
Homosexual practices are, or have been, very prominent among the peoples in the neighbourhood of the Behring Sea… Dr Bogoras gives the following account of a … practice prevalent among the Chukchi: “It happens frequently that, under a supernatural influence of one of their shamans, or priests, a Chukchi lad at sixteen years of age will suddenly relinquish his sex and imagine himself to be a woman. He adopts a woman’s sex and imagine himself to be a woman. He adopts a woman’s attire, lets his hair grow, and devotes himself altogether to female occupation. Furthermore, this disowner of his sex takes a husband into the Yurt and does all the work which is usually incumbent on the wife… These abnormal changes of sex imply the most abject immorality in the community, and appear to be strongly encouraged by the shamans who interpret such cases as an injunction of their individual deity.
The change of sex was usually accompanied by future shamanship; indeed nearly all shamans were former delinquents of their sex. Among the Chukchi male shamans who are clothed in woman’s attire and are believed to be transformed physically into woman are still quite common; and traces of the change of a shaman’s sex into that of a woman may be found among many other Siberian tribes….
M.A. Czaplicka, Shamanism in Siberia, 1914:
Taking into account the present prominent position of female shamans among many Siberian tribes and their place in traditions, together with certain feminine attributes of the male shaman (such as dress, habits, privileges) and certain linguistic similarities between the names for male and female shamans, many scientists (Troshchanski, Bogoras, Stadling) have been led to express the opinion that in former days, only female shamans existed, and that the male. shaman is a later development which has to some extent supplanted them.
Effeminate sorcerers and priests are [also] found among the Sea-Dyak of Borneo (Capt. Brooke, Schwaner); the Bugis of South Celebes (Capt. Mundy); Patagonians of South America (Falkner); the Aleutians, and many Indian tribes of North America (Dall, Langsdorff, Powers, and Bancroft) …Similar changes of sex were observed by Dr. Karsch (Uranismus oder Päderastie mid Tribadie bei den Naturvölkern, 1901) all over the American continent from Alaska to Patagonia.
Thomas Falkner, in his ‘Description of Patagonia’ (1775), said that among the south Americans:
The wizards are of both sexes. The male wizards are obliged (as it were) to leave their sex, and to dress themselves in female apparel, and are not permitted to marry, though the female ones or witches may. They are generally chosen for this office when they are children, and a preference is always shown to those who at that early time of life discover an effeminate disposition. They are clothed very early in female attire, and presented with the drum and rattles belonging to the profession they are to follow.
Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1890:
In the volume ‘Adonis, Attis, Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion’ Frazer attributed the adoption by south Pacific island priests of female attire to the fact that:
…it often happens that a goddess chooses a man, not a woman, for her minister and inspired mouthpiece. When that is so, the favoured man is thenceforth regarded and treated as a woman…
These unsexed creatures often, perhaps generally, profess the arts of sorcery and healing, they communicate with spirits and are regarded sometimes with awe and sometimes with contempt, as beings of a higher or lower order than common folk.
19th century British explorer Richard Francis Burton found homosexual and cross-dressing practices common around world, and recorded they had “been adopted by the priestly castes from Mesopotamia to Peru.”
In 1724 Jesuit Father Joseph-Francois Lafitau published, in French, a massive work named ‘The Customs of American Savages Compared to the Earliest Times’ in which he drew comparison between the native shamans and the traditions of the ancient Mediterranean world:
…among the Illinois, among the Sioux, in Louisiana, in Florida, and in Yucatan, there are young men who adopt the garb of women, and keep it all their lives. They believe they are honored by debasing themselves to all of women’s occupations; they never marry, they participate in all religious ceremonies, and this profession of an extraordinary life causes them to be regarded as people of a higher order, and above the common man. Would these not be the same peoples as the Asiatic adorers of Cybele, or the Orientals of whom Julius Fermicus speaks, who consecrated priests dressed as women to the Goddess of Phrygia or to Venus Urania, who had an effeminate appearance, painted their faces, and hid their true sex under garments borrowed from the sex whom they wished to counterfeit?
For this queer shamanic phenomenon was once common in Europe too:
2nd century Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus wrote that: “The Mother of the Gods also admits effeminates, and the Goddess would not judge so, if by nature unmanliness were a trivial thing.”
Historian Will Roscoe:
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.
Were these ancient priests gay or transgender? Where does the line lie? Masculine men who were attracted to other men could blend into regular society, or join the army, effeminate men went to the temple to serve alongside women and androgynes:
In 1914 English philosopher Edward Carpenter wrote:
The fact is well known, (sic! If it was well known then what happened to that knowledge?) of course, that in the temples and cults of antiquity and of primitive races it has been a widespread practice to educate and cultivate certain youths in an effeminate manner, and that these youths in general become the priests or medicine-men of the tribe; but this fact has hardly been taken seriously, as indicating any necessary connection between the two functions, or any relation in general between homosexuality and psychic powers.
Andrew Harvey, Gay Mystics, 1997:
Many shamans were and are homosexual; many of the worshipers of the Goddess under her various names and in her various cults all over the world – from the Mediterranean to the Near East to the Celtic parts of northern Europe – openly avowed their homosexuality and were accepted and even specially revered as priests, oracles, healers, and diviners. Homosexuals, far from being rejected, were seen as sacred – people who, by virtue of a mysterious fusion of feminine and masculine traits, participated with particular intensity in the life of the Source. The Source of Godhead is, after all, both masculine and feminine, and exists in a unity that includes but transcends both. The homosexual was thought to mirror this unity and its enigmatic fertility and power in a special way. The tribe or culture gave to him or her specific duties that were highly important and sacred, acknowledging this intimacy with divine truth and the clairvoyant help it could bring to the whole society.
Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors, 1996, highlighted the presence of those who crossed sex and gender boundaries throughout history:
She wrote that she … discovered abundant evidence of male-to-female transsexual women priestesses who played an important role in the worship of the Great Mother… The Great Mother was emblematic of pre-class communalism… While it’s impossible today to interpret precisely how people who lived millennia ago viewed this goddess, Roman historian Plutarch described the Great Mother as an intersexual (hermaphroditic) deity in whom the sexes had not yet been split… Many Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and near Eastern goddesses were served by transsexual priestesses, including the Syrian Astarte and Dea Syria at Hierapolis, Artemis, Atargatis, Ashtoreth or Ishtar, Hecate at Laguire, and Artemis (Diana) at Ephesus.
Raven Kaldera, Hermaphrodeities, 2002:
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.
rainbow messenger 