Pip: Rainbow messenger is back, and today we’re going somewhere older than organized religion — which, depending on your week, might be exactly where you need to go.
Mara: shokti takes us deep into the history of queer sacred roles, from the temples of ancient Mesopotamia to the Dagara of West Africa, asking what it means to reclaim a spiritual identity that predates the forces that suppressed it.
Pip: Let’s start with the queer spiritual calling itself — and how far back it actually goes.
The Queer Spiritual Calling
Mara: The post opens a very long historical record: the claim that queer and gender-variant people have held sacred roles across cultures and centuries — and that what looks like marginalization is actually a story of deliberate erasure.
Pip: And the erasure has receipts. The post quotes Arthur Evans directly: “The Christian oppression of women and Gay people was no accident. Their freedom and high status in the old religion made them prime targets for the new religion, which was profoundly anti-sexual.”
Mara: That’s the spine of the argument. The suppression wasn’t incidental — it was structural. Queerness had to be destroyed because it was entangled with a rival cosmology.
Pip: So when we talk about religious homophobia, we’re not just talking about prejudice. We’re talking about a hostile takeover that needed a scapegoat, and found a very convenient one.
Mara: The post traces this across specific examples. In ancient Mesopotamia, from at least ten thousand BC, the goddess Ishtar was served by gay and transgender priest-priestesses — the Assinnu, Kurgarru, and Kulu’u — whose legends included rescuing the goddess from the underworld. The Old Testament’s Qedesha, translated as sodomites in the King James Bible, were almost certainly the same tradition seen through a hostile lens.
Pip: John Wycliffe’s medieval translation rendered Qedesha as “woman-ish men who committed all the abominations of the heathens.” Which is doing a lot of heavy lifting for what the post is describing as a priesthood.
Mara: The pattern repeats across continents. The Galli served Cybele in Rome. Two-Spirit shamans held sacred roles in dozens of Native American tribes — the Navaho nadle, the Oglala Winkte, the Zuni Ko’thlama. Sources from the Navaho as late as the nineteen-thirties held that without the nadle, the tribe would perish.
Mara: And the Dagara of West Africa, the post argues, never lost this knowledge. They call gay men gatekeepers and lesbian women witches — holders of vibrations that connect earth to spirit.
Pip: The post lands somewhere personal. It describes queer crisis — the mental illness, the suicide rates — not as a symptom of identity, but as a symptom of invisibility. Being unseen for what you actually are.
Mara: Andrew Harvey is quoted in the post on exactly this: “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.”
Mara: The post closes by grounding all of this in something present-tense: Queer Spirit Festival, which held its tenth anniversary in Devon in August 2026, attended by eight hundred people — a space, the post says, where the spirituality of LGBTQ-plus people is honored and explored.
Pip: Ten thousand years of sacred tradition, and we’re only just getting the festival circuit going. Better late than never — and the question of what comes next for that reclamation feels worth sitting with.
Pip: The thread running through all of this is the gap between what queer people have historically represented — spiritually, cosmologically — and what the modern world has allowed us to be.
Mara: That gap is the work. And it sounds like more people are noticing it.
