At the London Queer Spirit Samhain Full Moon Drum Circle (24 Oct 2026) we remembered friends, lovers, family and tribe in spirit. Around 70 Radical Faeries, Queer Spirits and Rainbow Souls gathered in our enchanted south London community hall, just down the road from the bars and clubs of Vauxhall, where, since Winter Solstice 2012 this queer tribe has been meeting for seasonal and full moon ceremonies.
This year our Samhain Full Moon Ceremony was dedicated to two of our Radical Faerie kin – Wasp and Torch – who have recently departed their fleshly forms. We opened the circle by questioning the nature of death – embracing the possibility of multi-dimensional consciousness, calling the quarters to open the gates to spirit, and opening our hearts to our beloved dead by naming them, telling stories about them. Then we took a journey to the visit the ancestors, going deep within listening to the shamanic drums. After sharing our experiences during a short break we came back together to let the djembe drums speak, the rhythms and dancing building during a 90 minute dance with the dead.
Full Moons bring strong emotions, this one in Taurus being a time when the deepest, hardest feelings in us can come up for exposure and release. We have to move emotions through our body, through our voices or they will cause mental dis-ease leading to physical disease. Drumming and dancing together gives us an opportunity to honour, shift, express and release all kinds of feelings. Releasing the sadness, the anger, that inevitably build up in us over time, makes way for lighter, easier emotions to move into and through us, make space for spirit to get in. Drum Circle is a great spot every month for raising some collective queer joy as we dance between the worlds and a chance for a bit of therapeutic screaming when the world is driving you crazy.
WE CREATE A CIRCLE
WHERE ALL CAN SEE AND FEEL EACH OTHER
A CIRCLE WHICH CONNECTS ABOVE, BELOW, AROUND
AND OPENS US UP WITHIN.
Embracing the possibility that we are part of an infinite, eternal, multi-dimensional consciousness
embracing the possibility that death is a step not an end,
‘the beginning of another phase in our timeless creativity,’
we invite the Spirit to guide us home to Oneness:
Queer Beings break the binaries
Life-death is the ultimate binary,
the illusion keeping humanity in confusion.
I run this Circle because of my experience of AIDS in the mid 90s,
my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Spirit
which was an Accelerated Inter-Dimensional Shift,
and an Awakening Into Divine Sorcery.
Ever since I’ve been serving the Universal Mother,
casting circles, casting spells where Her presence can bless us.
She is calling her queer children home,
to become aware of our divine calling as her people –
the good pagans of the past reborn again –
Androgynes of Inanna, Gays of Gaia, Dykes of Diana:
liberating ourselves we liberate the planet
from the binaries blinding the human mind.
THE QUEEREST THING ABOUT DEATH
is perhaps there is no death.
TWO FLUTES PLAYING by Andrew Ramer, subtitled ‘a spiritual journeybook for gay men’, is an inspired work written by Andrew as he listened to the voices of gay ancestors in spirit during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. This was a time when our friends who passed on felt very close still to those of us living with AIDS in the body. AIDS brought a rekindling of ancient memories within some of us, which Two Flutes refers to:
…few if any will remember that for much of the Ice Ages, gay people often served as tribal midwives. Not midwives for those being born, but midwives for those who were dying. Some of the fear of gay people to this day is the lingering whiff of death and transformation unconsciously detected…
Life does not begin at birth or end at death. Life extends beyond body and time, into and out of a spaciousness like the most powerful of dreams. Words alone cannot describe it. Perhaps 3-D film might one day do it, reveal the fluid vastness that life is. But one aspect of life is creating a body to focus yourself in. To do this is holy, to do this is a gift. You live in many bodies, as a painter paints many canvasses. Death is not the destruction of the artist. Death is the beginning of another phase in your timeless creativity. Gayness is the coming together of certain strands of humanness. This particular arrangement, particular frequency, resonates well with certain functions in the human community. It is a nurturing frequency, a strong and caring one, that expresses itself in every possible way, yet excels at certain ones. To make art, to dance, to make beauty of body, food, home, all of these can be gifts of this energy. But working with those who are dying, working with death, is one of the skills that have been forgotten, not only by your community, but by the world itself…
Some people will not want to hear that life does not begin at birth or end at death. For many gay people, the sense of spirituality has been for so long denied that only the body, sex, beauty seems real. And it will be hard for some gay men to hear that there is more than that, that rises up from spirit and goes back to it again…
You as soul create many bodies to express yourself through, in different times, in different places, as female and male, as straight and gay. You are born many times and you die many times. Death is that part of the soul’s process of recreating itself. The work of gay midwives to the dying is not easy. But you can tap into the place where you have done it before. You can tap into your guides, you can tap into the source of love, which permeates the universe. Love binds all together. No one is separate from love, from spirit. And death is not a separation. It is only a change in frequency…
Some who are dying will find doors in consciousness opening. Some rejoice in that, some are frightened by it. Your being there to talk about the spiritual, about the presence of “unseen” guides and friends, friends who have died already, who are waiting to welcome them beyond death will be useful. Often those dying will be visited in visions and dreams by loved ones who have died. To some this is a joy, to others this sign of death approaching is a seal upon their sense of failure in their body-life. Comfort them. Hold them. Let them know that no life is wasted, that it is time to forgive themselves the seeming failures, time to rejoice in simply having lived, eaten, laughed, smelled a flower, even suffered. All that happens to us is what we draw to us to learn from. And remind them that they are not done, but in a certain sense, just beginning. Beginning another joyful phase in the aspects of their life that your culture prevents you from knowing. For life in and out of bodies is woven together, the seed of one eternal in the fullness of the other. Not one a place of grace, the other a fall, but each woven together in sacredness. Each floating in a vaster state of Oneness.
