Pip: Rainbow messenger, where the history is long, the laws are older, and the injustice has been hiding in plain sight for about sixteen centuries.
Mara: Today we’re following shokti through two stretches of that history — how colonial-era laws exported homophobia around the world, and how the Christian persecution of queer people built the legal and moral scaffolding those laws stood on.
Pip: So: empire, church, and a very long paper trail of harm. Let’s start with the colonial roots of anti-queer laws.
How Empire Exported Homophobia
Mara: The central claim here is stark — laws criminalizing homosexuality and transgender expression weren’t organic developments in the countries that still enforce them. They were imported, by force, during European colonial expansion, and many have outlasted the empires that imposed them.
Pip: The post puts a number on it that’s hard to shake off: of the sixty-nine countries that still criminalize homosexuality today, thirty-eight were once under British rule.
Mara: And the mechanism is specific. The Indian Penal Code’s Article 377, criminalizing “sexual acts against the order of nature,” became the template. It was copied into legal systems across Asia and Africa — Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia all carry versions of it today.
Pip: The Queensland Penal Code did similar work in the Pacific and then traveled to Nigeria in 1916, then Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania. One document, drafted in one colony, still shaping lives on two continents.
Mara: The post is direct about why this matters beyond the statute books: “Wherever anti-gay laws exist, even when these laws are used on rare occasions, their very existence creates a criminal class of queer people, who are consequently targeted for violence, harassment and discrimination because of their criminal status.”
Pip: Criminal status as a tool — not primarily for prosecution, but for stigma. The 1885 Labouchere Amendment was called the Blackmailers Charter almost immediately after it passed.
Mara: Laws that punish love — a history the second post traces in detail — shows this pattern goes back further than empire. The colonial exporters were themselves working from centuries of accumulated European law, much of it theologically motivated.
Pip: Which brings us to where that theology came from, and what it did when it had state power behind it.
Sixteen Centuries of Church-Backed Persecution
Mara: The through-line across both posts in this segment is that Christian persecution of queer people wasn’t incidental — it was structural, beginning the moment the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion.
Pip: And the first targets weren’t gay men in the modern sense — they were the gender-fluid priests of pagan goddess temples, whose existence the new Christian order found theologically intolerable.
Mara: The post on sixteen hundred years of Christian persecution quotes historian John Malalas on what Emperor Justinian’s crackdown looked like in practice: “Alexander, on the other hand, had his male organ cut off, and was placed in a litter and exposed as a spectacle to the people. Shortly after, the emperor passed a law that the crime of sex with males should be punished by castration. And at that time many androkoitai were seized and their genitals were cut off. And a great fear ensued among those who suffered from the evil desire for males.”
Pip: That fear was the point. Procopius, Justinian’s own court historian, noted the prosecutions were used against political opponents and the wealthy — paiderastias as a charge of convenience.
Mara: The post traces how that legal climate traveled — through medieval Europe, through the Spanish Inquisition, through burnings in Venice, Florence, France, and the Netherlands. Louis Crompton estimates around a hundred executions in Spain’s Inquisition alone between 1570 and 1630, with a similar count from secular courts.
Pip: And Scotland, for the record, was the last country in Europe to abolish the death penalty for gay sex — 1889, which is not a medieval date.
Mara: The closing argument in both posts is the same: this wasn’t theology protecting morality. Plato identified it in the fourth century BCE — suppression of same-sex love has always served power, not virtue.
Pip: Sixteen centuries of church law, then exported by empire — the history is long, but the thread is straight.
Mara: And it’s still live. Several Caribbean nations decriminalized same-sex intimacy only between 2022 and 2025. The next episode will find us somewhere further along that thread.
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 Activated 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.
The French and the British — especially the British — in the age of European imperial expansion imposed laws against homosexuality and transgender expression that are still causing injustice and suffering around the world today. These laws were attempts to impose European morality on the cultures the imperialists were subduing, as well as attempts to control the sex lives of the colonists.
Wherever anti-gay laws exist, even when these laws are used on rare occasions, their very existence creates a criminal class of queer people, who are consequently targeted for violence, harassment and discrimination because of their criminal status.
Although consensual sexual acts between men were decriminalised in France in 1791, the French imposed sodomy laws on some of its colonies as a means of social control — with versions of these still surviving, and even being strengthened after independence, eg in Cameroon and Senegal.
(Several former French colonies passed anti-homosexuality laws after gaining independence, including Algeria, Mauritania and Chad.)
In England, where sodomy had been a criminal offence since Henry VIII’s Buggery Act of 1533, attitudes hardened in the early 19th century — and although the death penalty was finally removed in 1861, long terms of imprisonment and hard labour remained as punishments. This came the year after the British had updated the Indian Penal Code, article 377 of which criminalised “sexual acts against the order of nature.” The Code became the model for British legal systems in Asian and African colonies — Article 377 is still a law in India (4,690 cases of violations were prosecuted between 2014 and 2016), but a Supreme Court decision in 2018 limited the act to exclude consensual private sexual acts between consenting adults. The code is still in force in former Asian British colonies Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Malaysia. In Africa, 13 former British colonies still have laws against the LGBTQ+ community — and of the 69 countries in the world that still criminalise homosexuality, 38 were once under British rule. (source: migrantwatch.org)
In India, authorities amended the Penal Code in 1897 to include ‘eunuchs’ as a designated group. The word was “deemed to include all members of the male sex who admit themselves, or upon medical inspection clearly appear, to be impotent.” In practice this meant India’s third-gender community, the hijra, could be arrested without warrant and imprisoned for up to two years if they simply appeared “dressed or ornamented like a woman in a public street … or… dances or plays music or takes part in any public exhibition, in a public street.” The law denied eunuchs legal personhood, including the rights to draw up a will or to adopt children, and authorities had to keep a register of all eunuchs “reasonably suspected” of “committing offences under Section 377.”
***
Empire-building was at first a largely male activity and attitudes to sexuality in the colonies were for a long time more liberal than at home — to such an extent that some places even became known for a while as havens for sodomites. There were very few white women around in the Caribbean colonies during the 17th century — a tabulation of Barbados residents made in 1635 indicates 94% were male. Richard Ligon chronicled Barbados life in the 1640s, saying of the men there: “So frank, so loving, and so good natur’d were these Gentlemen one to another; and to express their affections yet higher, they had particular names one to another, as, Neighbour, Friend, Brother, Sister: So I perceived nothing wanting, that might make up a firm and lasting friendship amongst them.” Writing from Antigua in 1655, Madam Margaret Heathcote put it bluntly: “… they all be a company of sodomites that live here.” Sometime between 1678 and 1680, Francis Dilly was executed in Jamaica by order of the Governor for being the ringleader of a group of ‘sodomites’ but the other three men implicated were pardoned.
In the early 18th century, when the gender balance had been rectified, Barbadian official Thomas Walduck still complained about homosexual conduct in the Caribbean:
“All Sodom’s Sins are Centered in thy heart
Death is thy look and Death in every part
Oh! Glorious Isle in Vilany Excell
Sins to the Height — thy fate is Hell.”
(source: Burg, B. R. (1983) Sodomy and the Perception of Evil: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean)
And hell would eventually be delivered — via the exported British laws, which became even more oppressive to homosexual men after 1885 when the Labouchere Amendment, in the Criminal Law Amendment Act, proscribed two years at hard labour for, “Any male person who in public or private commits or is a party to the commission of or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person.” Gross indecency was a broad offence designed to include virtually all kinds of non-penetrative sexual acts between two men, whereas previous laws had focused on the act of anal intercourse. The Act declared itself to be aimed at “the Protection of Women and Girls,” (raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 years), but became the weapon most used against gay men in Britain through most of the 20th century — and its impact spread and is still being felt around the world.
The crime of gross indecency appeared in the Sudanese Penal Code in 1899, which listed seven types of “vagabonds,” including the “catamite,” defined as a “any male person who 1) dresses or is attired in the fashion of a woman in a public place or 2) practises sodomy as a means of livelihood or as a profession.” A person’s clothing became criminal in itself and potentially the sign of a criminal sexual history. One legal commentator clarified that “catamite” meant a “habitual” practitioner of sodomy, adding that “it is not necessary to prove when and where any individual act of this nature occurred.” Beyond the person’s appearance, no evidence was needed for his (or her) arrest and jailing.
Also in 1899, in Australia, the Queensland Penal Code declared that anyone who “has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature … {or} permits a male person to have carnal knowledge of him or her against the order of nature, is guilty of a felony and is liable to imprisonment for fourteen years.” This made it crystal clear that both the top and bottom were at fault. This code went on to be a major influence in African law. Legal amendments in 1938 introduced the gross indecency provision in 1938 in Singapore and Malaysia. Some governments dropped the reference to males, making the code applicable to women too.
The Queensland Penal Code was adopted in Papua New Guinea in 1904, Nigeria in 1916 then copied in East Africa, in modern Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
In Asia and the Pacific, colonies and countries that inherited versions of that British law were: Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Fiji, Hong Kong, India, Kiribati, Malaysia, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Myanmar (Burma), Nauru, New Zealand, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Western Samoa.
In Africa, countries that inherited versions were: Botswana, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Nigeria, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Swaziland, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe
In the Caribbean, when independence came to Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago in 1961 the existing homophobic colonial laws were kept intact, resulting in a difficult and dangerous situation for queer Jamaicans to this day. Several Caribbean countries — including Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, St. Kitts & Nevis, and St. Lucia — have recently decriminalized same-sex intimacy (2022–2025), but Jamaica and Guyana are among those with laws still in place.
***
Wherever anti-gay laws exist, even when these laws are used on rare occasions, their very existence creates a criminal class of queer people, who are consequently targeted for violence, harassment and discrimination because of their criminal status. The 1885 Labouchere Amendment was soon being called the ‘Blackmailers Charter’ in the British newspapers, and so it proved over the next 80 years. These laws are used by authoritarian governments to create scapegoats in society, direct the anger of the populace away from themselves and onto a truly vulnerable, defenceless section of society. Plato identified this behaviour in the 4th century BCE, when one of the diners in the Symposium observes that it does not suit tyrannical powers to encourage love between men because of the bonds of trust that love produces.
“Sodomy laws exist to brand gay men and lesbians as criminals. Social ordering necessitates the criminalization of sodomy, thereby creating a hierarchy that values heterosexuality over, and often to the exclusion of, homosexuality. This symbolic effect of sodomy laws is not dependent on their enforcement. Even though very few men and virtually no women ever suffer the full range of criminal sanctions permitted under state sodomy laws, these statutes impose the stigma of criminality upon same-sex eroticism”. Leslie, C. R. (2000) ‘Creating criminals: the injuries inflicted by unenforced sodomy laws’, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 35.
Pip: Rainbow messenger is back, and this time the topic is nothing less than the nature of consciousness itself — no pressure.
Mara: shokti has been digging into the long history of cosmic consciousness — what it means, who has mapped it, and why the queer spiritual tradition keeps showing up at the center of that map.
Pip: Right — mystics, poets, radical faeries, and at least one Jesuit paleontologist. The usual crowd.
Mara: Let’s start with the call itself — what cosmic consciousness actually is, and why so many voices across so many centuries keep pointing toward the same thing.
The Call of Cosmic Consciousness
Pip: The post opens with a question that sounds simple but keeps expanding: what is cosmic consciousness, and why do so many traditions — Hindu, Christian, pagan, queer — keep arriving at the same description of it?
Mara: Yogananda sets the frame at the very top: “Just as a river has a source, so the river of consciousness has a source. It descends from Cosmic Consciousness, the consciousness of God that is beyond all creation.”
Pip: So the claim is not that cosmic consciousness is a rare achievement — it is the origin point. The river metaphor matters: we are already downstream from it.
Mara: Arthur Evans, writing in Lady Moon Rising, builds on that. He describes cosmic consciousness as expanding “more and more into the larger world as we ourselves become more interconnected,” and calls the collective work of cultivating it the Great Reconnect — a process he ties directly to the loss of meaning he sees as a root cause of modern dis-ease.
Pip: Evans was the author of Witchcraft and the Gay Counter Culture in 1978, so he is not exactly a disinterested party on the question of who gets to lead this reconnection.
Mara: Richard Maurice Bucke, writing in 1905, gave the framework its clearest historical shape. He described three stages: simple consciousness in animals, self-consciousness in most humans, and then cosmic consciousness — a mystical state he considered the next stage of human evolution, bringing “a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness… a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life.”
Pip: Bucke credited Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a key that helped open his own mind to that experience. Which is a remarkable thing to say about a poetry collection.
Mara: Whitman’s vision was explicitly non-dual — “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” — and he saw love between men as a political and spiritual force, writing in Democratic Vistas of “threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown.”
Pip: Edward Carpenter took that thread and ran with it. He left Cambridge, moved to a smallholding near Sheffield with his partner George Merrill, and wrote his own mystical poetry sequence, Towards Democracy, while also arguing in Love’s Coming of Age that sexual liberation and spiritual evolution were the same project.
Mara: Carpenter’s letter to Bucke puts it directly: “may not the whole of human consciousness gradually lift itself from a mere local and temporary consciousness to a divine and universal?” And in his 1913 work Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folks, he connects gender-blended consciousness specifically to “that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness and which may also be termed divination.”
Pip: John Addington Symonds had his own glimpse — under chloroform, of all things — describing his soul becoming “aware of God… streaming in like light,” with “my whole consciousness seemed brought into one point of absolute conviction.”
Mara:The post then moves into the twentieth century, tracking how the same vision surfaces in lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow, whose love for women became, in her words, a portal to “the Goddess, Mystery, fecund Emptiness / From which all fullness comes / And universes flower.” Spiritual feminists including Starhawk, Zsuzsanna Budapest, and Marion Woodman extended the argument — that a shift to recognizing interconnectedness is inseparable from environmental and social justice.
Pip: And then the Radical Faeries arrive, which is where gay men formally organized around the same intuition. Harry Hay’s subject-SUBJECT consciousness — seeing others not as objects but as versions of yourself — is described here as “cosmic consciousness in action.”
Mara: Judy Grahn, Teilhard de Chardin, Aurobindo, Yogananda at length, Stanislav Grof, Alan Watts, Robert Monroe — the post assembles a genuinely wide coalition of witnesses. Grof’s formulation is striking: “each of us is essentially identical with the entire field of space-time and ultimately with the cosmic creative energy itself.”
Pip: The post closes with Carpenter again — “So thin a veil divides / Us from such joy, past words.” Which, after that much evidence, starts to feel less like poetry and more like a status update.
Mara: The throughline across all of it is that cosmic consciousness is not a destination reserved for the spiritually advanced — it is described, repeatedly and across traditions, as our fundamental nature already waiting to be recognized.
Pip: What stays with me is how consistent the description is — mystics separated by centuries and continents keep arriving at the same words: unity, interconnection, joy, the dissolution of the isolated self.
Mara: And how consistently the queer and gender-fluid figures show up at the center of that tradition — not as a footnote but as, in Judy Grahn’s phrase, mediators between worlds.
Excerpt from ‘The female experience and the nature of the divine’ by Judith Ochshorn, 1981
What seems to have been the case in the ancient Near East, then, for most of the period from the third to the first millennium, is that both women and men performed sacred sexual rites in the service of female and male deities and, once again, the sex of the priest or participant was not a determining ground for inclusion or exclusion from these rites. While the purpose of these sexual rites apparently moved from the sacred to the profane with the passage of time, and perhaps especially so by sometime in the first millennium, attitudes toward sexuality in the earlier millennia appear to have been far more open, less judgmental, and different from our own. In most instances, female sexuality was not regarded with fear or ambivalence but was seen as an integral part of sacred rituals and therefore important to community life. Hierodules either represented goddesses in their sexual aspect or were “brides” of gods, and apparently monogamy and motherhood were not particularly linked with the roles of women in cult. There was no denigration of either sex involved in sacred rites on the basis of their biological functions, and the consequences of sexuality were often viewed as divinely inspired and beneficial to the community.
In many parts of the ancient Near East from the third to the first millennium, priestesses and female devotees of Ishtar, or her counterparts Kybele, Asherah, Aphrodite, or Astarte, lived in and around temples devoted to these divinities. Although they have sometimes since been described as “harlots” or “ritual prostitutes,” they were known in their own times and places, especially in the carlier years of this period, as quadishtu, “holy women,” or ishtaritu, “women of Ishtar”.
They engaged in sacred rites that often included a free and active sexual life, in celebration of the active sexual aspect of the goddess they served, who was seen by people of those times as the source of fertility and abundance for the community. They were the hierodules of the temple just as Inanna was the hierodule of Heaven. And as representatives of the goddesses, the chief priestesses of Inanna/Ishtar participated in the Sacred Marriage rites, commemorated in rapturous poetry and theology for two thousand years.
In Mesopotamia there were several classes of priestesses, but there is only limited information about a number of their functions. It appears that some of these sexually active priestesses could marry, but few were permitted to bear children to their own husbands, so they sometimes provided the latter with substitutes for this purpose. When priestesses did bear children they evidently retained them. That the carly status of these quadishtu was high, and that the sacred sexual rites, which involved having intercourse with men outside of marriage, were indeed considered sacred, are attested by the references to these priestesses as “the sacred ones,” “the pure ones,” “the holy ones.” In Babylonia and Assyria, the active sexuality of the priestesses attached to Ishtar’s temples in many cities was recognized as part of the goddess’s religious rites.
From about 1910 to 1840, and then from about 1813 to 1781 B.C.E., Assyrian merchants penetrated Asia Minor. The region was then divided into small city-states, each of them ruled by a princess or prince whose subjects were Hittites, Luwians, Hurrians, and Semitic Amorites. In many aristocratic families from this area, at least one daughter would be dedicated to the service of the god Ashur, or to one or another of the female or male protective deities, as gubbatum or quadishtum, the holy women of Ishtar. The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (ca.1700 B.C.E.) mentioned various classes of women connected with the temples, of whom the most exalted in rank was the entum, or high priestess and “bride” of the male deity. Some of them were the daughters and sisters of kings. Another numerous class of priestesses from upper-class families, the naditum, were simultaneously regarded as the wives of the reigning male deities and the hierodules of the temple, and they also were prominent in local civil and economic life.
In addition to these upper-class women who were votaries of the tutelar goddess and practitioners of her sacred sexual rites, there were still other groups of temple women mentioned in the Code, such as the sikirtum or kulmasitum. Though their specific duties are obscure, it seems fairly clear that they were also part of the general class of hierodules. And the sanctity of the sexual rites practiced by both the priestesses and the lay votaries of the goddess was widely acknowledged. Hierodules frequented the Phoenician temples of Astarte, the Ashtoreth of the Old Testament. Ritual sexual practices played an important part in Semitic religious ceremonies, and it was not uncommon for them to occur in places like threshing-floors, associated with the earth’s fertility. But gradually, by the first millennium, the holiness of sexual acts performed in and near the temples gave way to profane prostitution.
What may be less frequently realized is that there were male counterparts to these “holy women” who also practiced the sacred sexual rites of the great goddesses. For example, men as well as women were hierodules of some of the same temples of Ishtar in Babylonia. The fertility-cult of Canaan had its full complement of “ritual prostitutes” of both sexes, quedesim and quedesoth. By the mid-Assyrian period, and under Greco-Roman rule, Near Eastern temples employed thousands of hierodules of both sexes. And while Josiah ruled over the Hebrews (ca.639-609 B.C.E.), he destroyed the quarters of the qedeshim, the “male cult prostitutes” who were housed in the Temple of Jerusalem, in fact in the very part of the temple where women wove clothing for Asherah, the mother-goddess (2 Kings 23:7).
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.
Pip: Rainbow Messenger, where the planets don’t just go retrograde — they go mythologically retrograde, with footnotes.
Mara: shokti has been digging into some deep territory this episode — ancient myth, sacred queerness, and what a Mesopotamian goddess’s journey through the underworld might still mean for queer people today.
Pip: History, cosmology, and a rescue mission five thousand years in the making. Let’s start with the queer story hiding inside the Venus retrograde.
The Queer Story in the Venus Retrograde
Mara: Right now Venus is in retrograde in Scorpio, and most astrologers are connecting that to the ancient myth of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld — but the post argues the rescue at the heart of that myth is being almost entirely ignored.
Pip: And the rescue is the whole point, because it was carried out by someone the ancient world couldn’t quite categorize.
Mara: Exactly. The god Enki, unable to send any man or woman into the Underworld, created a being described this way — “He fashioned the dirt into a kurgarra, a creature neither male nor female.”
Pip: A gender-variant being, immune to Ereshkigal’s enchantment, walks into the one place no one else could go. That’s not a footnote to the myth — that’s the plot.
Mara: The post draws on Vern Bullough’s Sexual Variance in Society and History, which records the curse Ereshkigal placed on the rescuer Asushunamir — “The food of the city’s gutters shall be thy food, The sewers of the city shall be thy drink. The shadow of the wall shall be thy station.”
Pip: Five thousand years old, and it still reads like a recognizable social script.
Mara: That’s precisely the tension the post sits with. The curse reflects millennia of prejudice, but the deeper argument is that gender-variant priest/esses became sacred servants across ancient Goddess temples — not despite their queerness, but because of it. Inanna, Aphrodite, Cybele, Isis — all served by women and gender-variant beings.
Mara: Randy P. Conner’s Blossom of Bone, quoted at length, documents the assinnu, kurgarru, and kalu priests of Inanna as singers, magicians, ritual actors, and composers — figures who held respected, functional roles in ancient worship.
Pip: Sacred drag performers with a cuneiform discography. The continuity with queer artistic and spiritual vocations today is not subtle.
Mara: The post closes with a poem by Enheduanna — the earliest known named author in literary history, writing in the 23rd century BCE — whose hymn to Inanna includes the line “To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna.” Gender variance isn’t incidental to the mythology; it’s attributed directly to the Goddess’s power.
Pip: And the argument lands somewhere genuinely forward-looking — that reclaiming this history isn’t nostalgia, it’s a rescue operation for the present.
Mara: The Goddess, the post suggests, is once more trapped in the Underworld, her teachings invisible to mainstream culture. The invitation is for queer people to recognize themselves in the myth and act accordingly.
Pip: Ancient astrology, sacred androgyny, and a five-thousand-year-old job listing. That’s the territory — and it’s worth sitting with.
Mara: What stays with me is how old the connection is — between queerness, spiritual vocation, and the divine feminine. That’s not a modern invention.
Pip: It’s a lineage. And apparently one that comes with a curse, a counter-blessing, and a very long memory.
For many centuries before the ‘morning/evening star’ became named after the Roman Goddess Venus, our closest planetary neighbour was called Inanna, the ancient Goddess of the lands of Mesopotamia. Known as the Queen of Heaven, Inanna’s priests were well known for their queerness and celebrated for rescuing the Goddess from her imprisonment in the Underworld.
Venus/Inanna, in retrograde motion in the deeply transformational sign of Scorpio since October 13th 2026, disappears below the western horizon around October 19th, and will emerge in the east as the morning star around October 29th. Many astrologers across the Internet are making the connection between this and the ancient myth of Inanna’s entrapment in the Underworld, but I’m seeing almost NONE of them talking about how the Goddess was actually rescued – one of the most powerful queer stories of (the many) queer myths of the ancient world.
Every two years the planet Venus/Inanna descends below the horizon in the west, emerging 10 days later as the ‘morning star’ in the east. Many legends around the world reflect this journey, including the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl – their god identified with Venus – who throws himself into a fire, and after days in the underworld, his heart rises again as the morning star. From the empires of Mesopotamia, the ancient myth of Inanna’s time in the Underworld describes how she became trapped by her dark sister Ereshkigel, and her absence causing climate chaos across the Earth. No man nor woman could enter the Underworld so the god Enki created a being ‘neither male nor female’, who undertook a rescue. Enchanted by the beautiful androgynous epicene, Ereshkigel gets drunk and offers them anything they want – so the rescuer asks for the water of life, which, when the dark sister falls asleep, they use to release Inanna from her chains and bring her back to the upper world.
“…the creation of the epicene appears in an early Babylonian story recounting the descent of Ishtar (or Inanna) into the nether world. The story tells how Ishtar was rescued from her sister Ereskigal, queen of the underworld, by Asushunamir (Asushu-Namir), whose sexless or effeminate nature made him immune to the “great enchantment” of Queen Ereskigal. Ereskigal thereupon cursed him with a fate,
“not to be forgotten through eternity.
The food of the city’s gutters shall be thy food, The sewers of the city shall be thy drink.
The shadow of the wall shall be thy station, The threshold shall be thy habitation, The besotted and thirsty shall smite thy cheek.”Vern Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, 1976.
While this myth might be seen as reflecting the prejudice that developed against queer people during the millennia since this story was told, it also points to the reason that gender-variant, ‘queer’ priest/esses became the sacred servants of the Goddess throughout the temples of the ancient world (not only Inanna, but Aphrodite, Cybele, Isis, Hecate, Demeter, Ashtoreth – all Goddesses were served in their temples by both women and queer, gender-variant beings) – and even to a liberated queer future that could arrive when queer people rediscover and reclaim their innate connection to the spiritual realms, particularly to the divine feminine. In the modern world the Goddess is once more trapped in the Underworld, and despite the emergence of a Goddess movement in recent decades, her liberating, peace-bringing, teachings, her reality, are still invisible to the mainstream culture. I think it is the job of the queers to rescue her from the dark depths again. This time we will not end up cursed, we will instead be free.
“When Ishtar learned of the curse placed upon the man-woman, She wept and spoke so that no one might hear, “The power of Ereshkigal is great. No one dares defy Her. But I may soften Her curse upon you. For many ages you will suffer. Those who are like you, lovers of men, kin, my sacred women, shall be strangers in their homes. Their families will keep them in the shadows and will leave them nothing. The drunken shall smite their faces, and the mighty shall imprison them.
“But if you will remember Me, how you were born from the light of the stars to save Me from death to rid the earth of winter, I shall harbor you and your kind. You shall be My children, and I shall make you my priests. I shall give you the gift of prophecy, the wisdom of the earth and moon. You shall banish illness from My children, as you have stolen Me from the clutches of Ereshkigal.
“And when you robe yourselves in My robes I shall dance in your feet and sing in your throats, and no one shall be able to resist your enchantments.
“When the earthen jug is brought forth from the 7 gates, lions shall leap in the deserts and you shall be freed from the spell of Ereshkigal. Once more you shall be called Asushunamir. Being clothed in light. Your kind shall be called Those Whose Faces Are Brilliant. Those Who Have Come to Renew the Light, the blessed ones of Ishtar.”
[Excerpt from an adaptation of the Inanna myth by Storm Faerywolf & Claudia Lorie made from the cuneiform translations interpreted in Blossom of Bone by Randy Connor, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Kramer, and The Greatness that was Babylon by H.W.F. Saggs.]
More on the sacred queer servants of Inanna –
From Blossom of Bone, by Randy P Conner, 1993:
“Inanna/Ishtar… was served by gender-variant male priests who were divided into several groups, including the assinnu, kurgarru, kulu’u, and kalu[m]… In later times, they all may have been generally referred to as kalbu, a Babylonian term for a servant of the Goddess. The term kalbu is related to the Semitic kalebh, which may signify either a dog or a gender-variant person who serves the Goddess. As a faithful companion, the dog was a common symbol for the male worshiper of the Goddess, and the Sumerian goddess Gula was pictured accompanied by a dog. Male priests of the Goddess were also generally referred to as sal-zikrum, “women-men.” As such, they were considered as being essentially different from other men, their collective identity a gift of the gods…
“Evidence suggests that the gender-variant priests of Inanna dressed in a combination of feminine, masculine, and sacred garments. They also let their hair grow long and wore colorful necklaces. A hymn to Inanna indicates that they may have worn a bifurcated costume, with masculine articles making up the left side of the costume and feminine articles the right. The priestesses of Inanna apparently wore a complementary costume, with the masculine and feminine articles reversed. What a spectacle of androgyny this must have seemed to the Mesopotamian audience of the third millennium B.C.E.! In terms of gender variance, certain texts indicate that at least some of the priests may have been eunuchs.
“Gender-variant priests, like priestesses, were considered the mortal representatives of the Goddess. The priests were also seen as human reflections of certain spirit-companions of Inanna. In a myth concerning the Goddess’s descent to the Underworld, an androgynous being named Asushunamir, or “He Whose Face Is Light, is created to rescue Inanna from the grip of her sister Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld. In another myth of Inanna’s descent, two such beings, the kalaturru (or galatur) and the kurgarra, are created to rescue Inanna. In an ancient text we read of the god Enki’s creation of these beings:
He fashioned the dirt into a kurgarra, a creature neither male nor female.
He fashioned the dirt into a galatur, a creature neither male nor female.
He gave the food of life to the kurgarra,
He gave the food of life to the galatur.
“While these beings are referred to as “neither male nor female,” Samuel Kramer and other Sumeriologists agree that they are meant to represent gender-variant males rather than hermaphrodites or gender-variant women. Not surprisingly, they were blessed by Inanna, while they were cursed by her sister Ereshkigal, who wished to see Inanna remain in the Underworld. “The shadow of the wall shall be thy station,” she told them, “the threshold shall be thy habitation. The besotted and thirsty shall smite thy cheek…”
“Although the priests of Inanna occasionally suffered ridicule, they nevertheless held respected positions in the worship of the Goddess, being employed as magicians, ritual artists, and hierodules (or sacred prostitutes). As magicians, they were said to excel in making talismans and amulets to protect the wearer from destructive magic and other dangers.
“As ritual artists, they functioned as singers, musicians, composers, dancers, and actors. The kurgarru played various instruments, including the lyre, the two-stringed lute (zinnutu or sinnatu), the flute, and metal clappers. The kalum priests were known as composers of hymns, lamentations, and incantations, which they chanted in the Emesal dialect. Among the types of compositions composed by the assinnu was the inhu, a lament concerning the life of Ishtar. The term inhu refers to the sorrowful, melancholy song of the ursanu bird. “You seat the assinnu,” an ancient text reads, “and he will sing his inhus.” Of such laments, another text reads, “In-hi-ia sunuhuti Istar ismema, Ishtar (Inanna) heard my sorrowful inhu songs.”
“As ritual actors, the kurgarru, led by the rabi kurgarri, performed in dramas de-picting epic struggles. The kurgurru and the assinnu also took part in a ritual drama honoring both Inanna and the goddess Narudu, in which the priests dressed in the garments of the goddesses. Gender-variant priests also played a role in the ritual of the hieros gamos, or “sacred marriage,” of Inanna and her consort Dumuzi, embodied by the high priestess and the king. This rite was celebrated each year in order to promote fertility. In a hymn dating from the third millennium B.C.E… we read that in this ritual, gender-variant priests and priestesses wearing bifurcated costumes, the men carrying mirrors and combing their hair, joined in a procession, chanting, “Hail, Inanna!”
“Foremost among their tasks, however, was that of making love with, in most cases, traditionally masculine worshipers in order to bring the latter into intimate contact with the Goddess. In this respect, the gender-variant priests dedicated their bodies, including their anuses, to the Goddess. Like the priestesses of Inanna, they engaged in anal intercourse with male worshipers, usually taking the receptive role.”
Excerpt from the poem, Passionate Inanna, by Enheduanna, High Priestess of the Moon in the Sumerian city of Ur. Written in the 23rd Century BCE. Enheduanna is the earliest known example of someone signing their name to a literary work:
“Without your consent, no destiny is determined, the most ingenious solution finds no favour. To run fast, to slip away, to calm, to pacify are yours, Inanna, To dart aimlessly, to go too fast, to fall, to get up, to sustain a comrade are yours, Inanna. To open high road and byroad, safe lodging on the way, helping the worn-out along are yours, Inanna. To make footpath and trail go in the right direction, to make the going good are yours, Inanna. To destroy, to create, to tear out, to establish are yours, Inanna. To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna.”
What an enormous honour and thrill it is to see my hand, enlarged, protruding from a wall and pointing the way into Tim Walker’s Fairyland exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. This exquisite show features fantastic, inspired photos of 250 queer pioneers of the last 50 years – activists, artists, performers, characters who have influenced and helped shape the modern queer culture and community. To be included in the exhibition, coming due to my contribution to community explorations among the Radical Faeries and as a founder of Queer Spirit Festival, is truly epic. Thanks Tim!
Tim has built this show from a vision which reaches back to his childhood, when, he tells us, he “loved fairies, pixies and elves… Fairies had magical, mystical powers. I was happiest when I was a fairy, and I always wanted to believe.” At school he learnt to hide his own fairy nature from the homophobic bullies, but he “never stopped believing, not for one minute.” Tim’s Fairyland is a homage to our long-repressed queer community which over the past half a century has liberating its creative magic – discovering, remembering, reclaiming, reinventing itself – creating new realities, finding Fairyland. The exhibition brims over with imagery full of emotion, spirit and magic. Each room has its own power and presence. The show suggests – reveals – that we queers are in tune with, and have the potential to co-create, a more magical, enchanted, compassionate, liberated, joy filled reality than most of the world can even imagine is possible.
Tim invited me to be part of the exhibition because I have spent 25 years as a Radical Faerie co-creating exactly the kind of environment Tim is dreaming of in the quotation above – our sanctuaries are the party at the bottom of the garden where the ancient and mystical forces gather. I have played a key role in the development of Radical Faerie community spaces in the UK and France during the past two decades, and am a founder of Queer Spirit Festival. I believe that when I met Tim, my tales revealed to him the extent of the largely hidden undercurrent of Radical Faerieness – the queer spiritual counter-culture. In this global tribe of nature-loving queer folk we are doing exactly what Tim has dreamt of – we are creating Fairyland, we are creating home for each other, home that also includes nature, ancestors and Goddess. We are, as gay spiritual teacher Ram Dass famously put it, ” walking each other home.”
My journey into Radical Faerie gatherings, which take place usually out in remote, wild places, came after my retreat from London’s gay scene in the mid 1990s as I became sick with AIDS – but instead of a death sentence, AIDS became what I like to call my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self –Self in the spiritual sense, the Cosmic I Am – that humanity is blindly – pathetically – failing to recognise that we all are, despite enlightened teachers and mystics throughout time telling us how it is.Most remain stubbornly ignorant of the spiritual reality, despite social, environmental chaos pushing our world to the edge. AIDS was once described as‘the training ground for the apocalypse –well here we are folks. The planet has AIDS. The collective is being pushed to the edge – destruction or awakening are the only two possibilities. As one who went over the edge 30 years ago, faced destruction but found awakening – and has been living partly in the worlds of spirit ever since – I encourage queer folks to open their eyes, minds, hearts – and not just their arses – and let the cosmos in.For we are more than our sexuality, more than our gender. Amongst our kind are healers, creators, messengers of spirit, let’s bring this aspect of queer nature into the picture.
Hovering at the edge of life and death for over 2 years I spent my time studying spiritual, mystical and magical teachings. I journeyed into the subtle realms of consciousness – expecting to die, I had nothing to lose, so was willing to surrender my individuality into the cosmic whole. I eventually learned that this is what queer shamans have done throughout time – one of our queer roles in ancient Goddess and Earth honouring cultures the world over, was to be channels, healers, links to the spirit world. The suppression of pagan cultures by Father God worshippers started with the suppression of the queer priests – this happened in Europe from the last century of the Roman Empire (with Goddess temples ransacked and genderqueer priests killed or expelled) and it happened over 1000 years later in the Americas (where the gender-bending shamans were called berdache by the European invaders, a Persian word for a gay bottom boy kept for sex – that word becoming the anthropological term until 1990 when Two-Spirit was adopted by the shamans of today – 2S is now added to the LGBTQ+ alphabet in Canada) and of course in Africa. In India the English tried, but failed to outlaw and eradicate the sacred ‘third-gender’ hijra population in the late 19th century, attempting to impose a gender binary as the only recognised reality.
Tim Walker has featured my hand, with the Herb Robert flower emanating from my fingertip, pointing at the doorway to Fairyland in recognition of my dedication to the path, since surviving AIDS, of creating transformational queer community. From the year 2000 I set out to find other queers exploring a spiritual connection – I found them in queer pagan camps, men’s community groups and radical faerie groves around the world. Nature connection, I learned is crucial to wellbeing – the elements, earth air fire water, reflect the 4 parts of us, body, mind, spirit, emotion. We need good connection to the elements and to all parts of our Self, if we are to live at max vitality and creativity. Crucial too is community of the heart – I discovered in Faerie gatherings that community can go deep and high into the cosmic realms, it can be transformational, healing and liberating – and indeed, to me the queer scene at its best is this also. Drag bars, leather bars, ecstatic nightclub nights were a crucial part of my personal development as a proto-Faerie. Our spaces always have a touch of Fairyland about them.
Despite the bitterness and hate directed at us, queers have long shown our ability to create great art, fashion, music, parties. Love and creativity is at the core of our nature – more than sexuality, more even than gender, Spirit is at our core – the raw, erotic, nature spirit that came to earth to play and explore, to make love, and to change the world. In Radical Faerie spaces we explore what it’s like to live together in deep communion with the earth, the spirit and each other. Operating from the Faerie principle of subject:SUBJECT consciousness, where no-one is seen as ‘other’, we create Fairyland, where the fairy within whom we learnt to suppress as a child can come out and discover the full potential in their natural magic.
The LGBTQ+ community is at a point in our collective history and journey of liberation where some amongst us who have gained rights thought impossible just three decades ago do not want to support the ongoing struggle for recognition, rights and safety by other parts of our queer community. We are arguing among ourselves, with some gay men and lesbians apparently unable to see that the struggle has always been about the right to love, acceptance and freedom of expression – for all people. History shows that ‘third-gender’, androgynous, ‘trans’ people have always existed – it is thanks to the achievements of Gay Liberation that these long-suppressed traits are freer to express again.
We are at a point when we need to be asking ourselves does queer liberation come only through the recognition of rights or also through the possibility of building different ways of living and being together?
In Radical Faerie sanctuaries we have been exploring new ways of living together, developing rituals and celebrations that connect us deeply to the natural flows of the cosmos, and bring out the best of who we are. This has led to Queer Spirit Festival, of which I am one of the founders and part of a huge team of volunteers who pour our hearts into creating a safe, playful, love-filled space of self-discovery. For a decade now hundreds of lgbtq+ people have been meeting at Queer Spirit for a 5 day summer camp with workshops, performance, ceremonies, healing space, crafts, djs, a temple of sacred sexuality and much more… Since 2023 Queer Spirit takes place in the stunning grounds of Bridwell Park in Devon and we are looking forward to returning there next summer. Queer Spirit Festival website here.
I believe we queers need healing sanctuaries and festivals in every land where we can discover our powers and heal from the attacks of the world, and also the freedom to bring the fullness of our artistry, our joy, our love, our spirit into the world. Our challenge is political AND spiritual. Tim Walker’s Fairyland points to our potential, our power, our love. But he reminds us the struggle is global and it is not over yet.
Radical Faerie sanctuaries are places queers can go to build our strength, power and resilience – and Tim’s magical, healing creationholds that same spirit, offering an empowering experience to every visitor passing under my hand. I am happy it’s just my hand on show, I’m not ‘known’ in the world on the level of the amazing pioneers in this show, all of whom I admire so deeply, my contribution is something different. I been working in secret with the Goddess, building community in the queer spiritual underground, the Faerie world, and I know that the Faeries, both human and spirit, have beautiful, empowering things to share with the whole queer community.
IN THE ANCIENT TEMPLES OF ISHTAR, that stretched across the lands of Mesopotamia, which we nowadays call Iraq, Kuwait, Syria and the border lands of Turkey and Iran, from at least 10000 BC, the Goddess, often known as Ishtar, was served by gay and transgendered priest/priestesses.
They were called ASSINNU, KURGARRU, KULU’U, legends told of their role in rescuing the Goddess from her imprisonment in the Underworld. The worship of Ishtar is deeply associated with eroticism and sacred prostitution – sex used to create spiritual connection.
Empires rose and fell in the region but the worship of Ishtar stayed strong. Eventually as we know times changed and the goddess worshippers of the ancient world became persecuted lowlife, though in some corners of the planet… such as amongst the hijra of India, some connection to the past has been kept alive through the centuries.
Those ancient gendervariant priests even get a mention in the Old Testament… as the QEDESHA (‘The Holy Ones’), servants of the Canaanite goddess ASHERAH, who were condemned by the Israelites for the same sex eroticism and cross dressing in their ritual practice. Qedesha was translated into ‘sodomites’ in the King James Bible, and is often rendered as ‘male shrine prostitutes’ in modern versions. A medieval English translation by John Wycliffe gave Qedesha as ‘woman-ish men who committed all the abominations of the heathens.’
As the centre of power shifted over time into Europe, the genderfluid goddess worshippers came too. The Galli were ritual celebrants who were known for acts of public castration in ritual, which the priests undertook to be closer to their Goddess, Cybele. This worship spread into the Roman Empire. read more here
Antinous
Sexual practices and homosexual priests and priestesses were normal in the pagan religion of the ancient world. Pan, Dionysis, Aphrodite were among the deities worshipped sometimes in single sex cults. When Roman Emperor Hadrian’s young lover Antinous died mysteriously while sailing on the Nile, the spirit of Osiris was invoked and Antinous raised to the level of a god. His cult was so popular it spread throughout the empire within a decade and was an attempt to revive the power of the old religion in the face of the competition of the more rigorous new faith, Christianity.
English poet Rev. Samuel Cottam (1863-1943) thought that the official cult of Emperor Hadrian’s drowned lover, ‘the everglorious lad’ Antinous, was the religion that might have been: “Antinous was within an ace of becoming the god of the modern world. We may say it was only the divinity of Christ which prevented this.” (quoted in Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th century, Graham Robb (2004)
Christianity was also based on the love of men for each other, but it took the turn of making the body into something dark, and sex into a sin. So the old ways of knowing god through sexual connection were lost, and those that involved knowing god through sexual connection between same gendered people became totally taboo. Rival religious groups throughout the middle ages – eg the Manicheans, the Cathars, the Bogomils – had a more relaxed approach to all sexual relations (note that we get the word BUGGERY from the Bulgarian Bogomils, its original meaning was heresy) but over the centuries the Catholic Church tightened its grip on people’s morality and behaviour, often associating heresy and same sex activity together.
The remaining male and female witches, druids and healers of the old religion were persecuted until the old ways were pretty well eradicated during the witch hunts of the 15-17th centuries. Those born with inclination to love members of the same sex were forced to hide their nature, and the spiritual connection that goes with that love was largely lost, although, ironically, channelled also into the monasteries, convents, churches and art of the Christians, and from the Renaissance era also into theatreland. The Middle Ages saw a flowering of love culture in the single sex monasteries, and earned them a reputation as beds of homosexual activity, which made it all the easier for Henry VIII to use his new anti-sodomy law (the Buggery Act of 1533) and to turn the population against them when he decided to kick the Roman church out of England in the 16th century.
From that time the link between same sex love/gender fluidity and the sacred dimension was thoroughly destroyed in Europe. Gay life would reemerge in the 17th century in the growing cities, in molly houses and cruising spots and in the dreams of the Romantic period, when the long lost playful arcadian days of the pagan past were missed. But having finally, after about 1000 years, achieved the eradication of the link between god and queerness at home, when the European explorers set out to conquer the world they found the same link going on strong just about everywhere they went.
Most peoples of the world had no big hang ups about different kinds of sex until the Europeans came along. Temples in India showed all kinds of sex acts in their stone carvings, just as had been the case in ancient Middle Eastern and Far East lands. In fact many cultures recognised that tribe members who carried both male and female spirit in themselves were in touch with the invisible realms and were honoured for that. The Two Spirits of the native Americans are the most famous example Each tribe had its own special name for the shamans – The Navaho called them the nadle, the Oglala call them Winkte, Absaroke of Montana used Bo-te, which means not-man, not-woman. Zuni say Ko’thlama… Sources as late as the 1930s from the Navaho tribe reported that the nadle (a term that could apply to men and women shamans) were sacred and that without them the tribe would perish.
The Europeans set about destroying the power of the shamans – they called the american shamans berdache, a Persian word and common slang for a passive homosexual. This name stuck until the 1990s, when the efforts of the native American two spirits to reclaim the nobility of their role took off.
The Europeans went around the world in early modern times being shocked at the blatant enjoyment – and holy associations – of same sex relationships that they came across. In Japan and China homosexuality was seen as a privilege enjoyed particularly in the monasteries, and people laughed when the Jesuits suggested it was sinful. In Angola, Quimbanda was the name given to men who dressed as women and had sex with each other – they were held in esteem by the tribefolk as wizards. (Antonio Oliveira de Cardonega 1681 )
Malidoma Some
One tribe on this planet by some miracle never lost its knowledge of the spiritual nature of its queer children. The Dagara of western Africa call gay men ‘gatekeepers’ and lesbian women ‘witches’. They see us as holding certain vibrations that connect the earth to the spirit, and see our sexual rituals as necessary for the well being of all. Malidoma Some and Sobonfu Some, two teachers the Dagara have sent into the West to share their wisdom, have both testified to the crucial need of gay people to be acknowledged for our spirit, and not reduced to our sexuality, for our spirit makes us into healers, shamans and gateways for important energies into the world.
We have always been this. The reason there are such high rates of mental illness, drug use, suicide amongst gay people is because we are living in a world that does not see who we are – but in fact do WE properly see who we are yet? The spiritual challenge of being queer is to embrace our gender fluidity or our queer sexuality as a call from the soul, to know ourselves fully and completely, to search for our own truths, for the keys that unlock who we are, all our unique talents and gifts – as spirits in a human experience, as healers, as connectors of the spiritual dimensions. There is so much more to us than our sexual expression. Gay life has so much crisis going on because crisis makes us sit up and face ourselves. AIDS was the crisis that woke me up to the deeper reality of my soul.
Today I co-create queer spiritual spaces where our natural, playful, divine spirit can emerge, but I am aware that most queers in the world do not see who we are. Luckily some of us, more and more of us in fact, have noticed, our eyes are opening, we are pulling together to amplify our voices – and everything you once believed about being gay/queer may be close to changing.
Queer Spirit 2026
At Queer Spirit Festival in the UK (which held its 10th anniversary event, attended by 800 fabulous queers in Devon in August 2026) we have created a space in which the spirituality of LGBTQ+ people is honoured, explored and celebrated. This element of our queer nature, so prominent in our history across the planet, has been little addressed by the modern political movement, which was born in a secular age. Many queers still ignore spiritual matters because of the history of religious homophobia. Well I hope this article goes some way to reveal why that homophobia is so twisted, reveal that it was always in fact a power grab by males who sought to eradicate the ancient cultures of the Goddess, in which queerness played a crucial, sacred part – and reveal why the time is ripe for us to collectively, globally, reclaim the queer sacred powers.
“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.” Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture (1979)
“Many shamans were homosexual; many of the worshippers of the Goddess under her various names and in her various cults all over the world … 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 transcends both…” Gay Mystics, Andrew Harvey (1997)
“It’s tragic that many in the LGBTQ community struggle with issues around spirituality. We confuse it with religion and, no wonder, given the treatment we have received at the hands of most religions… But what’s ironic about that is that before the patriarchal cultures and religions, people that we today refer to as LGBTQ were not only spiritually inclined, but were honored for the roles of spiritual service and leadership they played all over the world.” Christian de la Huerta, author of Coming Out Spiritually. (1999)
Under the guise of ‘protecting the family’ the government of Turkey has initiated a nation-wide coordinated attack on the freedom of same sex attracted and gender-nonconforming people. Never mentioned is the fact that queer children are born in, raised in, and are part of family structure, and of course always have been. This kind of attack on us – making queer people a scapegoat for society’s ills, as a way of diverting attention from failures of leadership and policy – as we are all well aware, is far from new. Plato named this back in the 4th century BCE when one of the diners in the Symposium observed that it does not suit tyrannical powers to encourage love between men because of the bonds of trust that produces – history provides plenty of examples of that in practice and in the 2024 USA election the Republican party used an updated version of the formula very successfully with their ‘Kamala is for They/Them, President Trump is for You’ campaign.
“Coordinated police raids between September 12 and 14 targeted seven LGBT rights organizations, two groups supporting people living with HIV and bars and nightclubs in Istanbul, Ankara, İzmir, Aydın and Mersin. At least 112 people were detained, with courts subsequently ordering 82 held in pretrial detention, of whom some 24 were activists, founders or executives of the targeted organizations, while one was a journalist.
“Justice Minister Akın Gürlek said authorities had initiated legal proceedings against 162 suspects, nine associations and 13 businesses across 15 provinces as part of an operation called “My Family Is Safe.” The figure of 162 referred to people subject to legal proceedings and was not the number detained.
“The investigations, coordinated by prosecutors in Istanbul, Ankara, İzmir, Aydın and Mersin, involve allegations including facilitating prostitution, producing or distributing obscene material and exposing children to such material. Authorities have also cited drug-related allegations and possible violations of Turkey’s law on associations…
“The crackdown has also extended to online content. Courts issued orders between September 12 and 16 blocking dozens of websites and social media accounts belonging to LGBT organizations, rights groups and activists, according to the Freedom of Expression Association, a Turkish group that monitors internet censorship.
“Police also detained more than 100 people who gathered outside Istanbul’s Çağlayan courthouse on September 15 to protest the crackdown. They were released after being held for more than 24 hours.
“The operations come amid an increased government emphasis on what officials describe as protecting the traditional family. The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has designated 2026-2035 as the “Family and Population Decade,” while Gürlek has linked the recent investigations to government policies aimed at protecting children, the institution of the family and what authorities describe as public morality.”
Some history:
This crackdown is not the first to happen in the Turkish lands. In fact rulers here have been trying to suppress same sex love for 1500 years. You would think by now they would have got over it.
The Law Code of the Eastern Roman, Byzantine emperor Justinian, issued in 534 CE in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), 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 still infects the world. Byzantine historian John Malalas (c491–578) recorded that:
“… bishops of divers provinces were prosecuted for the lustful act of sleeping with males…Shortly after, the emperor passed a law that the crime of sex with males should be punished by castration. And at that time many androkoitai (men who slept with men) were seized and their genitals were cut off. And a great fear ensued among those who suffered from the evil desire for males.”
Procopius, Justinian’s court historian, wrote a ‘Secret History’ in which he informs us that there were more than religious motives underlying this action. Having described his horror at the “reckless fashion” in which this law was enforced, Procopius indicates that the punishment was directed at first towards political opponents and those “possessed of great wealth or those who in some other way chanced to have offended the rulers.” Justinian soon emptied the imperial treasury through expensive wars and building churches and palaces: Procopius informs us that “No sooner had he thus disposed of the public wealth, than he turned his eyes towards his subjects, and he straightaway robbed great numbers of them of their estates… charging some with belief in polytheism, others with adherence to some perverse sect among the Christians, or withpaiderastias.”
During the many centuries of the Ottoman empire,(13th – early 20th), which conquered Constantinople, ending the Christian eastern Roman empire, in 1453, there were legal prohibitions on same sex acts but in practice little persecution. In medieval Islamic culture, mukhannathun was a term used to refer to effeminate men or people of ambiguous sex characteristics who appeared feminine or functioned socially in roles typically carried out by women.
“According to the Iranian scholar Mehrdad Alipour, ‘in the pre-modern period, Muslim societies were aware of five manifestations of gender ambiguity: This can be seen through figures such as the khasi (eunuch), the hijra, the mukhannath, the mamsuh and the khuntha (hermaphrodite/intersex).’ Generally, adolescent men were socially permitted to desire older men or women. After puberty, they were expected to desire young boys or women. Being in both roles could have led to social censure. There is evidence, however, that egalitarian same-sex relations also occurred.” (wikipedia)
In the 19th century exposure to western European attitudes brought a more tense atmosphere around same sex attraction. The 1858 Ottoman Penal Code stated the following:
Art. 202—The person who dares to commit the abominable act publicly contrary to modesty and sense of shame is to be imprisoned for from three months to one year and a fine of from one Mejidieh gold piece to ten Mejidieh gold pieces is to be levied.
This is sometimes interpreted as decriminalising private sex, but it should be remembered that this had not been persecuted previously, and this act set the scene for much darkness for queer Turks in the 20th century.
Beginning during the Turkish Republic under Attaturk in the 1920s a process of ‘europeanisation’ led to behaviour such as open affection for the people of the same sex, or “feminine” behaviour from males becoming stigmatized, but queer people were not openly discussed until in 1974 when the coalition government made queer people the target of repressive policies, with the result that attacks against the community became more frequent and violent. Some members of the LGBT+ community kept on fighting for their rights and, to protect themselves, attempted to create their own political identity. Multiple cities became centers of queer resistance such as Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara – cities where this year’s raids were focussed.
But 1980 brought a military coup – political parties were banned and freedom of demonstration, association, speech, and the press were censored. The authorities initiated a campaign of mass persecution against the members of the LGBT community – including a 1981 law that prohibited drag queens from performing on nightclub stages. “As a response to the situation they were living in, the entire trans community started organizing protests in Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara… Because of the increasing violent actions from the police, on April 29, 1987, trans people, lesbians, and gay men initiated a ten-day hunger strike in Gezi Park by Taksim Square. The strike started in a house in Taksim and was moved to Gezi Park the next day until it was dispersed by the police. However, the protest continued in different houses for weeks, and managed to get support from the Radical Democratic Green Party and some famous artists and intellectuals. This hunger strike is considered to be the first large-scale LGBTQ+ protest before the 1990s, and a turning point in the contemporary queer movement.” wikipedia
In the UK in 1987 we were dealing with the homophobia of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, which brought in a prohibition of the ‘promotion of homosexuality’, known as ‘Section 28’. I wonder how many of us in the UK at the time knew about the queers on hunger strike on in Turkey? I certainly didn’t. But today in the Internet age the whole gay world hears about this new crackdown – but what do we do about it?
I believe it helps to know the history, both of Turkey and of other lands. Raids and laws against us are nothing new in the world – and as we look for how to respond, we should not forget that England has suffered centuries of the like itself:
In England, Henry VIII’s Buggery Act of 1533 was part of the King’s efforts to reduce the power of the Church, in this case by claiming powers of trial over sodomy, which the ecclesiastical courts had previously dealt with. He used the act primarily against the monastic communities, using the excuse of sodomy in the monasteries as a way to close them and seize their wealth.
Repealed under Queen Mary, the law, renamed the Sodomy Act was brought back under Elizabeth in 1862. Prosecutions however were rare – historian Rictor Norton has identified less than a dozen cases prior to 1660 – and during the late 16th-early 17th century the atmosphere was tolerant enough for a gay subculture to start to flower. However this also led to the first police raids on queer establishments in the early 18th century when London’s Molly Houses were targeted – commencing FOUR CENTURIES OF PUB RAIDS AND LEGAL PERSECUTION OF QUEERS IN THE UK. Yes this was still happening in the post-decriminalisation era – in January 1987 famous drag pub, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London, was raided by police wearing marigolds to protect themselves from the perceived danger of catching AIDS from the queers. Performer Lily Savage famously asked if they’d come to do the washing up.
In early 20th century Germany a diverse and creative queer subculture was developing fast – also in Russia during the first decade after the Revolution, there was tolerance of gay people. The 1930s brought repressive, authoritarian regimes under Hitler and Stalin, during which once again gay folk were blamed for society’s ills, persecuted, arrested, killed.
Back to Turkey:
In the 1990s queer activists, supported and encouraged by European groups, stepped forward in Turkey and in the 2000s the wish of the new government to get closer to the European Union led to a more tolerant period in which LGBTQ groups and culture could emerge, but the ruling party has never been comfortable with that. “In 2014 the pride march counted more than 100,000 participants, making it one of the biggest pride marches in Southeastern Europe, and politicians of the main opposition parties… lent their support to the demonstration. As a consequence, the following year, Turkish authorities stopped the annual pride parade in Istanbul through violence, making use of tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons against the marchers.” Wikipedia.
The authorities have continued to send out riot police with tear gas and rubber bullets to Pride events ever since. The September 2026 raids and arrests are the latest stage of a long fight, a repetition of an ancient prejudice still playing out, a political manoeuvre so blatant but so long used they continue to be able to get away, from Trump to Putin to Erdogan they continue to get away with it. To close on a more optimistic note let’s remember that Viktor Orban’s attempt to ban Pride led to the largest lgbt+ rights parade there ever and his government lost power the next year.
All tyrants fall in the end. Queer people carry on.
At the Queer Spirit Faerie Drum Circle at the Wheatsheaf Hall in Vauxhall, south London, this Friday 25th September 2026 we will dedicate our rhythms to our queer kin in Turkey, reaching out through the queer cosmic web to send them prayers for strength and resilience, to stand with them in spirit as we try to fathom out, how do we rid the world of this age old ignorance and prejudice for ever?
Why do benders love divas?… was the question posed at a highly enjoyable Sunday afternoon Duckie event at London’s Royal Festival Hall (20/9/2026)… but unfortunately while the question was posed it was not really addressed and definitely not answered!
The afternoon was good entertainment – a panel discussion about the adoration of powerful women (and some men) who inspire the queer community and also have long spoken to the sensibilities of queer kids growing up in conventional families, hosted by author Rupert Smith with singer David McAlmont, artist Sadie Lee, performers Travis Alabanza and Neil Bartlett alongside. Each shared the names of the divas who had inspired them early in life – I was delighted that Sadie included Marc Almond as one of hers (he and Debbie Harry have been my life-long diva inspirations), and interesting anecdotes galore rolled forth from all, some hilarious to the point of making the audience feel privileged to share in their personal stories.
But why do benders love divas? We certainly affirmed that they do – Maria Callas, Shirley Bassey, Whitney Houston, Beyonce Madonna of course were amongst those getting a look in. There was a reference at the start to the fact that DIVA comes from Latin, a word for divine female, a Goddess, which got me excited, but at no point did the discussion come round to actually speaking to the question originally posed!
I was hoping for a dive into the ancient world, where Goddesses great and venerable were regarded as equally powerful, or more powerful, than the male Gods, and were served in their temples and rituals by many queer priesthoods. That era lasted for literally thousands of years all around the Mediterranean Sea until Christianity became the official religion of the Empire in the 4th century – in the ancient world, spirituality was largely in the hands of women and queers who worked together in Goddess temples across the Empire. Examples include the Gallae priestesses of Cybele, the Great Mother (Magna Mater) of the Roman Empire. She and her very queer devotees had been invited and brought to Rome from Anatolia (modern Turkey) around 200 BCE with great fanfare and celebration. She was so ancient she was considered to be the Mother of the Greek and Roman deities. 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.” Her worship became the official religion of the Empire and remained so until replaced by Christianity. The loud, colourful, queer Gallae priests were much hated by Christian writers (and were considered extreme by some of the Roman pagans too):
Around 340 CE, Christian Firmicus Maternus wrote about Cybele worship: “In their very temples can be seen deplorable mockery before a moaning crowd, men taking the part of women, revealing with boastful ostentation this ignominy of impure and unchaste bodies. They broadcast their crimes and confess with superlative delight the stain of their polluted bodies”. We know less of the practices of the all-female Amazon warrior women of ancient Scythia, but they too were Cybele devotees: classicist Walter Tyrell wrote that “their rites were orgiastic, attended by frenzied dancing and music, their votaries were women and eunuchs.”
The Gallae’s most public ritual, the Day of the Blood, when new initiates were welcomed into the priesthood, was described by pagan writer Lucian in the 2nd century:
“As the Gallae sing and celebrate their orgies, frenzy falls on many of them and many who had come as mere spectators afterwards are found to have committed the great act. I will narrate what they do. Any young man who has resolved on this action, strips off his clothes, and with a loud shout bursts into the midst of the crowd, and picks up a sword from a number of swords which I suppose have been kept ready for many years for this purpose. He takes it and castrates himself and then runs wild through the city, bearing in his hands what he has cut off. He casts it into any house at will, and from this house he receives women’s raiment and ornaments. Thus they act during their ceremonies of castration.” Lucian, De Dea Syria.
“They wear effeminately nursed hair,” complained Firmicus Maternus (4th century) “and dress in soft clothes. They can barely hold their heads up on their limp necks. Then, having made themselves alien to masculinity, swept up by playing flutes, they call their Goddess to fill them with an unholy spirit so as to seemingly predict the future to idle men.”
Queer beings in service to the Goddess was not limited to Cybele. The earliest we know of are the priests of Inanna/Ishtar in Mesopotamia. As historian Will Roscoe has put 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.”
Sacred sexual services in the Goddess temples were condemned as prostitution by both the Hebrew and Christian Fathers: Both male and female sexworkers were present in the traditional temples of the Canaanites: the Old Testament tells us it took four centuries of persecution for those Hebrew Fathers to stop Canaanite women setting up phallic poles in praise of the Goddess, known to them as Asherah, and stamp out the tradition of the QEDESHA – the sodomizing male or trans priests who served Her. The Old Testament prohibitions against cross dressing and sex between men were designed to stop this ancient religious practice.
Qedesha was a term for holy men anointed to serve the Goddess, but was translated into the King James English bible as ‘sodomites’ and in modern bibles is usually rendered ‘male shrine prostitutes’. A medieval English translation, by John Wycliffe of the Lollard heretical movement, translated qedesha as ‘womanish-men who committed all the abominations of the heathens.’
I have been part of the global Radical Faerie community for 25 years: The modern gay liberation movement was born in a secular age, but back in the 1970s Harry Hay, Mitch Walker, Don Kilhefner and others were feeling a deeper call to uncover the cosmic in our queer consciousness, to reclaim the shamanic gifts our queer ancestors once held in earth-honouring, goddess-worshipping cultures around the whole world. The first Faerie gathering was in Arizona in 1979, and from there the tribe has spread around the world, a queer counter-culture. Meeting in Europe since 1995, and in the UK since 2006, radical faerie gatherings take place far away from the commercial culture of mainstream gay life. In our sacred groves we have been reconnecting to the Goddess, to the Diva of all Divas, and exploring the spiritual levels of queer consciousness. We are ready to share our discoveries – and one place we are doing that is at Queer Spirit Festival, which just had its 10th anniversary event in Devon with 800 fabulous queers attending. Radical Faeries from around the world came to join with our local tribe and with pagan, yogic, spiritual queers from the UK to co-create a celebration of the spiritual, creative and healing gifts of LGBTQ+ people from all races and cultures. Festival features include the Temple of Sacred Sexuality, along with performance, djs and 100+ workshops. The Glastonbury Goddess Temple appears at the festival, helping us rediscover our deep, ancient connection with the divine feminine.
I feel it might be important to point out to atheistic queer folk that, as witch and activist Starhawk has put it, “The symbolism of the Goddess is not a parallel structure to the symbolism of God the Father. The Goddess does not rule the world; She is the world. Manifest in each of us, She can be known internally by every individual, in all Her magnificent diversity.” She goes on to say: “Sexuality is a sacrament. Religion is a matter of relinking, with the divine within and with Her outer manifestations in all of the human and natural world… In the Craft, all people are manifest gods, and differences in color, race, and customs are welcomed as signs of the myriad beauty of the Goddess.”
That’s why benders love divas. Rad Fae founder Harry Hay said of queers: “We have been a SEPARATE PEOPLE…. Drifting together in a parallel existence, not always conscious of each other.. yet recognising one another by eyelock when we did meet… here and there as outcasts… Spirit people… in service to the Great Mother.. Shamans.. mimes and rhapsodes, poets and playwrights, healers and nurturers… VISIONARIES… REBELS.”
Gay writer Arthur Evans summed up it in his 1978 book Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture: “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.”
Once the Goddess temples were destroyed, queer kind who had once served in them went instead into the churches, convents and monasteries. When the monasteries were shut down some moved into cities and created theatre. which led to the bars and queer culture we have today. We came together in a South Bank theatre to speculate, why do queer people love to worshipfully adore a diva on stage – well i was hoping somebody might say, it’s because that is what we have always done – through celebrating the Divine Feminine, one of queer nature’s roles is to bring connection, glamour, magic, laugher, freedom, joy, delight, healing and holiness to the people of the world.
Benders love Divas because Divas reflect something in us. That something is for sure raw emotion but is also the consciousness of the divine feminine, the consciousness in us that sees love and interconnection rather than separation and division. And as the great diva Dionne Warwick put it back in the day but applies even more urgently today, what the world needs now – is LOVE.
And in my opinion that’s what Gay Liberation was in the first place and must always be: a stand for the right of all people to love whom they naturally are drawn to love, whatever the gender of the people involved. All forms of love are recognised and honoured by the Goddess, only the Father God judges (well actually his followers do that, not him!), and when love is truly free to flow, massive changes may occur on our planet. French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin wrote that, “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
Why do Benders Love Divas – because we are, and always have been, the people of love, the people of the Goddess, nature’s children born to reflect her gaiety.
It seems there’s no more effective catalyst to get the LGBTQ+ community on the streets expressing our passion, our pride, our love than challenge. The AIDS crisis was a key factor in birthing the globally connected network we have now, in the UK Clause 28 mobilised us in the 1990s to form stronger community bonds and institutions… yet it seems when life gets easier (for some of us), when the attacks abate a while, the community soon gets complacent, starts arguing with itself. However, right now in the mid 2020s the pressure on us is building again, and maybe we are remembering the bigger picture and can pull together as one.
In 2026 some of those attacks on Pride and the LGBTQ+ community in general have come from gay men and lesbians who loudly protest that they are mono-gender sexual beings who have nothing in common with gender-blending trans people, or those strange queer, non-binary types. Gay men complaining that Pride has got too ‘sexual’ (wearing dog masks and showing butt in front of the children!), or that it’s become too corporate (wake up honeys we were protesting business sponsorship already 2 decades ago — and on the whole I would say Pride events learned the lesson and have succeeded in creating community events in which gay members of corporations, armed and emergency services are included, not highlighted).
Or complaining that they were called queer as a kid and therefore will never accept that word as an umbrella term for the community — despite the fact we’ve already been doing that for nearly 4 decades — thus condemning us to always use the ever expanding alphabet of identities, which also of course upsets them.
To those separatist types I want to say open your eyes. To those who hate us you are no different to trans people — gay men and women have always been regarded as gender-benders, subversive at the core. Those who hate us will use every trick, even twist the facts of history to get their evil across and you will not be spared:
the kind of nasty hateful shit appearing on my feed recently
Matthew Vines, author of God and the Gay Christian (which is credited with assisting many evangelical gays come to terms with their sexual nature), gained massive online exposure on the last day of this year’s Pride month with his New York Times Article “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters” in which he blames the a decline in acceptance of LGB people on the Trans and Queer folk, whom he sees as having a political agenda than contradicts his wish to fit into society and have a ‘normal’ life. The response from the queernet has been awesome — he and people like him have hopefully listened and learned. The LGBTQ+ community is having a debate! Gay Christians are among those speaking up, such as singer/songwriter Flamy Grant who posted online: “There is no such thing as a normal gay person, Matthew. Our subversion of social norms is our power, friends. We exist in God’s creation specifically to be a thorn in the side of those who demand conformity.” Gay Christian author Brandan Robertson wrote a response on Substack titled “Queer Isn’t the Threat. Respectability Politics Is.” — he writes,
“The fundamental problem with this critique is that it amounts to a defense of the privilege of a portion of the LGBTQ community at the expense of the rest. It relies on outdated ways of understanding sexuality and gender, and it clings to a utopian vision in which gays and lesbians can be accepted in society and in religion so long as they conform to every other ‘norm’ required of them, ignoring the millions of transgender, nonbinary, asexual, bisexual and queer people who exist in every corner of this country.”
Robertson powerfully states: “Those who adopt the label of ‘queer’ do so because they understand that their own identities are more complex than the simple binaries that those like Vines are trying to force them into.”
What I actually saw at London Pride: a parade showcasing the incredible diversity of LGBTQ+ people and communities. It’s so moving to see groups of queers from African and other countries where homosexual acts are illegal, proudly proclaiming their queer nature and challenging the narratives put out by politicians in those lands. Pride is still a protest — and everyone there, while partying, is doing so in solidarity with our kind all over the world, as well as the bigots and naysayers here in the West, who, perhaps because they have seen cracks opening in our rainbow coalition, seem suddenly emboldened to loudly attack us again.
Great too at Pride to see football clubs sponsoring floats and celebrating the queer members of their communities and religious groups walking on the parade, putting out a positive message while some of their disturbed fellow believers still waste their day waving their protesting placards on the sidelines.
I’ve been going to London Pride for 40 years, the first parade I attended was followed by a party in Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank. The park afterparties that we enjoyed for many years were great but became too big to sustain, too expensive to put on. London shifted to a Soho focussed street party about 15 years ago, and this continues today, with evening after parties across the city. In the past few year I noticed a few changes have happened. Pride seems way less dominated by gay men than it used to be, it is now a truly diverse and universal celebration of all kinds of people, our allies, our straight friends included and the whole of central London becomes a very happy, relaxed, colourful place for the day where people from all the world’s ethnicities, faiths and cultures are mingling together in safety and joy. Even the police always seem to be smiling and playing along. I remember the first few years of the Soho post pride party the streets seemed to be a chaotic mess of inebriated gay men, but this year I felt I was part of a genuinely joyful celebration energy that included everyone.
Pride is a protest but it has no enemies except those who make enemies out of us.
We don’t oppose straight people, we don’t oppose families…
The rainbow flag stands for FREEDOM for all people:
Freedom from oppression, freedom to love whomever we love
Freedom of self expression, autonomy over our own bodies.
Pride is important because ignorant bigotry still exists, and it’s not hiding; because same sex love is still punished in dozens of countries around the world — due to attitudes and laws that Europeans imported to those lands. People who regard and criticise Pride as a celebration of sexuality are missing the point entirely and are revealing the contents of their own shadowy minds! Pride has always been about love, about self expression and community. I saw this writ large across central London at Pride 2026.
“…the most common features of ASS (AIDS Survivors Syndrome): extreme emotional pain, trauma, and depression; survivor’s guilt and low self-esteem; suicidal ideation; anger, over-guardedness, and chronic anxiety; social isolation; fear of aging; and difficulty envisioning a future.”
The media love to focus on suffering: “An entire generation of AIDS survivors is now struggling with a hidden epidemic” declares LGBTQNation.com
I’m an aids survivor. I don’t have ASS.
HIV taught me Healing Is Vital.
AIDS was my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self.
Facing death led to me asking deep questions about life. This is why I call HIV the the greatest gift. When I opened my mind and heart to the universe, it responded by bringing me ecstatic inspiration and a sense of my place in the cosmic whole. I went from atheist to activated then activist. We are All One. I will even go as far as to say that’s what LGBTQ+ people are here to teach the world!
All those listed ASS symptoms are blown away by Spiritual Gnosis, Self Knowledge, Self- Realisation. All those symptoms are signs from our souls to dig deeper into who we really are.
Self, with a capital S, is a spiritual term for the core divine consciousness within us. Hinduism teaches that Atman = Brahman, ie the individual self is in fact an emanation of the God Self. The goal in life becomes to realise – ie make real – the divinity within.
Mystical Christianity points to the same thing. Jesus taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is within. Exoteric Christianity tells people to worship an exterior being who will return to ‘save’ them, whereas esoteric, mystical, Christianity teaches that the Christ Self – the divine Self- lies within. Medieval heretics (who were so known for their queerness that Ketzer – Cathar – became a word for German gays and we get the word buggery from the Bogomil heresy that originated in Bulgaria) believed that we can become united with the Christ while alive, we don’t have to wait until after death. But we do have to face our own mortality and learn to surrender to the greater spirit to achieve this.
People with HIV/AIDS are not life’s victims. We are front line troops on the path of Conscious Awakening.
The LGBTQNation article is, despite its horror-struck headline, a celebration of the work of Long Term Survivor Tez Anderson, whose website Lets Kick ASS AIDS Survivor Syndrome is focused on empowerment in the face of real and massive challenges. From what I can tell Tez did not go through the extreme process of full-blown AIDS that I did – it is that experience that makes me so vocal about putting the spiritual lesson at the centre of my AIDS activism, but of course he’s aware of that aspect too – at the end of the article Tez is quoted as saying “Living with one foot in the grave and one foot in the living is a unique perspective, and it helps us be sort of death doulas, if you will.”
His Long Term HIV Survivors Declaration states “We have valuable lessons to teach our community and the world about living and resilience.” I agree – and the message I personally am delivering is that HEALING IS VITAL – consciousness is what we are, connected to the cycles of nature, an eternal Self as well as an embodied one. We are body (Earth) mind (Air) emotion (Water) and spirit (Fire) – and beyond that we are Self, the I Am, incarnate. Consciousness is individual and collective, awareness and love are its core qualities. Some of us are here to be connectors of the multi-dimensional cosmic conscious reality – and we are often queer, as shamans have been in cultures across the planet throughout time: Bridges between human and spirit, between life and death.
We are here for the Great Reconnect. This is the term Arthur Evans, author of 1978 book Witchcraft and the Gay Counter Culture described cosmic consciousness in his later work Lady Moon Rising, a book that spotlights the loss of meaning in people’s lives as a prime source of dis-ease and discontent. He calls the work of coming together with other people to collectively birth a new era of enlightened awareness The Great Reconnect:
“Making the Great Reconnect necessarily deepens and expands the lives of the people doing the reconnecting. They become more open to learning from other people’s personal experiences, the cultural richness of humanity, and the wonder of the natural world. If they invest enough of themselves in the world, they will no longer experience it as an alien presence of external, lifeless objects, disconnected from their own inner needs, feelings and identity. Instead, they will come to experience both themselves and the world as mutually engaging parts of a larger, organic whole…” Arthur Evans. The Call of Cosmic Consciousness – rainbow messenger
To return to the ASS symptoms described above: extreme emotional pain, trauma, and depression; survivor’s guilt and low self-esteem; suicidal ideation; anger, over-guardedness, and chronic anxiety; social isolation; fear of aging; and difficulty envisioning a future.
These symptoms are I suggest life trials designed to make us grow. I do not think they are particularly related to being long term HIV+. I think they are the kind of challenges anybody and to some extent everybody will likely face. I don’t deny they have featured in my life – but my spiritual perspective affects how I experience them. The extreme transformation I went through with AIDS – the paradigm shift from materialist atheism (believing myself to be a random accident of thinking atoms in a cold, meaningless universe) to mystical spirituality (knowing myself as a shamanic soul on an eternal mission) – taught me that the darkest challenges contain the potential for the greatest light, healing and self-discovery.
I watched the Cambridge Union debate from May 14th, 2026 on the theme:
‘This House Believes modern LGBTQ+ activism fails its community’.
An introduction to me: I read history at Churchill College, Cambridge from 1983-6, coming out of the closet half way through my final year – and still somehow managing to graduate despite spending much time in the Burleigh Arms gay pub in town from there on. I moved to London after graduating and have been part of the London LGBTQ+ community here for 40 years – enjoying the diversity of the London scene -drag, leather, discos, art, activism and the sexual underworld, participating in Pride parades, anti-Section 28 marches, equal age of consent protests etc.
I was diagnosed HIV+ in 1990 and lived with full blown AIDS from 1995-8, a period in which my body became sick and weak but my spirit came alive. I had been atheist since the age of 12 (and my study of history had affirmed me in that stance as so much conflict has arisen due to religion), but as I prepared myself to die I applied my historian mind to the subject of humanity’s wisdom traditions, and, as I discovered the deeper mystery that the modern world keeps us blind to, I surrendered myself to the spiritual path – a path I had really known nothing about despite my ‘high class’ education. I dropped my atheistic materialist mindset and entered into the paradigm of consciousness, appreciating now that humanity is on a spiritual evolution, one that is severely held back by the wool that has been well and truly pulled tight over most people’s eyes, especially I would say in academic circles.
It took a few years to rebuild strength post AIDS, during that time I went to nature for healing – met queer pagans and found the global tribe of Radical Faeries, a group that has been exploring the deeper spiritual nature of queerness since the 1970s. Since 2005 I have also been adding to the cauldron of LGBTQ+ community activities in the form of hosting queer spiritual and radical faerie events – gatherings, retreats, a monthly full moon meetup in London for drumming and dancing (the Queer Spirit Circle, in Vauxhall) and as one of the organisers of Queer Spirit Festival, a 5 day camping festival where hundreds gather to celebrate the spirituality and creativity of LGBTQ+ people from all the world’s cultures.
I watched the Cambridge Union debate with fascination, captivated from the start by the fact that the first speaker was Buck Angel, whom I remember rising to fame as a ground-breaking trans porn performer in the 1990s – the Man with a Pussy. 63 now, Buck rocked up in Cambridge Union dinner suit drag with black bow tie, slightly portly and totally fatherly in his demeanour. Despite his pioneering role, Buck has detractors in the transgender community because of his view that a trans person does not actually ‘change’ their sex – he agrees with the biological determinist view that sex is fixed, but gender is subjective, variable. So he disagrees with the proclamation that ‘Trans Women are Women’, upsetting those who feel this is important to emphasise. LOOK HOW LANGUAGE IS DIVIDING US – where is the understanding that all labels are superficial and limited in their usefulness?
Buck celebrated the achievements of the community over the decades but lays into modern LGBTQ+ activism, mocking our ever expanding alphabet and claiming we are losing what we gained because mainstream people do not like having transness thrust into their world. He feels that that young people questioning their gender are all too easily swept up in a medical process, when many of them are more going through a psychological journey. He speaks of the medical establishment making money from encouraging gender transition, but I think that does not apply in the UK as it might in the USA, if it’s real at all. So he agrees with the ban on puberty blockers for young people, but did not address the suicides of those trans or questioning teenagers who have been denied them.
I think Buck’s transition to male patriarch is complete. He has become the angry old man shouting at the kids for doing it wrong. Instead of grasping the deeper message of diversity and inclusivity, of exploration and discovery, that the queer alphabet represents he just mocks it. I wonder how the Two Spirits (native American shamanic queers), whose 2S is now often added in America to the list, feel about that. The expanding alphabet has made room for this spiritual aspect of queer nature to enter the picture, but this aspect has not yet made it to the Cambridge Union. Despite declaring that gay men have supported him over the years more than other trans people, Buck wants the LGB (sexual orientation) to be separated from the TQ+ (which he says are about identity), forgetting that the reason we have always been together (eg at Stonewall Inn) is because the hetero-patriarchy has long been excluding, persecuting, dominating us all. We are more visible now and finding more ways to define ourselves, why object to this? I embrace it. I would argue our movement is not really about sexuality or gender – our movement is about all people being free to live and love in the ways they feel natural to them. The Witches Creed – And it Harm None, Do What Thou Wilt – could be the motto of our movement, and it would be appropriate if it was as, unknown I think to the academics of Cambridge, in pre-Christian cultures across the world queer people were seen as having spiritual gifts – whether same sex inclined or gender-variant it was their inner androgyny that set the queer apart and even gave them special status.
The nearest sign of the core spirituality of our nature during the debate came from the floor when a self-defined NON-BINARY student spoke up about their personal experience of gender transition as a young person. Born in a female body, they did not seem traumatised by their time living as a male – in fact they seemed glad to have tried it and discovered ‘I made a terrible man’ – and how seemed happy to identify as NB, ie androgynous as cultures have called such people since ancient times. Where is the understanding that all living things are a blend of masculine and feminine energies – that’s how it works – as reflected in the Yin-Yang symbol and declared in the Tao Te Ching of China, in Shiva-Shakti principle of Hinduism and in ancient European philosophies too, eg the Hermetic Texts include this fundamental ‘law of gender’. “Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles; Gender manifests on all planes.”—The Kybalion. I will return to this.
Back to the speakers:
Those supporting the motion that ‘modern LGBTQ+ activism fails its community’ included Alphonso David, an American civil rights attorney and President and CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum. He pointed out that homosexuality is still criminalised in 60 countries around the world, countries that receive plenty of inward investment from western companies, highlighted the deaths of trans people around the world and the high rate of HIV among black gay Americans – and from these facts declared that modern LGBTQ+ activism is not serving its community. I agree with him. LGBTQ+ people are arguing amongst ourselves about who should be in the community, about flags and pronouns and failing completely to stand together as a force for continuing liberation around the world. I would love to see this change.
However I did not resonate at all with the third principle contributor supporting the theme. Maeve Halligan, founding president of the Cambridge Uni Society of Women. “Somewhere along the way, recently, the movement that fought for gay liberation decided that gay people were the problem,” was her opening gambit. Claiming the activist movement has ‘abandoned’ gay people Maeve presented a biological determinist view of sex and gender, criticising the LGBTQ movement for trying to convince people that biology is not real. She gets upset about workshops offered to lesbians interested in learning about male genitalia (at Queer Spirit we have had the same, and also workshops about the cunt aimed at gay men and these have been popular – plus nobody is forcing anyone to do a workshop!), and believes most who transition male to female are actually heterosexual men who are seeking sex with lesbians – plus she feels that telling children about the existence of trans people damages gay and lesbian children. Watching her was quite exhausting.
Speaking against the motion, Andrew Boff, a 67 year old London Assembly Member and Patron of LGBT+ Conservatives, applauded the achievements of LGBTQ+ activism and celebrated the diversity of our community, calling on all parts to work together and seeing discord in the community not as a sign of failure but as an indication of how much freer to express ourselves we are now, compared to the dark times he grew up in. Andrew argued that we must work together because the cause of our rights can go backwards as well as forwards.
Sammy McDonald, a history student and previous Union president, spoke against the motion from the same perspective – highlighting the many transphobic headlines in the press and their similarity to homophobic reports of the 1980s. Sammy is a gay man who knows he is lucky to live in a time when he is not condemned as a pervert and feels it is important to stand in solidarity with trans people because of the many forces lined up against them (such as Trump’s election campaign spending $220million on transphobic advertising). “ If you endorse this motion you endorse the view a backward notion that those who are victims of this rising hatred are the ones responsible.”
Dr Helen Webberley was the third speaker opposing the motion. Dr Webberley works with people going through gender transition. It was a relief to hear her speak about internal gender identity out of alignment with the physical body being a natural thing, not a disorder or illness. Also that she explained that biology is not as simple as xx chromosomes = female identification and xy = male, nature is more variable than that, and spoke of the massive harm being suffered by people who are attacked for not fitting the expected mould. However, while agreeing that one’s sex cannot fundamentally be changed she is at the same time arguing for trans women to be accepted as women. Again here I believe language and labels are dividing and damaging the cause.
This Cambridge Union debate affirmed what I already knew – that the intellgentsia of the western world are stuck in a blind alley of their own making, created by the arrogance of previous generations and maintained by a system that is threatened by its dissolution. The university system supports the continuation of our spiritually bereft, materialist culture by educating the future leaders of the land before they are mature enough to grasp the bigger, spiritual, picture (which I think for most comes in their late 20s with the Saturn return), and then locking them into a system that keeps them working and bringing up children, so with no time to grow into the soul’s awareness. My gayness – and my working class critique of the pampered middle and upper classes and the system they maintain – saved me from the trap. HIV gave me cause to question the purpose of my life and the stories I’d been told about life’s meaning, or lack thereof. It moved me to explore my inner self – through to the root of my consciousness – and who did I meet there? The divine feminine aspect of my soul.
Back in the 1950s, psychologist Blanche M Baker, was quoted in the pioneering queer publication, ONE magazine in the USA: “It is regrettable that all too many people think of sex in terms of an absolute dichotomy: men are male and women are female. Only a very little observation reveals that all of us are varying mixtures of maleness and femaleness both physically and psychologically.”
“…all of us are bisexual in both our physical and mental constitution. When this bi-sexuality is highly developed, at least on the psychic plane, you have the makings of a mystic,” wrote gay witch and activist Leo Martello, writing in the early 1970s and using bisexuality to mean both male and female, bi-gendered. The Witch of Gay Liberation – rainbow messenger
In fact this is a basic principle that has long been honoured around the world and is known in European esoteric traditions also: The Hermetic Principle teaches 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. “What, you say that God has both sexes, Trismegistus?” “Yes, Asclepius, and not God alone but all beings animate and vegetable.”
It is from this principle that our discussions around gender should begin.
In Buddhism, anatta is the teaching of no self; it states that nothing conditional can be pointed to as being who or what you are. It accepts that no aspect of being can be identified with in any kind of continuous, independent sense, so gender itself is a veil through which our deeper nature manifests.
Hindu sages have long taught that the soul is genderless, that everything in creation results from the interplay of masculine and feminine energies, and everything material is in fact a manifestation of 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.
One of India’s most prominent gurus, Mata Amritanandamayi, known as Amma, the ‘hugging mother,’ teaches “Whether woman or man, one’s real humanity comes to light only when the feminine and masculine qualities within one are balanced.”
In fact the very first book of the Old Testament tells us that God created humans ‘male and female in his image’ – this is generally taken to mean two separate sexes, whereas it is actually a reference of the Principle of Gender, that all things contain both male and female energy, that is how creation works.
Science has tried to make Creation fit into neat, tidy, boundaried boxes. But life is more fluid and flexible than that. Science seeks understanding by examination of the material. Spirituality teaches us how to examine the inner world, the immaterial – how to explore our own consciousness. Resulting from the mix of religious and scientific prejudice over such a long time, there is now a ‘war’ underway over gender definition, but this war is a false war, keeping firmly in place the paradigm of separation and division, whereas the explosion in trans exposure, confidence and awareness happening in the world is really a sign that we as a species are ready to move on, to grow in understanding, as well as in acceptance and celebration of the magnificent diversity of the human race. At the root of the matter we are all the emanation of blissful, creative, divine consciousness. The goal, as Hinduism puts it, is not enlightenment or salvation, but Self-realisation – discovering, uncovering, making real the divinity within. THE SPIRITUAL VIEW OF GENDER – rainbow messenger
This is what LGBTQ+ activism should address in my opinion – the fact that we are all human, all equal at the core, all deserving of love, all here to live freely as the fullness of our unique individuality within the whole. This is what LGBTQ+ people teach the world.
I am an organiser of Queer Spirit Festival, where lesbians, gay men, bi and trans people, and our friends and allies, gather to recognise nature, divinity, love, spirit in each other, in nature, in all beings.
LGBTQ+ — our opportunity is to recognise the validity, the beauty, the creativity, the divinity within each other. In this we teach the world how to celebrate difference, revel in diversity and create a more harmonious world. But there is a danger we will fall into the trap of divide and conquer, a consciousness programme that has been playing out on this planet for a very long time. We are the ones who can break that pattern. Queer people are born in every race, culture, class – we are born to be mediators, healers, community builders, barrier breakers. We are bearers of subject:SUBJECT consciousness – subject:SUBJECT – rainbow messenger
There is a fundamental error in the western mindset – the belief in division and separateness. This is the paradigm that is destroying the world. Queer people, with our global interconnected web of community, have the potential to change the world, if we realise the bigger picture we can shift the paradigm. Historically queer people have often been spiritual functionaries for their communities – it is time for us to reclaim these roles and discover what they can mean for us in the world today. It starts simply with respecting, honouring, listening to, learning from, recognising our commonalities – with each other.
I propose it’s time to update the Charge of the Goddess
for in humanity there is a desperate need
to reconnect to the immaculate Wholeness
which exists beyond the gender binary
and go beyond the historical definitions
of male and female deities.
When God was seen as Mother
the people saw humanity as her children
and all life of equal worth.
When God became a Father
dictating rules from up above
humanity became divided
even though this God says He’s Love.
When God was a Mother
the masculine was held within her orbit
as her son and lover:
Isis, Inanna, Cybele, Persephone, Aphrodite
all had their male lovers
though Artemis/Diana needed no masculine other.
When God became a Father
the feminine was suppressed
the Goddess faith destroyed
feminine men oppressed.
A misogynistic tyranny
drained the spirit out of nature.
Doreen Valiente’s Charge of the Goddess
invoked the return of that power.
But Spirit is both the creator and the creation
who as God and Goddess gives birth to this physical manifestation
of the emotions, spirit and mind of the divine
finding expression in space and in time
birthed into the human soul
to remember that THAT is WHAT WE ARE
is the human goal.
All Acts of Love and Pleasure are Her Rituals
She “is the beauty of the green earth, and the white moon among the stars, and the mystery of the waters, and the desire of the heart of man… Arise, and come unto Her. For She is the soul of nature, who gives life to the universe. from Her all things proceed, and unto Her all things must return; and before Her face, beloved of gods and men, let thine innermost divine self be enfolded in the rapture of the infinite.”
And He is the Self – Conscious Awareness, the I Am in each one of us
engaged in the dance of romance and rapture with Her divine creation.
She is the Creatrix, He is the Enraptured
All Acts of Love and Pleasure are THEIR rituals.
“Let Her/Their worship be within the heart that rejoiceth; for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are Her/Their rituals. And therefore let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you. And thou who thinkest to seek Her/Them, know thy seeking and yearning shall avail thee not unless thou knowest the mystery; that if that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee, then thou wilt never find it without thee. For behold, She/They has been with thee from the beginning; and She/They/That/Them* is that which is attained at the end of desire.”
*For anyone objecting to a Them there, I remind you that the Old Testament word Elohim which became God, was originally plural.
May 1st 2026 Solar Beltane coincides with the Full Moon on the same day, a rare and extremely magically powerful alignment! The moon’s movements follow a roughly 19 year pattern – but in 2007 full moon fell on May 2nd, so the last alignment of sun opposite moon on May 1st was back in 1988.
Coming soon after the famous Harmonic Convergence of 1987 – when a grand fire trine in the sky involving the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars all in Leo, Jupiter in Aries, Saturn and Uranus in Sagittarius, was considered to be a potentially powerful energetic gateway, bringing spiritual activation, evolutionary acceleration and a collective desire for harmony – that 1988 Beltane could be said to have kicked a period of positivity for humanity that lasted into the early 21st century. Considering the massive elemental shifts in the cosmos recently, this year’s Sun-Moon opposition at Beltane could bring a, long-awaited, surge of positive energy again.
In the late 80s-90s the world got brighter – the long Cold War ended, 1989 saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the USSR collapsed in 1991. Peace finally came to Northern Ireland with the Good Friday Agreement. House music got the world dancing, ecstasy raised the vibration, culture flourished, economies grew. LGBT+ people came out proudly in vast numbers demanding equality and action, by the late 90s men were no longer dying in large numbers from AIDS.
This year’s Solar-Lunar Beltane peak has the potential to also bring a massive new shot of (so desperately needed) positivity and hope. This time we have just collectively passed through an incredibly challenging period of frequency change as the outer planets of the solar system have transitioned from earth/water astrological signs into air/fire. Pluto in Capricorn Earth 2008-2024, Neptune in Pisces Water 2011- January 2026, Uranus in Taurus Earth 2018 – April 25th 2026 have brought a gradually deepening energy that might be called gravitational – water and earth pull us deeply into the material, physical experience of being alive. Life has seemed to get heavier, harder, more conflict, more struggle, more violence, more expense! From March 2023 until February 13th 2026 Saturn was also adding to the gravitational pressure while transiting through Pisces – so the peak of that energy has only just recently receded and we are still feeling the after effects.
Pluto, Neptune, Uranus – these planets reflect the deep movements within our collective consciousness, layers that we do not usually experience directly in our egoic focused minds. Saturn and Jupiter reflect the collective fields we share more directly with each other – their movements are mirrors to our societal moods and attitudes. Since June 9th 2025 Jupiter has been making his 12-yearly visit to the water sign Cancer, so also adding to the earth/water mix. Jupiter will reach the fire realm of Leo on June 30th 2026 in time to liven up the summer, as his influence over our collective fields shifts from the emotional, protective and defensive Cancerian spirit into the much more playful, outgoing and expressive Leonine vibration.
We are in a slow-motion Turning Point lasting a few months, but this Beltane will kick us into the final stages of it.
PARADIGM SHIFT IS HERE
Sun in Taurus opposite Moon in Scorpio at Beltane 2026 is a huge cosmic, soul-level, reset, a time of alignment between our deepest and darkest, and our highest and holiest places within, a culmination of the many resets that have been coming our way for a few months. This time it’s as deep as it can go. And it’s also collective.
This could bring breakthrough for many. Breaking through the no doubt intense personal dramas that have likely been arising in recent weeks/months – but also more. For we are collectively in a huge shift, that I describe as a breaking through the materialist delusion into awareness of the cosmic, divine dream manifesting here on Earth.
I’ve been celebrating Beltane for over 20 years. This powerful festival, which was widely and wildly celebrated across Britain until the 17th century(ie for a millennium after we became a Christian country as some think), honours the sacred Union of matter and spirit- and humanity’s part in anchoring that union. It reminds us we are part of an eternal, wild, free and holy spirit. The May Pole represents the Union, the Beltane fire is the place we burn away what no longer serves us, to be ready for the growth spurt that the next 6 weeks are going to bring. Beltane is the point when nature hits full stride, after a slow spring awakening there is now no holding her back. Peak growth time is here. What humans do not understand is this happens to us too – we are not separate from nature – and this next period of the year can be a time when some people spin out with manic behaviour and mental health crises. The opportunity at Beltane is to make sure we get properly earthed, connected to the planet, the elements, to community, and to consciously address and release the issues that have been bringing us down – so that as the new energies rise we can receive them and stay in balance.
With Pluto in Aquarius Air, Neptune and Saturn in Aries Fire and now Uranus just arriving in Gemini Air for the next 8 years, this Beltane is bringing us a SOUL RESET. An internal shift to a new era of air and fire – bringing spiritual, aspirational and transformational energies to the heavy load of earth and water fuelled issues and feelings we’ve been carrying. Life is also spiritual! Not just material! Why doesn’t our politics, our economics, our society reflect this! In time they will! We have to reset in ourselves first! Change the inner to change the outer!
This Beltane is a chance to affirm the unity of life and spirit. To affirm the Oneness of the human spirit. And affirm the Holy Wholeness of ourselves – our light and shadows all necessary parts of the Divine Play.
As I underwent my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Spirit in the mid 90s, I saw visions of a miraculous awakening coming to the whole planet, but I also felt very alone in my multi-dimensional perspective! I had to search for places where I could meet others seeing, exploring that reality. Now the Internet is full of people sharing the excitement of their awakening stories. But still the mainstream story of human life on earth carries on oblivious to the bigger mystery, to the magic happening through people reconnecting to nature and spirit, to a belief in and sense of Oneness. When enough people get it everything will change. The light is breaking through and this Beltane may it shine on YOU.
At 420 rallies across the world people come together in the name of peace and, as Bob Marley sang, One Love — and to stand against racist laws that keep one of nature’s most versatile plants illegal. But at London’s Hyde Park 420 Cannabis Rally 2026 the police were intrusive, provocative and certainly out to spoil the fun. They conducted searches and made arrests — when doing so a number of them formed a wall around the person being grappled and held down. One such man loudly declared over and over that he was being arrested for possessing one joint — on 4 20!. The impassive looks on the faces in the police wall was disturbing, though occasionally I spotted one thinking ‘wtf we doing here?’…
Next year will be the 60th anniversary of the first Legalise Pot Rally in London’s Hyde Park, in July 1967. Organised by parapsychologist, Steve Abrams, 3000 people gathered in the name of flower power, and the rally featured a speech from beat poet Allen Ginsberg, which can be seen in the video clip below. The following week on July 24th 1967 a full page advert appeared in The Times proclaiming that ‘The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice’. Arranged by Abrams and paid for in large part by Paul McCartney, the signatories on the ad included author Graham Greene, and scientists Jonathan Miller and Francis Crick.
The 1967 video reveals that harassment of smokers by the police and the struggle with the campaigners over the use of amplification at the rally has been going on since the beginning. When a policeman steps through the crowd to stop Ginsberg speaking the poet presents him a smile and a flower. The law prohibits amplified music in royal parks – however, Hyde Park hosts massive concerts all summer, so this policy absolutely stinks.
Also at the rally, and captured in a pictured with Ginsberg, was Lee Harris – a South African actor/playwright recently moved to London, who would in 1972 open the city’s first head shop, Alchemy in Portobello Road, which he ran until he retired in the mid 2010s, having first stood in 2015 as a London mayoral candidate on a ‘Cannabis is Safer than Alcohol’ platform. Lee stayed true to the cause for the whole of his life. During the 2015 election campaign he said that, in the 1960s, “divorce, gay rights, women’s rights, everyone, everything changed except cannabis and we think it’s time that this country gets rid of its archaic laws and becomes part of the 21st century.”
Although certainly outdated and unjust, those laws against cannabis sale and possession have actually only been around since 1928 – whereas archaeological and historical records indicate the use of hemp in Britain since truly archaic times, ie the Bronze Age. In the mediaeval period cannabis was an important medical and therapeutic tool, and was used as an anaesthetic and to treat conditions including gout, weight loss, urinary infections and childbirth issues. Areas in Scotland, particularly monastic communities, grew cannabis for both fibre and medicinal purposes. The famous German Abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098 to 1179 AD) wrote extensively about the positive (and negative) physical and mental effects of cannabis in her work “Physica”.
In the 1650s the medical uses of cannabis, including as an antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and antispasmodic, were included in a version of the London College of Physicians’ Pharmacopoeia published by botanist, herbalist and physicist Nicholas Culpeper. In the late 19th century cannabis was commonly used as a medicine in Britain, while in India, the India Hemp Drugs Commission recommended that cannabis should be taxed and regulated rather than prohibited, recognising its use in religious ritual and citing ‘how little injury society has hitherto sustained from hemp drugs’ and concluded that use of cannabis has a number of positive medical, emotional and social benefits.
In 1899 British pharmacologist Walter Ernest Dixon published a paper on ‘the pharmacology of Cannabis indica’, in which he wrote: “In cases where an immediate effect is desired the drug should be smoked, the fumes being drawn through water. In fits of depression, mental fatigue, nervous headache, and exhaustion a few inhalations produce an almost immediate effect, the sense of depression, headache, feeling of fatigue disappear and the subject is enabled to continue his work, feeling refreshed and soothed.”
Despite this medical enthusiasm, cannabis was not widely used in the 19th century and gradually a prejudice against it formed, that has been linked to racism and colonial prejudices against how native populations were perceived to consume or use the plant. In 1923 the League of Nations called for tighter regulation of cannabis in the UK, which the British government at first resisted due to the findings of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission – but in 1928 the Dangerous Drugs Act made possession a criminal offence.
The first ‘cannabis bust’ in the UK took place at the Number 11 Club in Soho in 1952. Famously in 1967, the same year as the first Hyde Park rally, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones received a prison sentence for possession.
1967 rally
40 years after the 1928 criminalisation of cannabis the Legalise Pot Cannabis Rallies were underway. We are now 60 years further on – for 6 decades cannabis campaigners have kept the flame alive and the authorities have tried to spoil the fun. The behaviour of the police at the 2026 Hyde Park rally was seriously disturbing. Why do the powers that be persist in criminalising one of nature’s most versatile, healing plants?
The campaign for decriminalisation has had few peak moments where optimism was high that the laws might change, such as the early 2000s when the Labour government reduced the classification of cannabis from class B to C – but they soon reversed this and things went quiet again.
The rallies continued annually, sometimes becoming Freedom Marches through the streets, and included speakers, poets, stalls, campaigning groups. However, since Covid the authorities have made life even harder for the campaigners, and none of those featured at the 2026 event.
The 2019 rally saw the largest ever attendance at Hyde Park, as hopes for change rose due to legal medical marijuana entering the frame, as a result of high profile media campaigns centred around children with life-threatening epileptic seizures who had experienced significant improvements from cannabis. Medical cannabis is now big business in the UK. Many of the people at the Hyde Park rally this year would have had cannabis prescriptions, making some of the people there criminals while others are not. It’s getting crazier!
The Labour government in the 2000s ignored the advice of its own ‘drug tsars’ who considered the evidence and all of whom proposed changes to the law. This was nothing new – in 1969 a committee set up by the Home Office concluded that cannabis is no more harmful than alcohol or tobacco and recommended that restrictions on use should be lifted. They were not. Instead, the 1969 Misuse of Drugs Act in England instated a maximum of five years’ imprisonment for cannabis possession.
Again, in 1979, an Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs [ACMD], created to guide government policy. suggested lowering the classification of cannabis to class C under the Misuse of Drugs Act. The government did not agree: In 1980 more than 20,000 cannabis convictions were handed out in the UK – the number more than doubled by 1991, reaching 42,209.
Government statistics show that in 2023/24, the police and border forces in England and Wales made 152,660 seizures of cannabis, the most of any drug. Statista.com reports that 28 percent of UK citizens surveyed in 2025 thought that the drug should be legal, with a further 27 percent supporting its decriminalization – and that recent surveys also indicate that almost one in three people in England and Wales had used Cannabis at some point in their lives, despite it being illegal. England and Wales drug offences 2025| Statista
Has everyone noticed that across the UK every newsagent, supermarket and local shop sells large rolling papers for making joints? Several brands usually. We are a nation of smokers. We resonated with Bob Marley’s marijuana soaked 1970s message of ‘One Love’ — like the Jamaicans and the hemp smoking holy men of India the Brits found the weed struck a chord with our pagan heart — the Brits in fact received back from our colonies not only the use of cannabis but the knowledge that cannabis is sacred.
Criminalisation came from a racist mindset. Decriminalisation would be a powerful way of honouring the multi-cultural land Britain has become. Look at the cannabis rallies — people of all races are there, united by the healing herb. People seeking peace, unity, friendship. The things Britain should be about, should be celebrating as our post-imperial contribution to a peaceful global future.
When conflicts that arise between the various identities in the LGBTIQ+ spectrum it suits the patriarchal control system well — divide and rule has long been its way. How about we blast away that old pattern, and seek for the deeper reason that we find ourselves walking with Pride under one rainbow.
I have been sickened recently seeing posts from the LGB Alliance crowing about their exclusionary conference coming up in London, and videos from the likes of Julie Burchill still pushing a hateful, twisted view of trans people. These queers — or non-queers more like as they rarely appreciate ‘queer’ as an umbrella term for our alphabet community — need a reality check. The persecution of gay men, women and gender-fluid/trans/nb people has gone hand in hand for 2000 years. It is only the relative social and legal freedom, so recently gained, that has made possible this highly visible emergence of queerness in all its diversity. Pride has always been about celebrating each other — because it is about celebrating LIFE itself, and claiming the freedom to be who we are. The rainbow is the perfect symbol for that.
Mythologically, the rainbow was the bridge to Asgard, the realm of the Gods, to the Norse people. For the Greeks, Iris was the rainbow messenger connecting the worlds. Oxumare is the intersex rainbow serpent God in Yoruba religion. Ancient Japanese myth saw the rainbow as the path ancestors took to visit the planet. The Irish have long sought the pot of gold, guarded by a leprechaun, at the rainbow’s end. Bulgarians believed that walking under the rainbow would change your internal gender. For the Buddhists rainbow consciousness is the highest state attainable. In the Bible the rainbow is God’s sign to humanity that all shall be well.
The role of myth is to remind us of the potential in the human soul. From whatever culture we view it, the rainbow has long been seen as a reminder that we are part of a bigger picture. Call it spirit, consciousness or nature — the rainbow reminds us we are all part of the picture.
“As Native Americans, we believe the Rainbow is a sign from the Spirit in all things. It is a sign of the union of all people, like one big family. The unity of all humanity, many tribes and peoples, is essential,” Late Thomas Banyacya, Spokesman, Hopi traditional elders
There are two rainbow movements in the world today. One of them is the global movement for LGBTQ+ rights, the other is an ongoing development of the counter-culture effort to give birth to a new human consciousness that began in the 1960s, and takes the form of ‘neo-pagan’ rainbow gatherings around the world. Both movements have the rainbow as their symbol because both are serve the ultimate liberation of human consciousness from oppressive belief structures. The two movements have the potential to learn a lot from and share with each other.
The Rainbow has seven colours that merge and dissolve into each other — reflecting the nature of the peoples of the earth, who do the same. Rainbow Consciousness sees all humans as part of the rich and diverse, colourful and creative manifestation of Spirit on planet Earth. We live at the time of destiny — as expanded networks of information and communication make the world one, long established institutions and systems of control are breaking down. How we engage with each other, with the planet, and with the spiritual dimensions is going through a profound shift, a shift of the ages. The breaking down of barriers around faith, gender and sexuality are producing new experiments in human community, where some are learning to live from a place of expanding awareness, heart centred communication and openness to the many planes of consciousness. All over the world people who believe in peace, in the unity of humankind, in non-dual awareness, who see love as the way forward for the species, are growing in numbers and confidence. Independent thinkers whose free spirit wakes up those around them.
The increasing visibility and acceptance of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people in recent decades is part of a fundamental shift in human attitudes. Natural human traits that were long suppressed by patriarchal religious attitudes are finding their way back. It shows that patriarchal systems of control are starting to break down. This development challenges religions to live up to their philosophies of love or be exposed for their hypocrisy. It shows how societies are evolving, and exposes those that are not. A brighter world of peace and tolerance, creativity and love, will only arrive when enough people want it.
The LGBT movement uses the Rainbow Flag as its banner. Some in the other Rainbow movement are confused by this but the underlying point is that we’re all seeking freedom to be ourselves to live in harmony with our deepest nature. Eventually perhaps all labels around sexuality will fall away, but for now the labels help some of us to advance on the path of self discovery.
Prominent spiritual feminist Zsuzsanna Budapest, in her 1991 book Grandmother Moon, wrote: “One of nature’s most pleasant ways of coping with overpopulation is to increase the number of homosexuals in the community. Rather than producing children, gays provide support for those in the community who do have children. The gay uncles and aunts are the legendary fun relatives we remember as adults. Their productivity is directed into other areas. They have enriched our culture with outstanding works in the arts-theater, dance, music, and so on. They are the emotional and cultural caretakers of the population.”
The RAINBOW TRIBE “is a loose, international affiliation of individuals who have a stated goal of trying to achieve peace and love on Earth. Participants make the claim that they are the “largest non-organization of non-members in the world.” In addition to referring to itself as a non-organization, the group’s “non-members” also even playfully call the group a “disorganization.” There are no official leaders or structure, no official spokespersons, and no formalized membership. Strictly speaking, the only goals are set by each individual, as no individual can claim to represent all Rainbows in word or deed. Also contained within the philosophy are the ideals of creating an intentional community, embodying spirituality and conscious evolution, and practicing non-commercialism.” (Wikipedia)
This sounds a lot like Radical Faeries (a nature and community focused counter-culture to the gay commercial mainstream that’s been going since 1979 and I been part of since 2001) to me. Much of it could actually apply to the global LGBTQ community too — loose, international affiliations, non organisation, no official leaders, no membership. The global Queer community could, however, embrace much more intentionality, explore its spiritual history and even become a beacon of conscious evolution. The other Rainbow tribe could help us get there. Spirituality is the big area of life that has, via some religions, been used to beat queer people down, and it is the big area that the LGBTQ movement has not worked out how to address. The clue to that however is in the rainbow — and visible in the Rainbow Tribe’s spiritual reclamation of pre-Christian, pagan practices that unite people with each other and spirit, that open up the inner universe of consciousness, and their openness to wisdom teachings from Native Americans, Hinduism, Buddhism.
The Rainbow reminds us that all colours and kinds of humanity all come from one unified source.
Since the 1960s a new consciousness has been emerging on planet Earth as we transition into the astrological age of Aquarius, a rapid spiritual awakening is occurring – a shift happening for many people which science, organized religions, media, governments, academia are not at all tuned into or aware of. I awoke to the consciousness shift as I experienced it happening within myself in the mid 1990s. At the time I had a sense that the 2020s would see the fulfilment of this global awakening, and that I, born in the 1960s and ‘waking up’ to multidimensional reality in the 90s, was in some here to be a bridge between the 60s hippies and the cosmic kids to come in the 2020s.
To put it simply, I would descrive the nature of this shift as being about coming to see, feel and understand that life is an interconnected Oneness, arising in consciousness – not consciousness arising in life as materialist science sees it – that we are part of a unified whole, never separate, never not existing. We have within us both an individual self, but we are also part of a collective Self. What we do to one we do to all, what we do to others we do to ourselves. This realisation changes everything.
Great Aquarian Conjunction February 4-5, 1962
In early February 1962, the Sun, Moon and all five visible planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—aligned in the sign of Aquarius, creating a rare celestial event that captured global attention. For some, fears of doomsday were stoked – they were “stocking up bomb shelters in the United States, and holding nonstop prayer vigils attended by millions in Bombay, India. One group of believers moved en masse to the town of Cleator, Arizona, which the group thought was one of only 12 spots in the world safe from the imminent disaster. Others claimed that the alignment was responsible for the assassination the following year of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.” Benchmarks: February 4, 1962: Five planets align – but no end of the world
For others this was the kickstart of a new age for humanity – an age of spiritual enlightenment, equality, humanitarianism – the new astrological Age of Aquarius. Many astrologers view the 1962 alignment as the sign in the heavens that the Aquarian game was underway. And indeed, the 60s brought the spread of alternative spiritualities and counter-culture experimentation with clothes, music and psychedelics, the Summer of Love. All very Aquarian. 1962 was also the year of the Cuban missile crisis, bringing global fear of nuclear war, there was a lot of excitement about the space programme and the Beatles arrived on the world stage. A global consciousness was being born.
Astrologer Daniel Giamario, founder of the Turning Point Mystery Schoolregards the February 1962 Great Aquarian Conjunction as the start of a period lasting until 2034 which he calls ‘The Great Turning.’Founders Corner – Turning of the Ages Mystery School
This 72 year period 1962-2034 contains several major astrological events that can be interpreted as each nudging humanity further along the transitional path through the time of turning from Piscean collective dream-mind to Aquarian ‘cosmic consciousness’. In these years the causes of racial and sexual equality, of gay rights, of humanitarian aid, and the spread of spiritual practices and teachings – this thanks to the very Aquarian manifestation of the Internet enabling astrologers, healers, spiritual teachers to reach audiences they could not previously – have grown alongside a transforming human understanding, an expanding human appreciation that we are all connected.
The Harmonic Convergence (August 16–17, 1987)
Widely considered a major turning point, this event involved a rare, synchronized global meditation, with many gathering at sacred ‘power spots’ around the planet, timed to coincide with a grand fire trine in the sky involving the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars all in Leo, Jupiter in Aries, Saturn and Uranus in Sagittarius. The alignment was considered to be a potentially powerful energetic gateway, bringing spiritual activation, evolutionary acceleration and a collective desire for harmony. The intention was to create a wave of harmonic resonance across the Earth, anchoring higher vibrational frequencies into the planetary grid.
Some believed this point to mark the end of “hell cycles” and a shift in Earth’s collective karma, ushering in a new age of peace. The fall of communism did follow soon after and a new era of global peace did seem possible, for a while.
Culturally, the late 1980s brought house music which would go on to conquer the world! It wasn’t long before ravers across the globe were experiencing loved-up states of consciousness that many considered their weekly dose of holy communion.
“This is my church This is where I heal my hurts
It’s a natural grace Of watching young life shape It’s in minor keys Solutions and remedies Enemies becoming friends When bitterness ends…” Faithless, God is A DJ.
American New Age writer José Argüelles connected the Harmonic Convergence to the Tzolkin, the sacred Mayan calendar, claiming that it marked the beginning of the final 25-year countdown to December 21, 2012, a key date much associated with the end of a cycle and the emergence of a new consciousness paradigm.
“The Harmonic Convergence of 1987 was a pivotal moment in the modern spiritual movement, symbolizing a shift in consciousness, planetary awakening, and the call for humanity to align with higher vibrational states.
Uranus, considered the ruling planet of Aquarius, was in his home sign during these years of millennial fervour. This was the period when the World Wide Web came into general use, birthing a communications revolution and ever deepening sense of global interconnection. In the UK a new Labour government brought optimism and change, which included equal rights for gay people at long last. Successful treatments brought an end to the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. These points are crucial – a little discussed aspect of the Aquarian energy is its queerness – Aquarius is the sign of gay love (personified in myth as the the love between Zeus and Ganymede) and Aquarius is at the same time the most androgynous sign of the zodiac – hence we can also regard increasing numbers of visible trans people as part of the new age birthing. (Ultimately we are all a Self that is beyond gender, and we are all a mix of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits, both physically and psychologically. Look at anyone’s astrological chart and we can see how so called male and female energies are present and activating within them. Aquarius gets this, and wonders why some others don’t.)
Aquarius is a sign of paradox – another example is that of being the sign of maximum individuation (Aquarian energy insists we be our unique selves) at the same time as the sign of the group, of collective consciousness. Get your head round it – we can’t have one without the other. The Aquarian glyph can be seen as symbolizing the dichotomies of the sign – two parallel horizontal lines indicating the two levels of mind, individual and collective. Aquarius unites them, and the Aquarian age will teach us how to evolve into the fullness and experience of both.
Winter Solstice 2012
The big moment heralded by many as a turning point into a new form of human consciousness. Those who expected it to happen overnight were disappointed.
I made an in-depth study of the Mayan calendar, exploring the work of Carl Johan Calleman, a Swedish biochemist.
Having had my own revelations of the cyclical and directional qualities of consciousness in the Spring of 1995 while preparing myself for predicted death from AIDS, I felt complete resonance with Calleman’s interpretation of the calendar as a chart of the evolution of consciousness on our planet, consisting of 9 creation cycles which run alongside each other, each one shorter and more rapid than the previous. All 9 reach the end of their cycles at the same point, with many scholars considering date in western terms for this point was December 21st, 2012.
Each creation cycle of the calendar is 20 times shorter than the previous, and the pace of evolution – the rate of change happening on earth (ie in life as a whole, in the overall consciousness that we are part of) – moves 20 times faster at each level. We feel this acceleration and it causes many people to feel ‘time is speeding up’, but it is the rate of change, the accumulation of new experiences that is accelerating. In economics, politics, culture – and in our families and social lives – in recent decades things have been developing and changing at a pace like never before. Calleman, and others, believed the last stages of the calendar would bring interaction with other planets, the birth of a galactic consciousness. My own journey with spirit led me to see things differently – during my underworld journey (three years living as PWA, person with AIDS) I experienced an opening to the inner realms, which revealed much to me about the multi-dimensional nature of consciousness. I regarded the end of the Mayan calendar as signifying that all levels of spirit/consciousness/light are now fully in place on the planet, all accessible – including all the ‘lower’ levels of unconscious projection and behaviour – but the higher levels are here to be experienced within oneself and developed through shared high vibrational experience with others. It is literally in humanity’s hands now – we each have to make the choice to evolve our minds into the next levels that are available to us. The multiverse of light-love-bliss is here but we have to choose to engage it.
At the 2012 Winter Solstice Queer Spirit Circle (a meet-up I have run in London since 2005) we made ritual to symbolise the transition from the old world paradigm of division and discord into a new paradigm of love, consciousness and unity. We didn’t expect immediate results, but we understood that that evolution is a step, a choice, the whole world needs to make, and after the first step come others.
The Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn December 21, 2020 at 0 degrees of Aquarius.
This event was highly significant because it began a new 200-year cycle of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in air signs (rather than earth signs), with the first in the series falling in Aquarius, signalling a shift toward community, innovation, and technological advances. During the 200 years of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in earth signs humanity’s material knowledge, wealth, standards of living have massively increased. So has our ability to destroy life on earth. We badly need wisdom to match our material strength but we’ve been so materially focussed as a species that we can not yet even imagine the many revolutions in the realm of air – the realm of the human mind – that are to come.
Saturn in Aquarius (2020–2023)
Saturn’s transit through Aquarius brought a three-year period of intense focus on collective responsibility, the regulation of technology, and the restructuring of social institutions, reinforcing the shift away from the Piscean, top-down structures. Before departing Capricorn, Saturn made a conjunction with the lord of the Underworld, Pluto, on Jan 12th 2020 – and shortly after the Covid 19 pandemic hit hard. When Saturn, the planet of restrictions and lessons, entered Aquarius, the sign of the collective, we were hit by by global lockdowns. Freedom of movement and association gone, but Saturn does things for a reason, he’s teaching us all the time. Life changed, people changed. A much longer trajectory was playing out.
Pluto’s Entry into Aquarius (2023–2024)
Pluto entered Aquarius for a short stint in 2023 and began its long-term, 20-year transit through the sign in late 2024. This is regarded as a massive, long-term structural transformation toward digital advancement, the dismantling of old systems, and societal reordering. Pluto mirrors the deepest parts of our collective consciousness, while in Capricorn he has been shaking the institutions that underpin society, structurally, politically, economically. In Aquarius his energy will rock, shake and rebirth our understanding of who we are, individually and collectively, a 20 year process now underway.
Aquarius New Moon Solar Eclipse February 17th, 2026
Coming alongside the epoch-making shift of Saturn and Neptune into Aries and conjunction on February 20th at 0 degrees of the zodiac, this new moon, which opened the year of the Fire Horse in the Chinese calendar, and was the powerful night of Shivaratri in the Hindu world, was a signal, for those that can see it, that a new stage of the Turning is here. Once Uranus shifts from Taurus to Gemini in April, all the outer planets will have completed their transition from water/earth energies to fire/air energy. The background energy of our collective consciousness, from so many perspectives, is shifting into very different frequency fields from where it has been for almost two decades. Humanity will follow, kicking, screaming or celebrating and rejoicing?
In April 2026 we will experience the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Neptune and (for 2 days – 15 to 17th) also the Moon, all in the first sign of the zodiac, fire sign Aries, at once. This is unprecedented and affirms that the shift away from the material to the spiritual paradigm is happening apace – and will be felt personally: It’s not just happening in the astrological background. Each step into the energies of the Aquarian Age is a step towards embodiment – because although Aquarius is an air sign, a mentally attuned energy – it is through manifestation, through creativity, through tangible joy shared with others, through living fully as we we really are, that the mind finds its fulfilment.
The Great Turning, as described by Daniel Giamario, has another eight years to run.
The 1960s brought the dawning
but now it’s almost morning
of the Age of Awakened Humanity:
Wake Up the Sleepy Heads
From the dream of the Living Dead,
time to rise and be the Cosmic Conscious Human, instead.
I first held a drum in my hands while in a field in Dorset in 1999 at the second ever Queer Pagan Camp. I felt the power, magic and potential straight away. I am forever grateful to Lou Hart for introducing me to the djembe and teaching me technique and rhythms.
Since 2005 I have hosted the Queer Spirit Circle in London, where we meet, usually at full moon, to drum, dance, make moon ceremony and build community. Dozens come along for a few hours of energy raising, emotional release and spiritual connections.
Drumming has been recognised by science as a practice that supports good mental and emotional health and that builds community bonds….
I’d like to share this excerpt from from a book by Arthur Hull – ‘Drum Circle Facilitation: Building Community Through Rhythm‘
“During a rhythm-based event, community consciousness is built among the participants and it carries into their daily life. A facilitated drum circle event is a natural community builder. With community metaphors delivered during the windows of communication, a good facilitator can reinforce the natural community-building experience. Comparing differences is a separation trap. Sharing differences is a community celebration. People call it ―team building – in the business environment, or ―synergizing – in the personal growth world, but the bottom line is that a rhythm-based event, in its most basic form, is a powerful tool for community building. At the end of a facilitated drum circle, strangers seem less strange to each other. There is more camaraderie in the population as they have created a group consciousness together. The players have been in constant collaboration for one or two hours, cooperating with each other to create beautiful rhythms and music together. In the process of playing together, participants put into action the basic elements that make a community or team function successfully to achieve any goal. As Babatunde Olatunji always said, ―Drumming is the simplest thing that we can do to bring us together.
“This melting of the ―physiology of separatenes – is a phenomena that happens in every drum circle event regardless of the group‘s age, culture or intention. Where the body goes, the mind and heart soon follow. Once this melting happens, the concept of separateness in the minds of the players also melts and dissolves. Instead of looking for and thinking about the things that separate them, they look for and think about the things that connect them. In a drum circle those connecting elements are easy to find. They are in the music and rhythm.
“Those involved in this grass-roots rhythmical expression movement can testify to the power of drumming and its ability to relieve stress and anxiety, calm the mind and create an expressive channel to release pent-up emotions. The exercise aspects of drumming alone make it a healthy activity. Drumming is one of many disciplines that can enhance the wellness factor in your life.
“Barry Bittman, MD, a researcher and neurologist, is head of the Mind-Body Wellness Center, in Meadville, Pennsylvania. His research has shown that certain group drumming protocols can positively affect the immune system in your body. He has broken the AMA ―sound barrier – by proving that drumming can have a measurable, reproducible, positive impact on many aspects of biology, psychology and social interaction.”
“The sense of gayness as a Spirit path is growing. As we break out of straight mind-bindings we naturally recoil from seeing ourselves and each as either mono-sided homo-sexualists or homo-oriented straights… for many of us come revelations of feminist thought/ practice: we discover women exposing, breaking free of sado-slavery into whirling fiery gyn-ecstacies of loving magickal sister-Selves. …We discover anarcho-sissydom, life-loving faggotry and more. We begin to suspect the existence of hidden universes beyond the pale of straight space/time delusions,
“Our straight socio-cultural enculturations have blinded us. We must turn to the freer world of our imagination, fantasy, dreams, myths…. Let us build fairy mythologies – gay ways of thinking and doing – to realise and protect our loving soulful brotherhood, to reclaim our Selves, recreate our culture, regain our heritage, remember our fates as beings of Spirit, wisdom, power compassion, truthfulness, light.”
So wrote Mitch Walker in the 1970s, this was published in Visionary Love, 1980. Back in the first decade of Gay Liberation there were some men who felt that the movement was quickly assimilating into hetero-normative societal standards: “The homophile movement is a dead thing: dead to the gay vision, anti-magickal, counter-revolutionary. Its spokespeople and theorists shun the roots (the radical, source of nurturance and understanding) in favour of surface values: the social norm, success, integration, acceptance, assimilation. Its shallow reality suffocates the vision in us, co-opting gay people and vitiating the creativity and potential of the Gay Movement.” Mitch was to become one of the founders of the Radical Faerie community, which held its first gathering in Arizona in 1979, advertised with a goal of “exploring breakthroughs in gay consciousness” and “the spiritual dimensions of gayness.” Parallel to pagan lesbian feminists, such as Starhawk and Zsuzsanna Budapest, who were leading a surge of ‘spiritual feminism’ at the time, the Faeries sought to embody a new way of seeing and interacting with the world – by embracing all beings as part of a living wholeness. “All faggots are feminists, and militant ones at that. To cultivate your woman-energy, your feminism, is to increase your ability to see and walk through the great portal. In fact it’s essential.” wrote Mitch.
Harry Hay, the most well known founder of the Radical Faeries, believed that gay men were born with what he called ‘subject:SUBJECT consciousness’ – the ability to meet and treat other as self. “We must not suppose that we share subject-SUBJECT vision only in the spheres of Love and personal relations. Actually, almost at once, we also begin to become aware that we have been accumulating bits and pieces of subject-SUBJECT perceptions and insights all our lives – talking to trees and birds and rocks and Teddy Bears… For the world we inherit, the total Hetero-Male-oriented-and-dominated world of Tradition and of daily environment, the summum bonum of our history, our philosophy, our psychology, our culture, and very languages of communication – all are totally subject – OBJECT in concept, in definition, in evolution, in self-serving orientation. Men and Women are – sexually, emotionally, and spiritually – objects to one another.”
The AIDS years from the early 1980s shifted the focus of gay activism from consciousness expansion to survival. The plague removed many men born in the 1950s and 60s from the picture – and although the Radical Faerie community has grown and spread across the globe in recent decades, the magical/spiritual insights that the Faeries, following in the footsteps of Mitch, continue to discover about gay/queer nature have remained largely hidden from the rest of LGBTQ+ culture.
The focus of Radical Faerie magic was originally male oriented, but its essence is not at all separatist. Faerie is an androgynous gateway, opening “the doors through which gay vision can take us,” doors which lead to uncovering and celebrating the polarities (receptive/active, yin/yang, female/male) of the divine Self. Faerie spirituality also focuses on the importance of harmony between the Earth and all of Her creatures and the ultimate necessity of healing our relationship with the Earth.
“Faerie is a see-ing through polarity. In straight consciousness Bi-Polar Thought is king: male and female are opposites, win-or-lose is the game, reality and dream are separate, immutable and contradictory. But there are Fairies, who look on in gentle mocking laughter at such childishness, for they know that everyone is now ‘female’, now ‘male’, that no one ever wins when anybody loses, that reality and dream flip into each other at the flick of a glittering wand…
“Being a crazy faggot is part of our radio-reception equipment for the signals across the Bridge. Our no-role emptiness provides the tuner to receive the spirits. That’s why we’re called fairies, faerie being the name of the spirit-land in Celtic mythology…
“Think of Fairy as a symbol, representing or triggering experience of joyful freedom from the myth of One Highest, liberation of be-ings and conscious forms from the bondage of oneself, opening up to the kosmopolitan nature of Self-universe, to the multivarious unitary truth of the matter.” Mitch Walker was calling gays to wake up to and embrace multi-dimensional, cosmic, consciousness, and so open up our natural gifts as healers, mediums and shamans.
“Modern western society is so disconnected from the “supernatural”energies which exist in the kosmos that it denies them. However, basic growth can happen to a person only as they reawaken to this level of reality. To do so is not to give up logic or reason, but to reopen to the roots of life and energy. The spirit-beings exist inside us in potentiality, and we can shape them and work with them for the higher good of ourselves and humanity.”
Mitch believed queers to “manifest a mutation in consciousness, for which we have been persecuted and exploited. It’s time to stop this stupidity. It’s time to enter our maturity. It’s time… Darkness grows in the falseself lands. This is not a coincidence. Those of use who live there live in a time-bomb, in a monstrously cli- maxing karmic behemoth, live in a violent dinosaurian genetic fate. Tyrannosaur Rex is thrashing in ecstatic S & M pain, is the ultra-victim in a self-induced snuff movie involving the entire Earth, enacting his last act and ringing down the curtain on World 4.”
By falseself, Mitch was referring to the “the living myths that define the people, that are sex roles, work roles, sexual behavior roles, collective standards of moral belief, politics, religion and so on…
“The falseself system as a human institution is itself the source of all hierarchies involving status and power. Since falseself mythology originates from outside the individual, a person must be taught their falseself identity, and for this to happen a person must submerge their autonomy, allowing themself to be led by others who ‘know’.”
Mitch and the early Faeries were pursuing the cause of expanding consciousness that had kicked off the in 1960s – these men were taking the sexual revolution to its spiritual climax. They believed in “A new age, a complete change in all current forms of society, a complete change in what it means to be human,” and that “…gay people have been put in an important place on humanity’s path towards this goal. Edward Carpenter, the great gay visionary, was one of the first to notice this publicly when he wrote in 1919 that gay people “point to a further degree of evolution than usually attained, and a higher order of consciousness.” (in Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk)
Writing in the mid 70s, with no idea what was coming in the next decade, Mitch prophetically proclaimed: “Gay shamanism is work in such times, work in the mode of death, work with the dying, death of oneself. Delightful communal Self realization is the instantly real resurrection. Sorcerous faggot fighter is a menace to society, is a dangerous flaming phoenix, a glowingly rounded function, an extra-ordinary healing-tool, a Rainbow-bridging eros-tool. Gay realization is sorely needed life-light now. Concentrated eros, focused will, activated anger, celebrated magick, shared love, are tactics to guard and guide our questing, to trans-form vision, trans-port worlds, trans-vest Self.”
The AIDS years changed the conversation.
We had to survive. From both radical and conventional angles, gay activism stepped up. A global LGBTQ+ community was born. We took on governments, pharmaceutical companies and society’s prejudice. We won.
And during those years some of us, well at least me, went through the gay shamanic transformation, facing death of my body but instead experiencing death of my false self. And since those years I have been pursuing ‘delightful communal Self realization’ amongst the Radical Faeries, and now as an organiser of Queer Spirit Festival in the UK.
As the fear of AIDS slipped gradually away, and HIV ceased to be a death sentence, the big gay party that had begun in the 1970s and so quickly stalled, erupted back into life. The advent of Prep medications that prevent HIV infection taking hold, of undetectable viral loads meaning positive men on meds are not infectious, plus dating apps and a surge in usage of certain drugs have all whisked gay life into a hedonistic cauldron like the world has never seen before. There’s generally little room for spirituality until addiction or breakdowns force people to embrace it. But just as AIDS was a catalyst for my spiritual awakening, I am aware that addiction can be also lead us there – and quite simply we do have to go through the dark to get to the light. ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’
As Mitch would put it, the tyranny of the falseself system does not want us to wake up to our god-given creative powers and inner liberation, it would rather keep us as drug-addicted, promiscuous outsiders. The most radical ‘sorcerous faggot fighters’ left us in the aids years and the more conventional queers led the way into the campaign for equal marriage rights. Gay culture has been bought off, it is no longer a menace to society – assimilation in action– except when it blurs and challenges the gender norms. Trans people are now the advance guard, challenging hetero-patriarchal society’s – and some gay men and lesbians’ – understanding of the mythological consensus.
The Gay Spirit teaches us that we are all human and spirit, female and male. Fluidity is the key to freedom.
“Gay spirit is profoundest love and knowing. A magnificent liberation is possible now for those who remember their true nature as reality-channeling as faerie Selves…
“Imagine that Visionary Love is first seeing, then recognising, and finally joining a vital, mythic, on-going struggle for the universe of free being, for the universe of your true gay being, for worldwide justice for all beings on all levels, a deeply revolutionary com/passionate karmic work with pattern and purpose involving evolution, consciousness, creatures of false and true self, of straightman’s societies and anarcho-communual Spirit utopias, forms of living zombie death and magickal spiralling kozmic ecstasy, reality-forms of a multi-level, multi-sexual political melodrama.
“NEW AGE FAGGOT BECOMES SORCERER
“At this time and place we have access to much wise knowledge. Sometimes we have to dig for it, sometimes it comes right at us, unbidden. This knowledge is available to aid you on your path. Much of it relates to spirit energies, to enhancing rapport in their realms. … All kinds offairy tales cultural myths, religious objects such as statues and paintings, are highly symbolic. All spiritual and religious holidays, rituals, dances and orgies are methods to summon the energies. If you see them in this light, they can help you on your way.”
Once we’ve accepted god/goddess/heaven is found within
no more need for arguments over customs and beliefs
gnosis is the blessed release
from other people’s projections of sin
and judgemental deities up in the sky,
who punish us when we die.
Accepting Oneness is the crucial first step:
One Love. One Life. One World. One Spirit.
Whether we choose to look at life this way
or are forced to this realisation, this awakening
by some crisis in our lives
once we make this step
everything changes.
Believing is just the beginning
then comes feeling it, seeing it, smelling it, hearing it, tasting it
knowing it
becoming it, becoming One with That:
The Lord of the Dance, Shiva.
The Cosmic Mother. Shakti.
Embodied as Buddha, Quan Yin, Jesus, Mohammed,
and every mystic since time began,
time for its embodiment
in every conscious loving human.
.
The challenge is to meet the world with love
compassion, kindness, charity
recognising cosmic Self in all.
.
Get ready CONSCIOUSNESS IS COMING Planetary ascension to the 4th and 5th dimensions. Light of Awareness descending Our forms revealed as divine blueprint Awakening activated by collective crisis Returning, retuning to the great mother Isis.
Everything is connected Consciousness is a unity we are all sharing Awareness is God, the only I Am, The light of revelation will burn through the illusions, The love divine will destroy the confusion.
Get ready. The shift will shock. We are not material beings We’re made of divine light Consciousness is coming Tis the end of the fight.
The day is coming when we will see We’re all made of divinity Those ready to accept this Are ready to be free. Those who cannot make the leap Will leave
“Roughly speaking we may say that the worship of Sex and Life characterised the Pagan races of Europe and Asia Minor anterior to Christianity, while the worship of Death and the Unseen has characterised Christianity.” Edward Carpenter.
The Gods were always present in the pagan past, not hidden away in an invisible heaven in the sky. They were present in nature, in bodies, in sex… present in temples and sacred groves, in sculptures and paintings. There was no separation between people and the gods. Tacitus recorded that the Germanic peoples “consecrate woods and groves and they apply the name of gods to that mysterious presence which they see only with the eye of devotion.”
The adoption of an instrument of torture, on which hangs a dying god, as the symbol of the Christian religion was a strange idea to many, and for centuries many resisted the symbol, even though dying and resurrecting deities were nothing new – the Jesus story echoes those of Adonis, Dionysus, Attis… The cross became the prime symbol in the 4th century after the conversion of Emperor Constantine and the rise to power of the Church. Medieval heretical groups had several issues with the dogma and dominance of the Roman Catholic Church, which included their rejection of the symbol of a tortured messiah as the holy symbol of the faith.
From the start of the union of Church and State in the 4th century, Christianity spread its influence, extended its power, through use of the sword. Over many centuries, people in many lands – from Europe to the Americas and beyond – were ‘encouraged’ to adopt the new faith and put to death if they refused. I could give many examples (and may come back to add some) but for now I wish to focus on one particularly deadly focus of Christianity – the fascination of the religion with what we now call gay sexuality or queer gender expression. One of the first actions against pagan practices after Constantine’s conversion was when he sent an army to wipe out a goddess temple (in the area we know as 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.
Later in the century, as pagan practices were gradually eradicated, the emperors started turning their attention on non-religious manifestations of gay sexuality, issuing laws that threatened the effeminate males working in brothels, then eventually laws that punished both the penetrator as well as the penetrated in male on male sex, calling for men who have sex with men to be killed in the “avenging flames in the sight of the people,” and associating such sexual activity firmly with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and natural disasters of all kinds: In 538 CE, a law issued under Justinian in the eastern empire warned that gay acts “incur the just anger of God, and bring about the destruction of cities along with their inhabitants… crimes of this description cause famine, earthquake and pestilence.”
In medieval Europe Justinian’s law codes became the basis for legal jurisdiction. The sin of gay sex became a crime punished by the state (this was, as under Henry VIII, a result of the political state taking for itself responsibility to punish things that had previously been under the church’s jurisdiction). Homosexuality was seen as heresy because it was regarded as being against god’s laws, and the Inquisition was given powers to hunt down and punish homosexuals.
One of the biggest shocks for European explorers arriving in the New World across the Atlantic was the prevalence, and acceptance of, same sex relationships and gender-bending shamans, whom they labelled ‘berdache’ – a Persian word for a gay bottom. One famously awful story is that of Vasco Núñez de Balboa, en route to discover the Pacific Ocean in 1513, who fed forty ‘‘sodomites’’ to his dogs. Peter Martyr recorded the spectacle in Decades (1516):
‘‘[Balboa] founde the house of this kynge infected with most abhominable and unnaturall lechery. For he found the kynges brother and many other younge men in womens apparell, smooth & effeminately decked, which by the report of such as dwelte abowte hym, he abused with preposterous venus. Of these abowte the number of fortie, he commanded bee gyven for a pray to his dogges’’ (quoted in Goldberg, ‘Sodomy in the New World’)
VASCO NUNEZ de BALBOA
(1475-1519). Spanish explorer. Balboa ordering native Indians to be torn to pieces by dogs. Copper engraving, 16th century.
Malidoma Some, a wisdom teacher from the Dagara people of West Africa, understood that the queerness we now label ‘sexual’ was previously considered more a ‘spiritual’ quality in traditional cultures in Africa as in the Americas. He said in a 1993 interview:
““Why is it that, everywhere else in the world, gay people are a blessing, and in the modern world they are a curse? It is self-evident.The modern world was built by Christianity. They have taken the gods out of the earth and sent them to heaven, wherever that is. And everyone who aspires to the gods must then negotiate with Christianity, so that the real priests and priestesses [gatekeepers] are out of a job. This is the worst thing that can happen to a culture that calls itself modern.”https://rainbowmessenger.blog/2023/05/17/gay-love-could-save-humanity/
In his 2022 book, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity, Kyle Smithputs the case for “how Christianity became (and how it still remains) a cult of the dead.” He highlights the emphasis on martyrdom in the religion: “Smith accepts the conventional contemporary view that the evangelist Luke created the image of the martyr in his portrayal of Jesus’ death based on the Greco-Roman model of “Noble Death,” and then, in his depiction of Stephen’s death by stoning, set in motion a tradition (a “genre”) that persisted for centuries. Smith quotes approvingly Candida Moss’s “inescapable but repugnant conclusion” that “dying for Christ may be a central, rather than peripheral, part of the Christian experience.” (from review by Luke Timothy Johnson) Is Christianity a Cult of the Dead? | Commonweal Magazine
Many Christians, even to this day, believe their faith is the only true path, their version of God the only real deity, and are prepared to enforce that view with laws and violence (the anti-gay laws in many African countries are a clear example). Holy Wars have long been part of the Christian story- such as the medieval Crusades to the Holy Land, in which historians estimate 1 to 3 million people were killed. The early modern witch trials in Europe are believed to have led to up to 60,000 (mainly women) being executed. Nor are Christians beyond murdering each other over questions of belief. The competition between Catholicism and Protestantism from the 16th century was accompanied by executions of fellow Christians because they believed the ‘wrong’ things, plus holy wars between Christian nations. This conflict still echoed well into the late 20th century in Northern Ireland. The attitudes of so-called ‘Christian Nationalists’ today threaten to continue the conflict and destruction through the 21st century.
Christianity worships an unseen God and his crucified human avatar. True spirituality reveals that God is present in all things and is the divine spark of consciousness that resides within us, and that his ‘son’ was sent to reveal that there is a second birth – to the spirit, to our divinity – available, in fact coming, to us all.
Christianity has been used as justification to wipe out entire populations, to suppress traditional faiths and to punish and murder queer people. This has been going on for centuries.
“Just as a river has a source, so the river of consciousness has a source. It descends from Cosmic Consciousness, the consciousness of God that is beyond all creation.” Yogananda
“Abandoning the quest and the glorification of the separate isolated self we have to return to the cosmic universal life. It is the blossoming indeed of this ‘new’ life in the deeps of our minds which is salvation…it is this presence which all down the ages has been hailed as Savior and Liberator: the daybreak of a consciousness so much vaster, so much more glorious, than all that has gone before that the little candle of the local self is swallowed up in its rays. It is the return home, the return into direct touch with Nature and Man-the liberation from the long exile of separation, from the painful sense of isolation and the odious nightmare of guilt and ‘sin.’ Can we doubt that this new birth-this third stage of consciousness, if we like to call it so has to come, that it is in-deed not merely a pious hope or a tentative theory, but a fact testified to already by a cloud of witnesses in the past-witnesses shining in their own easily recognizable and authentic light, yet for the most part isolated from each other among the arid and unfruitful wastes of Civilization, like glow-worms in the dry grass of a summer night?” Edward Carpenter, Pagan and Christian Creeds, 1920
The understanding “…that all things are interconnected in a great, encompassing, living unity – is what is meant by the term ‘cosmic consciousness.’ It’s ‘consciousness’ because it results from reflections on our experiences. It’s ‘cosmic’ because it expands more and more into the larger world as we ourselves become more interconnected. It involves a ‘living unity’ because the universe constantly transforms and perpetuates itself with stunning creativity, like a great living organism, and because the universe is one.
“Cosmic Consciousness stimulates creativity among the individuals who cultivate it. Because of its emphasis on connectedness, it motivates people to integrate the tactile, conceptual, and emotional parts of their lives into an experiential whole…
“Here is where we find the font of the magic of life, for that font is people themselves when self integrated, flowing with expressive creativity, and connected in body and spirit to each other and the cosmos. Here the boundaries of the self expand, and its windows open outward to the goodness and beauty of the whole, which it takes in with exuberance. From this place onward, life becomes a transformative and magical journey on an ever-opening road.”
This is how Arthur Evans, author of 1978 book Witchcraft and the Gay Counter Culture described cosmic consciousness in his later work Lady Moon Rising, a book that spotlights the loss of meaning in people’s lives as a prime source of dis-ease and discontent. He calls the work of coming together with other people to collectively birth a new era of enlightened awareness The Great Reconnect.
“Making the Great Reconnect necessarily deepens and expands the lives of the people doing the reconnecting. They become more open to learning from other people’s personal experiences, the cultural richness of humanity, and the wonder of the natural world. If they invest enough of themselves in the world, they will no longer experience it as an alien presence of external, lifeless objects, disconnected from their own inner needs, feelings and identity. Instead, they will come to experience both themselves and the world as mutually engaging parts of a larger, organic whole…”
The work of the Great Reconnect goes on in groups and communities, at heart opened gatherings of friends, seekers and celebrants. It is happening everywhere, but while it goes on most consciously in spiritual gatherings, it is not the reserve of the spiritually minded. All beings are equally destined to achieve, evolve into, wake up to cosmic consciousness – because it is our fundamental nature. The unified field of spirit/light/awareness that is at the root of who we are, is the core of creation. Spiritual communities can act like they have the keys to the kingdom, but, as a certain crucified messiah taught, the kindgom of heaven is within all of us. A kind, generous heart and an open mind are keys to the kingdom, love is the nature of the divine, compassion and kindness are love in action. Seeing all beings as worthy of love, as divine and whole in themselves – as another version of ourselves – trains the mind to see connection, oneness, love rather than division, difference, discord.
120 years ago Richard Maurice Bucke, who was born in the village of Methwold in Norfolk in 1837 and lived most of his life in Canada, published a book called ‘Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind’ in which he described three stages in the development of consciousness: the ‘simple consciousness’ of animals, the ‘self-consciousness’ of the vast majority of humans (the development of reason, self awareness, imagination, etc.), and, achieved by some only, ‘cosmic consciousness’; a mystical state of being beyond ‘self consciousness’ that is the awaiting, next stage of human development.
Bucke described cosmic consciousness, which he considered to have been experienced by mystics throughout history but the eventual destiny for all people, as bringing complete freedom from fear of sin or death:
“a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness… a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.”
He believed that he himself attained Cosmic Consciousness early in the spring of 1873 while reading the works of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Robert Browning, and especially Walt Whitman and in his work Bucke gives high praise to Walt Whitman’s poetic work ‘Leaves of Grass’, describing how it helped open his mind to the cosmic visionary experience. He writes about too his “personal intercourse” with Edward Carpenter, which “assisted greatly in the broadening and clearing up of his speculations, in the extension and co-ordination of his thought” (he writes of himself in the 3rd person in the book).
Whitman’s poetry, written from the mid 19th century and revised and expanded over the decades, was a key source of inspiration for many men who were erotically and romantically attracted to other males. Whitman was however not speaking to an existing community of gay men, and he believed himself to be writing for all men – invoking the ability in all men to love other men, as part of which overcoming shame about the body and intimacy was key. Whitman saw this joyful project as an essential step towards creating a true, modern democracy – for, until men learn to love and trust each other, any political system will always be corruptible and conflict-driven.
“I confidently expect a time when there will be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown…” From Democratic Vistas
“COME, I will make the continent indissoluble;
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon; I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies;
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks;
By the love of comrades, By the manly love of comrades.
…O Democracy, to serve you, ma femme! For you, for you I am trilling these songs.”
From Leaves of Grass, Calamus
Bucke points to ‘As in a Swoon’ as an example of a poem in which Whitman records his inner eyes opening to the cosmic reality:
“As in a swoon, one instant,
Another sun, ineffable, full-dazzles me,
And all the orbs I knew, with brighter, unknown orbs, ten thousand fold,
One instant of the future land— Heaven’s land.”
Whitman’s vision, inspired by love of other men, was absolutely non-dual:
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
Bucke summarised Whitman’s spiritual philosophy as an a appreciation:
“that the commonplace is the grandest of all things; that the exceptional in any line is no finer, better or more beautiful than the usual, and that what is really wanting is not that we should possess something we have not at present, but that our eyes should be opened to see and our hearts to feel what we all have.”
In his classic 1902 study of mysticism, ‘Varieties of Religious Experience,’ William James also expressed a high view of ‘Whitmanism’, seeing it as part of “the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition” on the same level as Hinduism, Neoplatonism, Sufism and Christian mysticism, paths that can lead us to “both become one with the Absolute and … become aware of our oneness.”
In the late 19th century as the psychological profession started to adopt homosexual as a term for men who loved men, and classifying it as a problem, a sickness, certain men, all inspired by Whitman, including Bucke, John Addington-Symonds and Edward Carpenter were proposing a very different understanding of queer nature.
These few writers of the 19th century dared to speak up about the ancient pagan associations of same sex erotic love, and of gender fluid people, with priestcraft, shamanism and the divine realms, a history that had been suppressed by the centuries of Christian hegemony.
Edward Carpenter, who also had an appreciation of the ‘common place’ (he left his Cambridge career and lived for many years in a smallholding near Sheffield with his partner, George Merrill), ran with Whitman’s vision of love between men coming from their recognition of their spiritual oneness each other, and the positive effect this might have on all aspects of life, producing his own set of inspired mystical poems which he called Towards Democracy:
“I saw a vision of Earth’s multitudes going up and down over the Earth – and I saw the great earth itself wheeling and careering onward through space. And behold! here and there to one among the multitude a change came; And to whomsoever it came continued onward apparently as before, yet as from the larva springs the perfect image, So (as it appeared to me) from that mortal form a new being, long long long in preparation, glided silently up unobserved into the breathless pure height of the sky.”
Carpenter described in a letter to Richard Bucke his belief,
“…that there is in man a divine consciousness as well as a foot consciousness. For as we saw that the sense of taste may pass from being a mere local thing on the tip of the tongue to pervading and becoming synonymous with the health of the whole body; or as the blue of the sky may be to one person a mere superficial impression of color, and to another the inspiration of a poem or picture, and to a third, as to the “God-intoxicated” Arab of the desert, a living presence like the ancient Dyaus or Zeus–so may not the whole of human consciousness gradually lift itself from a mere local and temporary consciousness to a divine and universal? There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his quite external body; that we know. Are there not also in every man the making of a universal consciousness?”
In his 1902 book Love’s Coming of Age, Carpenter described his vision of how a shift in attitudes towards sex, sexuality and love would push forward society’s evolution:
“Our public opinion, our literature, our customs, our laws, are saturated with the notion of the uncleanness of Sex, and are so making the conditions of its cleanness more and more difficult … The body itself is kept religiously covered, smothered away from the rush of the great purifying life of Nature, infected with dirt and disease, and a subject for prurient thought and exaggerated lust such as in its naked state it would never provoke.
“Till this dirty and dismal sentiment with regard to the human body is removed there can be little hope of anything like a free and gracious public life. With the regeneration of our social ideas the whole conception of Sex as a thing covert and to be ashamed of, marketable and unclean, will have to be regenerated. That inestimable freedom and pride which is the basis of all true manhood and womanhood will have to enter into this most intimate relation to preserve it frank and pure–pure from the damnable commercialism which buys and sells all human things, and from the religious hypocrisy which covers and conceals; and a healthy delight in and cultivation of the body and all its natural functions, and a determination to keep them pure and beautiful, open and sane and free, will have to become a recognised part of national life.
“Taking all together I think it may fairly be said that the prime object of Sex is union, the physical union as the allegory and expression of the real union, and that generation is a secondary object or result of this union. If we go to the lowest material expressions of Sex–as among the protozoic cells–we find that they, the cells, unite together, two into one; and that, as a result of the nutrition that ensues, this joint cell after a time (but not always) breaks up by fission into a number of progeny cells; or if on the other hand we go to the very highest expression of Sex, in the sentiment of Love, we find the latter takes the form chiefly and before all else of a desire for union, and only in lesser degree of a desire for race-propagation.”
Union, for Carpenter, was a spiritual experience – sexuality as a doorway to a higher level of consciousness, to a sense of interconnected oneness, to the divine power of love. To love that leads us to deep understanding:
“Tears and lamentations are no more. Life and death lie stretched below me. I breathe the sweet aether blowing of the breath of God. Deep as the universe is my life – and I know it; nothing can dislodge the knowledge of it; nothing can destroy, nothing can harm me…
“Freedom! the deep breath! the word heard centuries and centuries beforehand; the soul singing low and passionate to itself: Joy! Joy! Not as in a dream. The earth remains and daily life remains, and the scrubbing of doorsteps, and the house and the care of the house remains; but Joy fills it, fills the house full and swells to the sky and reaches the stars: all Joy! 0 freed soul! soul that has completed its relation to the body! 0 soaring, happy beyond words, into other realms passing, salutations to you, freed, redeemed soul!”
Carpenter made a connection between people who embody masculine and feminine in themselves, ‘intermediate types’ (in which he included same sex-attracted men and women as well as transgender people), in whom,
“This interaction in fact between the masculine and the feminine, this mutual illumination of logic and meditation, may not only raise and increase the power of each of these faculties, but it may give the mind a new quality, and a new power of perception corresponding to the blending of subject and object in consciousness. It may possibly lead to the development of that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness and which may also be termed divination.” Intermediate types among primitive folks, 1913
He connected this gender-blended consciousness to a cosmic evolutionary leap coming for humanity:
“We are arriving at one of the most fruitful and important turning points in the history of the race. the Self is entering into relation with the Body. for, that the individual should conceive and know himself, not a toy and a chance-product of his own bodily heredity, but as identified and continuous with the Eternal Self of which his body is a manifestation, is indeed to begin a new life and to enter a hitherto undreamed world of possibilities….this transformation, whilst the greatest and most wonderful, is also of course the most difficult in Man’s evolution, for him to effect. it may roughly be said that the whole of the civilisation-period in Man’s history is the preparation for it.”
John Addington Symonds had his own glimpse of cosmic consciousness while under chloroform:
“I seemed at first in a state of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light, alternating with blankness and with a keen vision of what was going on in the room round me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was near death, when suddenly my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt Him streaming in like light upon me and heard Him saying in no language, but as hands touch hands and communicate sensations: ‘I led thee; I guided thee; you will never sin and weep and wail in madness any more; for now you have seen Me.’ My whole consciousness seemed brought into one point of absolute conviction; the independence of my mind from my body was proved by the phenomena of this acute sensibility to spiritual facts, this utter deadness of the senses. Life and death seemed mere names… I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt.”
The 20th century brought more queer poets and prophets of cosmic consciousness, including lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow (1898-1986). Born in Hull, Yorkshire, Elsa went on to live in Canada and the USA. Her writing circle in 1918 created the first gay magazine in North America… Les Mouches Fantastiques. From 1954 she lived in California. naming her ranch Druid Heights. Among her companions there was philosopher Alan Watts, with whom she found the Society for Comparative Philosophy, and her friends included Maya Angelou, James Broughton, Allen Ginsberg, Neil Young and Ram Dass.
Her love for other woman became a portal to the cosmic oneness of existence, experienced as the presence of the Goddess:
“Here on this bed, holding you. So human in your need (and knowing mine).Miraculous, the human veil is rent. Lover-beloved, WomanSmall and strong in my arms. I know in you The Goddesss, Mystery, fecund Emptiness From which all fullness comesAnd universes flower.”
Love revealed as the true path of consciousness, Elsa asked:
“What if we smashed the mirrors
And saw our true face?
What if we left the Sacred Books to the worms
And found our True Mind?
What if we burned the wooden Buddhas?
Ga ve the stone Buddhas back to the mountains?
Dispersed the gurus with a great laugh
And discovered the path we had always been on?”
Whitman and Carpenter dreamed of an awakening of cosmic consciousness among men — in the 1970s spiritual feminists were calling for an awakening of cosmic consciousness in women, calling for women to reclaim the Goddess within and come to see life as an interconnected whole, in contrast to the dominant patriarchal belief systems, which are attuned to difference, division and male superiority.
Monica Sjoo, in the Great Cosmic Mother (1987) wrote “True religion is the original umbilical cord that binds our individual selves back to our larger, universal source. That source… is the Great Mother, who is the great cosmic weaver, the divine potter, the carrier of the heavenly water jar; we participate in her substance, her nature, her processes, her play and her work….
“The reality implicit in the Universe – in each one of us, in the self at the heart of being – is her way. It is very ancient, and has no time. …. Ecstasy is the only way through which the soul can lose itself in union with her…. Some male mystics have also understood this…
“Ecstasy is the dance of the individual with the All.”
Spiritual feminists from the mid 70s, such as Starhawk, Zsuzsanna Budapest, Carol Christ emphasised that a shift in consciousness will be the only way to bring about equality – a shift to a recognition of the interconnectedness of all things leads to recognition of the importance of environmental action and social justice, and honuring the diversity of spiritual traditions while emphasising goddess spirituality, witchcraft and ecofeminism as the means to bring the human spirit back into alignment and harmony with the planet.
“Feminist spirituality must be intersectional, recognizing the multiple and intersecting forms of oppression that women face. This means acknowledging the ways in which racism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia intersect with sexism to create unique experiences of oppression.” – Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade
STARHAWK: “I don’t like it when people assume that the Goddess, the great female principle, is just God in skirts. The Goddess means that the sacred is imminent – it’s present right here and now, in nature and in ourselves. And by sacred what I mean is not a great something that you bow down to, but what determines your values, what you would take a stand for. If the forest is sacred, we can’t chop it down. It water is sacred, we can’t pollute it, even a little bit. If there is sacred authority in the human body, then no external authority can tell people what to do with it- how to love, whether or not to end a pregnancy.” quoted in Visionaries : people & ideas to change your life by Jay Walljasper, 2001
In a manifesto declaration from Zsuzsanna Budapest’s women’s coven in San Franscisco, they declared: “We believe that we are part of a changing universal consciousness that has long been feared and prophesied by the patriarchs.“
MARION WOODMAN (1928-2018), Canadian mythopoetic author, poet, analytical psychologist and women’s movement figure, from her work Conscious Femininity, published 1993:
“… the goddess energy is trying to save us. If we go on with our power tactics, we’re going to destroy the earth. That’s why we haven’t got a long time to evolve. We’re either going to make a leap in consciousness or we aren’t going to be here. Sophia, Shakti, by whatever name we call her, is that wisdom deep down in all matter, pushing her way into consciousness, one way or another.
“The further you go in understanding yourself, the more you realise the kingdom of God is within…. So that in finding the ‘I’, you’re also finding the ‘I’ that is the God within. And in finding that, you are find the God in other people, in plants, in animals – that animating soul to which we all belong.“
“STARTING IN THE LATE 1970s, alongside the enormous and continuing growth of women’s spirituality, there sprung up, in almost parallel fashion, a small spiritual movement among men. This movement was connected with the feminist critique of patriarchal notions of religion and authority, and with the attempt of both gay and straight men to create a new definition of maleness.
“One important impulse behind the notion of radical faeries was the idea that there had to be something beyond assimilation. Just as radical feminists wanted to go beyond women attaining equal rights in a man’s world, toward a notion that feminism implied a totally different reality, a different language, a different attitude toward power and authority, this group of gay men saw their own movement as implying a totally different view of the world, with different goals and different spiritual values than the “straight” world…
“In an article in RFD called “A Sprinkling of Radical Faerie Dust,” Don Kilhefner wrote that the dilemma facing gay men is “our assimilation into the mainstream versus our enspiritment as a people” … “We are the equivalent of Shamans in modern culture,” said Peter Soderberg, during an interview at the 1985 Pagan Spirit Gathering. “Many gay men want to be middle-class Americans. They want to be respected as human beings and they want their sexuality to be ignored. But radical faeries are willing to live on the edge. We feel there is a power in our sexuality. You know there is a power there because our culture is so afraid of us. And there is a lot of queer energy in the men and women most cultures consider magical. It’s practically a requirement for certain kinds of medicine and magic…” Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon 1986
Harry Hay was a both pioneer in the 1950s of gay activism with the Mattachine Society and from the 1970s of gay spiritual liberation as a founder of the now global Radical Faerie community, a continuously evolving group that has been described as “having a pro-humanist, pro-environment, pro-sex vision of the world that contrasts sharply with the mainstream Western religious traditions.” (Michael Lloyd, a founding member of the Green Faerie Grove, Ohio).Faeries meet in circle and build community from the heart, embracing both sexuality and spirituality, connecting the two through ritual, drumming, dance, drag and play, and pursuing subject:SUBJECT consciousness – seeing people not as others, but as self, and so desiring the best for them as we do for ourselves. This is cosmic consciousness in action…. and you don’t need to already be cosmically conscious to do it – taking this mental attitude cultivates the experience of cosmic consciousness within us.
Historian Will Roscoe:
“For Hay, the transcendence of the individual, the discovery that one is part of an interconnected whole, is the truth of life itself and the essence of spirituality, as well as the source of political ideals… The vision of society that emerges from this interconnection of spirituality and politics is multicultural, cooperative, and decentralized. Rather than objectifying diverse communities as ‘Other’, subject-SUBJECT consciousness fosters the extension of common humanity to all. Affirming the other who affirms you does not require the erasure or denial of difference.
“For Hay, activism informed by spiritual values is the modern version of the community service traditionally performed by third-gender figures like the Native American Two-Spirit. But Hay stresses that his visions and ideals are a ‘call’ – for those who hear the message in their hearts as well as their minds. A spirit quest can never be imposed, require, legislated or prescribed, nor can matters of the spirit be reduced to political discourse. But, of course, taking ourselves seriously, inquiring into the nature of our sexuality and its deepest meaning, and loving ourselves and each other for being Gay remain crucial first steps towards liberation. Gay politics thus begins in the realm of the human spirit, and while politics can never take the place of spirituality they eventually lead us back to that realm, as we seek to find the language to express our visions of a better world.”
Queer people are arguably born to embody cosmic consciousness, ready to take that evolutionary leap from ego mind into cosmic Self awareness (which embraces the ego as its child, it doesn’t destroy it.) Lesbian writer Judy Grahn described in her 1982 book Another Mother Tongue, that
“The position that gay people take in society, the function we so often choose, is that of mediator between worlds….. In a tribal environment, this means shape shifting into wolves, birds, stones, wind and translating their wisdoms for the benefit of the people of the tribe… in the long patriarchal history that has gradually enveloped the world’s people, the gay function has been to make crossover journeys between gender-worlds, translating, identifying and bringing back the information ……..gay culture is always on the cusp of each intersecting world or way of life, on the path between one world and another…
“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.”
Let’s remember too that 2000 years ago the Gnostic gospel of Thomas recorded Jesus saying that humanity will enter heaven (his word for cosmic consciousness):
“When you make the two one, and when (if) you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and so that you make male and female into the single one, so that the male not be male nor the female female …”
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1881-1955), Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist. (Photo by Prisma/UIG/Getty Images)
French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who was a Jesuit priest and so never married, wrote in The Heart of the Matter:
“REVELATION OF THE UNIVERSE (COSMOS)
Under the constant pressure of my mind, which endeavoured to extract from Things a soul made up of consistence and the Absolute, the Universe was ultimately revealed to me as a Reality with an extraordinarily insistent claim for recognition.
As I write now, I can see, in what has become my most habitual outlook on the world, in my normal day-to-day life:
1. First, the Universe as a certain eminently great and precious Entity. I am habitually conscious (in some way) of its Totality, of its ‘Becoming’, of the countless potentialities (virtutes et potentiae) it contains. And in the presence of this majesty, I must confess that many restless human activities seem to me singularly unworthy of notice.
2. Secondly, I see the Universe as supremely inclusive and dominant. I feel that I am involved in it, locked into it, contained within it. I feel that I cannot take full possession of my own self except by extending my self into a certain perfection which runs through all things so that my own fulfilment must be in, and with, the universality of Creation.
3. This means that I believe I can distinguish in the Universe a profound, essential Unity, a unity burdened with imperfections, a unity still sadly ‘pulverulent’, but a real unity within which every ‘chosen’ substance gains increasing solidity.”
de Chardin wrote as a Christian waking up and seeing the western mind’s long denial of the oneness of creation – so he described the cosmic sense as bringing us into unity with Christ – while other modern cosmic prophets such as Aurobindo and Yogananda were from Hindu culture in which, unlike with Christianity, cosmic oneness is not hidden – it is heralded and celebrated as both the starting point and end point of existence. Hinduism is the natural home of cosmic consciousness, India’s many gurus all bringing their unique styles to how awareness and experience of it is taught. In them we see Christ’s own teachings reflected – that heaven is to be found within the heart and mind, Jesus never suggested it should be found through worshipping a crucified messiah.
YOGANANDA
Just as a river has a source, so the river of consciousness has a source. It descends from Cosmic Consciousness, the consciousness of God that is beyond all creation
When you begin to feel the sensations of others as though they were happening in your own body, you are developing that Christ Consciousness. When you cultivate this consciousness and therein understand that everything is yours, you will have no prejudices about race or color. In that consciousness you feel the love of a million mothers in your heart, not just for a few but for everyone. You do not imagine it, you feel it—this love that Jesus, Krishna, all of the great ones manifested—this universal intelligence and love which is called Christ Consciousness.
Man’s mind, operating as a part of Nature’s twenty-four elements, is engrossed in the material manifestations wrought by the five elements of earth, water, fire, air, and ether, which are subject to the law of relativity and time—the divisions of the timeless, eternal now into the progression of past, present, and future. To escape the flux of time, the devotee must rise to the Spirit beyond Nature’s compartments of relativity. The Absolutness of Cosmic Consciounsness is the only cure for the relativity of mortal consciousness.
The man of cosmic consciousness, never feeling himself as limited to a body or as reaching only to the brain, or only to the cerebral-lotus light of a thousand rays, instead feels by true intuitive power the ever-bubbling Bliss that dances in every particle of his little body, and in his big Cosmic Body of the universe, and in his absolute nature as one with the Eternal Spirit beyond manifested forms. The man into whose pure hand his divine bodily kingdom has been wholly delivered is no longer a human being with limited ego consciousness. In reality, he is the soul, individualized ever-existent, ever-conscious, ever-new Bliss, the pure reflection of Spirit, endowed with cosmic consciousness.
Having conquered the touch-sense of material-comfort desires of the body, the divine man feels the sensations of all matter as expressions of God’s creative cosmic energy playing upon his cosmic body, in a bliss unmatched by any physical pleasure of touch. He feels the smooth glide of the river over the breast of the earth. He feels the home of his Being in the ocean of space, and perceives the swimming waves of island universes on his own sea bosom. He knows the softness of the petals of blossoms, and the tenderness of the love in all hearts, the aliveness of youth in all bodies. His own youthfulness, as the ageless soul, is everlasting. The superman knows births and deaths only as changes dancing on the Sea of Life—even as waves of the ocean rise, fall, and rise again. He cognizes all past and future, but lives in the eternal present. For him, the conundrum of the why of being is resolved in the singular realization: “From Joy we have come. In Joy we live and move and have our being. And in that sacred perennial Joy we melt again.”
You are, and ever will be, a perfect reflection of Spirit. You were Spirit; now you imagine yourself to be mortal; but by meditation on your true Self, and by performing God-reminding actions constantly, you can remember your forgotten Spirit-nature and remain in that consciousness through all futurity.
AUROBINDO
“The possibility of a cosmic consciousness in humanity coming slowly to be admitted in modern Psychology, like the possibility of more elastic instruments of knowledge, although still classified, even when its value and power are admitted, as hallucination. In the psychology of the East it has always be recognised as a reality and the aim of our subjective progress The essence of the passage over to this goal is the exceeding of the limits imposed on us by the ego-sense and at least a partaking, at most an identification with the self-knowledge which brood secret in all life and in all that seems to us inanimate.
“Entering into that Consciousness, we may continue to dwell, like It, upon universal existence. Then we become aware-for all our terms of consciousness and even our sensational experience begin to change,- of Matter as one existence and of bodies a its formations in which the one existence separates itself physically in the single body from itself in all others and again by physical means establishes communication between these multitudinous points of its being. Mind we experience similarly, an Life also, as the same existence one in its multiplicity, separating and reuniting itself in each domain by means appropriate to that movement. And, if we choose, we can proceed farther and after passing through many linking stages, become aware of supermind whose universal operation is the key to all lesser activities. Nor do we become merely conscious of this cosmic existence, but likewise conscious in it, receiving it in sensation but also entering into it in awareness. In it we live as we lived before in the ego-sense, active, more and more in contact, even unified more and more with other minds, other lives, other bodies than the organism we call ourselves, producing effects not only on our own moral and mental being and on the subjective being of others, but even on the physical world and its events by means nearer to the divine than those possible to our egoistic capacity.
“Real then to the man who has had contact with it or lives in it, is this cosmic consciousness, with a greater than the physical reality; real in itself, real in its effects and works. And as it is thus real to the world which is its own total expression, so is the world real to it; but not as an independent existence. For in that higher and less hampered experience we perceive that consciousness and being are not different from each other, but all being is supreme consciousness, all consciousness is self-existence eternal in itself, real in its works and neither a dream nor an evolution.”
“Attaining to the cosmic consciousness Mind, illuminated by a knowledge that perceives at once the truth of Unity and the truth of Multiplicity and seizes on the formulas of their interaction, finds its own discords at once explained and reconciled by the divine Harmony; satisfied, it consents to become the agent of that supreme union between God and Life towards which we tend. Matter reveals itself to the realising thought and to the subtilised senses as the figure and body of Spirit -Spirit in its self-formative extension. Spirit reveals itself through the same consenting agents as the soul, the truth, the essence of Matter. Both admit and confess each other as divine, real and essentially one.”
Examples of western psychology embracing the unified field of consciousness include the work of Joseph Campbell and Stanislav Grof.
Joseph Campbell’s work on archetypes described the role of the divine feminine in our awakening to the spiritual nature of existence –
“Here is a principal mythological role of the feminine principle: She gives birth to us physically, but She is the mother too of our second birth—our birth as spiritual entities. This is the basic meaning of the motif of the virgin birth, that our bodies are born naturally, but at a certain time there awakens in us our spiritual nature, which is the higher human nature, not that which simply duplicates the world of the animal urges, of erotic and power drives and sleep. Instead, there awakens in us the notion of a spiritual aim, a spiritual life: an essentially human, mystical life to be lived above the level of food, of sex, of economics, politics, and sociology. In this sphere of the mystery dimension the woman represents the awakener, the giver of birth in that sense.”
Stanislave Grof wrote in The Cosmic Game (1998):
“After we have had direct experiences of the spiritual dimensions of reality, the idea that the universe, life, and consciousness could have developed without the participation of superior creative intelligence appears to us absurd, naïve, and untenable.
“Careful study of the perinatal and transpersonal experiences shows that the boundaries between the individual human psyche and the rest of the cosmos are ultimately arbitrary and can be transcended….. strong evidence suggesting that, in the last analysis, each of us is commensurate with the totality of existence.
“The experiences of the immanent Divine reveal the sacred nature of everyday reality and the unity underlying the world of matter, which for a naïve observer appears to be made of separate objects. By disclosing that all boundaries within the material world are arbitrary, these experiences make it clear that each of us is essentially identical with the entire field of space-time and ultimately with the cosmic creative energy itself. By comparison, the experiences of the transcendent Divine do not just show us new ways of understanding and perceiving the familiar world of our everyday life. They reveal the existence of dimensions of reality that are ordinarily invisible, or “transphenomenal,” particularly those abounding in primordial cosmic forms and patterns that C. G. Jung called archetypes…
“The archetypal domain thus represents a bridge between the world of matter and the undifferentiated field of Cosmic Consciousness. For this reason, the experience of the transcendent divine is more than just the experience of another ‘cosmic channel’. It also provides insights into the process by which material reality is created; it gives us a ‘glimpse into the cosmic kitchen,’ as one of my clients in Prague called it.
“The cosmic play offers many opportunities for experiences that make it possible for us to temporarily step out of the role we are playing in the universal script, recognize the illusory nature of everyday reality, and discover the possibility of reunion with the source.”
Robert Monroe, American author of 1971 book Journeys Out of the Body described his own experience of cosmic consciousness:
“Now I am moving back…. back to the Whole, where I belong… what joy to return…. Yes, now I know what I am, what I have been from the beginning, what I always will be…. a part of the Whole, the restless part that desires to return, yet lives to seek expression in doing. creating, building, giving, growing, leaving more than it takes, and above all desires to bring back gifts of love to the Whole… the paradox of total unity and the continuity of the part. I know the Whole…. I am the Whole… even as a part I am the totality.”
Mystic philosopher ALAN WATTS in Out of Your Mind said that
“And so we impose our will upon the world, as if it were something completely alien to us—something that exists on the outside.” However, if we open ourselves up to ecstatic experience, we’ll find that we’re “as continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean,” for just as the “ocean waves, the universe peoples.”
Richard Bucke wrote in his 1905 book Cosmic Consciousness:
“The simple truth is, that there has lived on the earth, “appearing at intervals,” for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another race; walking the earth and breathing the air with us, but at the same time walking another earth and breathing another air of which we know little or nothing, but which is, all the same, our spiritual life, as its absence would be our spiritual death. This new race is in act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth.”
Last word from Edward Carpenter:
“So thin a veil divides Us from such joy, past words. Walking in daily life the business of the hour, each detail seen to; Yet carried, rapt away, on what sweet floods of other Being: Swift streams of music flowing, light far back through all Creation shining, Loved faces looking- Ah! from the true, the mortal self So thin a veil divides!”
February 2026 is an important anniversary in Britain’s gay history – 300 years since the raid of Mother Clap’s Molly House in Holborn, which brought molly culture into public view. This anniversary reveals that a gay subculture existed in London 300 years ago, which drives home how long it took to finally gain acceptance and rights in this country.
The molly houses had first come to public attention earlier in the century, with writings about them indicating a well formed culture in which groups of men met regularly at their ‘clubs’, using ‘maiden’ nicknames for one another, dancing together, camping it up, sometimes dressing in drag on special ‘festival nights’, and using a specialized molly slang.
London’s molly houses were subjected to police raids in February 1726, at Mother Clap’s 40 men were arrested. Several were prosecuted and on May 3 were executed at a public spectacle, an example and warning to other men who might be tempted by gender-bending behaviour or erotic play with members of the same sex.
Historian Rictor Norton has written about the molly house raids and 18th century gay subculture in a 1992 book and on his website, and I think it’s worth sharing the story in some depth:
“On a Sunday night in February, 1726, a squadron of police constables converged upon the molly house kept by Mother Clap in Field Lane, Holborn, tucked away between an arch on one side and the Bunch o’Grapes tavern on the other. All the avenues of escape being blocked, by the early morning hours the rooms had been emptied of forty homosexual men – ‘mollies’ or ‘notorious Sodomites’ in the language of the day – who were rounded up and hauled off to Newgate prison to await trial. By the end of the month several more molly houses had been similarly raided, and more mollies imprisoned. None of the men were actually caught in flagrante delicto – though a few were discovered with their breeches unbuttoned – and eventually most of them were set free due to lack of evidence. A number of them, however, were fined, imprisoned, and exhibited in the pillory, and three men were subsequently hanged at Tyburn…
“Mother Clap and her company would have gone unmolested were it not for the jealousy of an embittered homosexual turned informant named Mark Partridge…Sometime during October 1724, Partridge had a quarrel with his lover Mr Harrington (whose first name doesn’t seem to be recorded). What we can piece together from confusing court testimony (which is scattered throughout several trials since neither Partridge nor Harrington were themselves tried) is that Harrington revealed to someone that Partridge was his lover, and that Partridge when he heard of this betrayal was angry at being revealed as a sodomite, so he proceeded to revenge himself by spreading the (true) rumour that Harrington was an habitue of a number of molly houses. The rumour got out of hand – that is, it spread outside the confines of the molly subculture – and soon Partridge was contacted by the police. He was probably coerced by them into becoming an informer in order to avoid being prosecuted himself. by late 1725, Partridge was leading various constables to all of the London molly houses that he knew of, and introducing one or the other of them as his ‘husband’ so they could be admitted as bona fide members of each group. On Wednesday, 17 November for example, Partridge took constables Joseph Sellers and William Davison to another molly house, one kept by Thomas Wright in Beech Lane, where there was a very big row because the others had heard that they had been informed upon. They called Partridge a ‘Treacherous, blowing-up, mollying-Bitch’, and threatened to kill anyone who would betray them. Partridge, however, was able to mollify them by arguing that it was Harrington who let out the secret in the first place. So they forgave him and kissed him – and kissed the constables too, little suspecting who they were, and little knowing how treacherous Partridge indeed was…
“Samuel Stevens, a Reforming constable (i.e. a member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners) who became a member of her club by pretending to be the ‘husband’ of a homosexual informant, reports a visit he made on Sunday, 14 November 1725:
I found between 40 and 50 Men making Love to one another, as they call’d it. Sometimes they would sit on one another’s Laps, kissing in a lewd Manner, and using their Hands indecently. Then they would get up, Dance and make Curtsies, and mimick the voices of Women. O, Fie, Sir! – Pray, Sir. – Dear Sir. Lord, how can you serve me so? – I swear I’ll cry out. – You’re a wicked Devil. – And you’re a bold Face. – Eh ye little dear Toad! Come, buss! – Then they’d hug, and play, and toy, and go out by Couples into another Room on the same Floor, to be marry’d, as they call’d it.
“In April 1726 five men were brought to trial. The first to be tried was Gabriel Lawrence, 43 years old, indicted on charges of having sodomised Thomas Newton on 20 July 1725, and of having sodomised Partridge on 10 November 1725… William Griffin, a 43-year-old furniture upholsterer, was tried in April on charges of having also sodomised Thomas Newton… Thomas Wright, a 32-year-old wool-comber, was charged with having sodomised Thomas Newton as well. According to Newton, Wright had been in the business of selling ale to various molly houses before he set up his own molly house in Beech Lane… Constable Sellers testified that he went to Wright’s house on 17 November 1725, ‘and there I found a Company of Men fiddling, and dancing, and singing bawdy Songs, kissing, and using their Hands in a very unseemly Manner’. At Sellers’ departure, Wright ‘kiss’d me with open Mouth’. Constable William Davison, who went there the night the mollies threatened Partridge, reported that ‘in a large room there, we found one a fiddling, and eight more a dancing Country-Dances, making vile Motions, and singing, Come let us [bugger] finely’. (Unfortunately this ditty has been censored by the court reports, and the full text is lost). ‘Then they sat in one another’s Laps, talked Bawdy, and practised a great many indecencies. There was a Door in the great Room, which opened into a little Room, where there was a Bed, and into this little Room several of the Company went; sometimes they shut the Door after them, but sometimes they left it open, and then we could see part of their Actions’.”
Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin and Thomas Wright were all found guilty, sentenced to death then hanged together at Tyburn on Monday 9th May.
“At the same time, three other felons arrived in another cart to be hanged, and the notorious Catherine Hayes was brought in a cart to be burned for the murder of her husband. (She become the subject of Thackeray’s novel Catherine.) Before the hangman – Richard Arnett – could strangle her with a rope (as was customary), the flames reached his hands and he had to let go of the rope. The spectators were horrified by her screams as she struggled to kick away the burning faggots; she failed, and people watched in dismay as the eyes in her sockets melted from the heat; it required three hours for her body to be reduced to ashes… Such mass executions as these were quite popular, and the wealthier spectators could afford to sit in the viewing stands specially erected to accommodate them. On this particular occasion, the stands collapsed under the weight of 150 spectators, six of whom were killed”
More trials followed in July, Martin Mackintosh was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, a fine and time in the pillory in Bloomsbury Square, which was also the fate of Mother Clap, who was found guilty of keeping a disorderly house, given two years imprisonment and forced to stand in the pillory at Smithfield: “She was treated so severely by the mob that she fainted and fell off the pillory several times, and was carried back to the prison having convulsive fits; the newspapers suggested that she would not survive the ordeal. No more is heard of her.”
“By August 1726, three men had been hanged at Tyburn, two men and one woman had been pilloried, fined and imprisoned, one man had died in prison, one had been acquitted, one had been reprieved, and several were forced to go into hiding. The court may have sensed a witch-hunt atmosphere in the proceedings, not so much because the victims were innocent, but because the accusations came almost solely from only two men, both of whom were participes crimen in every instance, and both of whom were demonstrable rogues of dubious credibility. Whether or not the judges fully appreciated the disrepute into which they may have precipitated the administration of British justice, the trials ceased, there were no more convictions (although in December 1726 Samuel Roper, alias Plump Nelly, died in prison while awaiting trial for keeping a molly house in Giltspur Street,) and this particular episode of homosexual history came to an end.”
The London Journal on 7 May 1726 contained a letter, signed by ‘Philogynus’ (Latin for ‘woman-lover’):
“According to him, the mollies commonly refer to each other as ‘Madam’ and ‘Miss Betty’, and in a quarrelling mood will say such things as ‘Oh you bold Pullet, I’ll break all your eggs’. (In the heterosexual underworld, a Game Pullet was a young whore-to-be.) He cites another slang phrase, ‘bit a Blow’, which is equivalent to the modern gay slang ‘score a trick’. Although Philogynus graciously acknowledges that the mollies ‘are really very good Customers where they frequent’, he denounces their ‘effeminacy’, suggests that they ‘despise the Fair Sex’, and concludes this uncomplimentary personality profile by suggesting that they are ‘brutish People … harden’d in Iniquity’.”
The same edition of the paper expressed horror about the molly trials, then proceeded to expose the major cruising grounds in London: “ ‘besides the nocturnal Assemblies of great Numbers of the like vile Persons at what they call the Markets, which are the Royal-Exchange, Moorfields, Lincolns-Inn Bog-houses [privies], the South Side of St James’s Park and the Piazza’s of Covent-Garden, where they make their Bargains, and then with draw into some dark Corners to indorse, as they call it, but in plain English to commit Sodomy’. This term comes directly from contemporary boxing slang, meaning ‘to cudgel upon the back’ or ‘to knock down one’s opponent upon the back’; ultimately it is derived from the Latin dorsus, the back.”
The Society for the Reformation of Manners had been going after ‘sodomites’ since the turn of the century, resulting in earlier trials in 1707 and 1709, the same year a journalist, Ned Ward, produced a pamphlet about the Mollies:
“There are a particular Gang of Sodomitical Wretches, in this Town, who call themselves the Mollies, and are so far degenerated from all masculine Deportment, or manly Exercises, that they rather fancy themselves Women, imitating all the little Vanities that Custom has reconcil’d to the Female Sex, affecting to Speak, Walk, Tattle, Cursy [i.e. curtsey], Cry, Scold, and to mimick all Manner of Effeminacy, that ever has fallen within their several Observations; not omitting the Indecencies of Lewd Women, that they may tempt one another by such immodest Freedoms to commit those odious Bestialities, that ought for ever to be without a Name.
“At a certain Tavern in the City, whose Sign I shall not mention, because I am unwilling to fix an Odium upon the House; where they have settl’d a constant Meeting every Evening in the Week, that they may have the better Opportunity of drawing unwary Youth into the like Corruption. When they are met together, it is their usual Practice to mimick a Female Gossipping, and fall into all the impertinent Tittle Tattle, that a merry Society of good Wives can be subject to, when they have laid aside their modesty for the Delights of the Bottle.
“Not long since, upon one of their Festival Nights, they had cusheon’d up the Belly of one of their Sodomitical Brethren, or rather Sisters, as they commonly call’d themselves, disguising him in a Womans Night-Gown, Sarsnet-Hood, and Nightrale, who, when the Company were met, was to mimick the wry Faces of a groaning Woman, to be deliver’d of a joynted Babie they had provided for that Purpose, and to undergo all the Formalities of a Lying in. The Wooden Off-spring to be afterwards Christen’d, and the holy Sacrament of Baptism to be impudently Prophan’d, for the Diversion of the Profligates, who, when their infamous Society were assembl’d in a Body, put their wicked Contrivance accordingly into practice.
“One in a high Crown’d Hat, and an old Beldams Pinner representing a Country Midwife, another busy Ape, dizen’d up in a Hussife’s Coif, taking upon himself the Duty of a very officious Nurse, and the rest, as Gossips, apply’d themselves to the Travelling Woman, according to the Midwife’s Direction, all being as intent upon the Business in hand, as if they had been Women, the Occasion real, and their Attendance necessary.”
A merry, gossipy, feast follows and then,
“No sooner had they ended their Feast, and run thro’ all the Ceremonies of their Theatrical way of Gossiping, but, having wash’d away, with Wine, all fear of Shame, as well as the Checks of Modesty, then they began to enter upon their Beastly Oscenities, and to take those infamous Liberties with one another, that no Man, who is not sunk into a State of Devilism, can think on without Blushing, or mention without a Christian Abhorrence of all such Heathenish Brutalities.”
The pamphlet then states that this culture had been going on for many years until the Society for the Reformation of Manners exposed it.
The 1726 persecution was a witch-hunt – and it may be that the authorities realised that. The persecution ended, but as a result of it the molly scene for sure went further underground – and the news coming in of horrific persecutions of sodomites in the Netherlands in the 1730s must have added to keeping things discrete. Yet when mollies hit the newspapers again in 1810 following a police raid on the White Swan in Vere Street, the same cultural characteristics, including the birth ritual, were still present. At the White Swan raid 27 men were arrested. 8 were taken to trial and 6 ended up in the pillory, where they were subjected to virulent rage from the local population, especially the women. 200 special constables were brought in to control the crowd and prevent further harm to the men.
I have shared at some length from Rictor Norton’s fascinating research, but there is much more detail on his site, including the trial records of the executed mollies. Rictor Norton’s book Mother Clap’s Molly House: Gay Subculture in England 1700 – 1830 was published in 1992 and is not in print, but fortunately Rictor provides us with a fantastic online resource of his essays and a massive collection of source documents at rictornorton.co.uk
Queer Georgians by Anthony Delaney is a recently published work that also visits the Molly history, in deeply descriptive as well as informative style. He evokes the atmosphere of the city and takes us into the smells, sights and sounds of Field Lane, where Mother Clap’s house was situated and takes us into the drama of the February raid:
“On that Sunday night, as Gabriel Lawrence settled jovially amongst his friends, Stephens and Sellers watched on, preparing to spring their trap. Outside, acting on their intelligence, two reforming constables, Messrs Williams and Willis, had positioned themselves on Field Lane. A squadron of other constables and numerous key members of the Society used the shadows to provide cover. These invisible adversaries had been arranged to cut off all possible escape routes when the mollies inside were ambushed. Whether Stephens and Sellers within or Williams and Willis without made the first move in the early hours of the next morning is undocumented. Either way, upon realizing they had been betrayed the mollies ran for their lives. Although the accomplices of the Society hidden along Field Lane attempted to block their escape, some of the luckier men managed to evade capture and absconded across the cobbles. Nonetheless, approximately forty men, including the milkman Gabriel Lawrence, were rounded up that night, alongside the dynamic Mother Clap. The captured men will no doubt have been concerned for their mothers, their fathers, their wives, their children and the consequences their discovery would have for them, as well as thinking on which of their friends present that night had escaped to safety. They themselves would now be delivered to London’s notorious ‘prototype of hell’, as magistrate and novelist Henry Fielding called Newgate Prison. There they would await their fate.”
Delaney’s descriptive account takes us into the horrors of Newgate, the details of the trials and the turbulent atmosphere of the executions – due to the celebrity status of the murderess Catherine Hayes this death day was very well attended.
“Executions were public events, meant to be attended by all sections of society, high and low. As Dr Johnson observed to Boswell, the self-confessed gallows connoisseur, ‘Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators they do not answer their purpose’.”
Anthony Delaney’s conversational writing style takes us emotionally into the 18th century experience, and he concludes:
“To be a molly in the eighteenth century was a perilous thing, as Gabriel Lawrence and his friends knew only too well; but it was also a life worth pursuing, even in the face of such danger. In that way, their defiance is greater than their demise. That is our inheritance.”
August 2026 brings the tenth anniversary of Queer Spirit Festival, of which I am one of the founders: 10 years of LGBTQ+ people collectively connecting through the heart to community, nature and spirit; breaking the chains of religious bigotry and reclaiming queer nature as part of the cosmic order is a ground-breaking step in LGBTQ+ history. At Queer Spirit Festival we build on the work of queer spiritual pioneers as hundreds come together in the south west of England. QS is an intersectional meeting point for queer people from many races, faiths, ages and backgrounds, all together celebrating the sacred in nature and in each other. I am excited as we prepare for our 3rd festival in the stunning setting of Bridwell Park in Devon, UK.
“Our beautiful lovely sexuality is the gateway to spirit. Under all organised religions of the past, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, there has been a separation of carnality, or shall we say of flesh or earth or sex, and spirituality. As far as I am concerned they are all the same thing, and what we need to do as faeries is to tie it all back together again.” Harry Hay, 1912–2002, pioneering gay rights and Radical Faerie activist.
Throughout time and across the globe queerness has been associated with magic, divination, ritual, spirit. The modern LGBTQ+ liberation movement hasn’t addressed this part of our history, but at Queer Spirit Festival hundreds of queers gather to reclaim and explore this part of our nature…
To be ‘cosmic’ — from the ancient Greek kosmos — a word used by Pythagorus to refer to the order of the Universe — is to be a conscious, creative part of Nature, connected to rhythms and patterns of the planet, the solar system and the stars — it is to know and feel ourselves connected to the Earth and the field of Oneness, to the eternal existence of Spirit.
At Queer Spirit when we chant
We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Cosmic
we are celebrating that HERE BE QUEERS REMEMBERING AND RECLAIMING OUR NATURAL ROLES AS CONNECTORS OF THE MATERIALWORLD AND THE SUBTLE REALMS OF SPIRIT
My own discovery and awakening to Spirit came in the mid 90s while I was living with AIDS, my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self: As I surrendered myself to expected death, the cosmos came alive for me, I woke up to the interconnectedness of existence and the multiverse of consciousness. I believe the cosmos calls to all queers to know that we are cosmic beings – and self-discovery, Self-Realisation, is the best game around! Coming out about our sexuality or gender identity can be a step on the way to a deeper liberation — or for some the spiritual calling comes first, then the sexuality later demands to be explored! Uniting the sexual and spiritual is what Harry Hay was calling us to do, and I believe the world is waiting for us rainbow people to embrace the spiritual element of our history and nature! The rainbow is after all a spiritual symbol, representing integration and wholeness!
I am also a Cambridge educated historian and I am keen to share some of the vast, rich history of connection between homoeroticism, gender-fluidity and the sacred that is there for us to uncover and celebrate as we liberate ourselves from religious doctrines and discover our own spiritual paths.
I invite you to take a deep dive with me…
Uncovering the Gay Spirit
In ancient pagan rituals the community celebrated the erotic charge of spirit vibrating and buzzing in all existence, entering collective states of ecstatic consciousness through drumming, dancing, chanting, through erotic energies raised and shared shamelessly, through them feeling united with nature, with spirit, with each other. The priests leading these rites, and the deities they invoked in the process – such as Dionysis, Attis, Artemis, Cybele in the Greco-Roman world – were very queer.
Throughout human history, gender-fluid and same-sex attracted people, until the rise of patriarchal monotheistic religions, were often seen as having spiritual qualities and gifts that were there to benefit the whole community. This was the case in nature-focused cultures across the globe, in societies that honoured the wholeness of life, that recognised balance between masculine and feminine polarities, and never imagined that anything created could be ‘against nature’ – as became the Christian view of queer people and queer expression. Under the Christian God the masculine became elevated above the feminine, but in earlier cultures spiritual power was regarded as primarily feminine and balance was regarded as holy. Many ancient depictions of deity are androgynous, and people who were born with a balance of the genders were seen as closer to Source.
“It’s tragic that many in the LGBTQ community struggle with issues around spirituality. We confuse it with religion and, no wonder, given the treatment we have received at the hands of most religions… But what’s ironic about that is that before the patriarchal cultures and religions, people that we today refer to as LGBTQ were not only spiritually inclined, but were honored for the roles of spiritual service and leadership they played all over the world.” Christian de la Huerta, author of Coming Out Spiritually.
“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.” Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture.
On the sidelines of mainstream LGBTQ+ life, some queers have been talking about their spirituality for decades:
At the first-ever Gay Spirituality Conference, held in Berkeley, California, January 1986, participants were recorded as saying: ‘“Gay people hold the key to the next stage of human evolution—a world in which it is possible to cooperate without competing,” said a teacher of meditation. “We stress that gay people are different and that if we deny this we become second-class nongay people—that is, homosexuals,” declared a Buddhist priest. “We’re different, a germ of an androgynous tradition,” explained an Anglican scholar. “Being gay is about being in the world in a different and essential way. Androgyny permits all things,” said a lesbian psychic. “There’s something about gay people that goes beyond sexual orientation. All throughout history we’ve been very different from heterosexual people. I believe there is something about gay people that is profoundly religious,” said a shaman. “A gay person cannot live an unexamined life,” concluded a poet.’
These quotations come from Gay Spirit, a book of essays edited by Mark Thompson, published in 1987 as the AIDS crisis was reaching its peak. That existential threat pushed many gay men to seek for deeper understanding of life. I am one of those men, and unlike most of those whom AIDS brought that Accelerated Individual Discovery of Spirit, I am still here to tell the tale. The roots of this tale, this search to understand the spiritual nature of men attracted to other men, and of all queer beings, goes back to the late 19th century – and during the Gay Liberation era of the 1970s the quest was already calling those who felt there was more to being queer than assimilating into heterosexual culture.
With the adoption in the late 19th century of the word ‘homosexuality’ by the psychology profession, what had for centuries been regarded as a sin, and then a crime (in England since the 16th century with death penalty until 1861), now became seen as a sickness in the mind. But there were gay men at the time who were presenting their own understanding of queer nature, one inspired by an appreciation of the creative, romantic and spiritual qualities that it produced in themselves and their friends. They read the ancient writings of of Plato, who praised same sex love as mystical, as connecting the heavens – in the Symposium we learn that same sex love came under the patronage of Aphrodite Urania – heavenly Aphrodite – while reproductive sex and lustful sex without love belonged to the more mundane Aphrodite Pandemos – of the people.
Following the lead of Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs in Germany, British writers such as John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde preferred the term Uranian over homosexual for queer men, women and ‘intermediate types’. They believed that queer people represented an evolution of the species into new ways of relating and being.
“I believe it is true that the Uranian men are superior to the normal men in this respect – in respect of their love-feeling – which is gentler, more sympathetic, more considerate, more a matter of the heart and less one of mere physical satisfaction than that of ordinary men. All this flows naturally from the presence of the feminine element in them, and its blending with the rest of their nature…If it be once allowed that the love-nature of the Uranian is of a sincere and essentially humane and kindly type then the importance of the Uranian’s place in Society, and of the social work he may be able to do, must certainly also be acknowledged.”Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex
“The instinctive artistic nature of the male of this class, his sensitive spirit, his wavelike emotional temperament, combined with hardihood of intellect and body; and the frank, free nature of the female, her masculine independence and strength wedded to thoroughly feminine grace of form and manner; may be said to give them both, through their double nature, command of life in all its phases, and a certain freemasonry of the secrets of the two sexes which may well favour their function as reconcilers and interpreters. Certainly it is remarkable that some of the world’s greatest leaders and artists have been dowered either wholly or in part with the Uranian temperament–as in the cases of Michel Angelo, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or, among women, Christine of Sweden, Sappho the poetess, and others.” Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age
“This interaction in fact between the masculine and the feminine, this mutual illumination of logic and meditation, may not only raise and increase the power of each of these faculties, but it may give the mind a new quality, and a new power of perception corresponding to the blending of subject and object in consciousness. It may possibly lead to the development of that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness.” Edward Carpenter, Intermediate types among primitive folks
The ‘double nature’ that Carpenter refers to was recognised by traditional cultures around the world. Named berdache (a Persian word for a young gay bottom) by European explorers, the gender-bending shamans of the Native American tribes, have, since 1990, been calling themselves ‘Two-Spirit’, a term reflecting that they were seen by their own people as bearing both male and female spirit in one body, giving them spiritual gifts. This reclamation of queer spiritual identity by the Native Americans is a model for us all around the world, though we have to dig back into European history to find that story here – back to the pre-Christian Roman Empire when Goddess temples around the Mediterranean were run by women and queers. Christian writers railed against the flamboyant and erotic behaviours of the Gallae priests of the Great Mother Cybele…
“They wear effeminately nursed hair,” wrote Firmicus Maternus,“and dress in soft clothes. They can barely hold their heads up on their limp necks. Then, having made themselves alien to masculinity, swept up by playing flutes, they call their Goddess to fill them with an unholy spirit so as to seemingly predict the future to idle men. What sort of monstrous and unnatural thing is this?”
Of these Galli priests Church Father Augustine said, “They are the sons of the earth. The Earth is their mother”, but he also complained virulently about their habits, calling them “castrated perverts….. madmen…. foully unmanned and corrupted”.
Leslie Feinberg, wrote from a transgender person’s eye-view, that: “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.” Transgender Warriors, 1996
Meanwhile, from a gay man’s perspective at the same time, Andrew Harvey, was writing:
“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.” Gay Mystics, 1997
In other parts of the world we do not have to go back so far into history to find the association between homoeroticism, gender-fluidity and the sacred. Third-gender individuals were recognised for their spiritual qualities in Asian and Pacific cultures. In Japan homosexuality was regarded as natural for the monks because they were not allowed to have sex with women. In the 19th-early 20th centuries anthropologists reported on the presence of cross-dressing shamans in cultures from Borneo to Siberia and Alaska. Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck wrote in 1906 about the Chukchi shamans in Siberia: “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.”
In distinct contrast to the negativity around queerness spreading today in many African countries, traditional African understanding was, until recently, very different. Instead of focusing on the sexual aspect, queer nature was understood spiritually:
Two wisdom teachers from the Dagara people of Burkino Faso, Malidoma and Sobonfu Some came to the west in the 1990s bearing African wisdom. They taught that in their culture gender was defined by a person’s inner vibrations, not their outer physical form, and that nobody was defined by their sexuality. In fact to the Dagara ‘gay’ people were known as Gatekeepers. Sobonfu wrote in her book The Spirit of Intimacy, that, “Gatekeepers hold keys to other dimensions. They maintain a certain alignment between the spirit world and the world of the village…. Most people in the West define themselves and others by sexual orientation. This way of looking at gatekeepers will kill the spirit of the gatekeeper.”
Malidoma said in a 1992 interview: “My knowledge of indigenous medicine, ritual, comes from gatekeepers, it’s hard for me to take this position that gay people are the negative breed of a society. No! In a society that is profoundly dysfunctional, what happens is that peoples’ life purposes are taken away, and what is left is this kind of sexual orientation which, in turn, is disturbing to the very society that created it.”
Liberating the Queer Spirit
One of the early activists in the American Gay Liberation Movement was a western ‘gatekeeper’ – Leo Martello was a witch initiated in his family’s Sicilian tradition. He left the GLF after a while to focus on teaching paganism because he realised most in the gay movement were not interested in queer spiritual roots or potential. Other queers in the late 70s felt that gay rights was quickly becoming an assimilationist cause. The Radical Faerie community was born of the desire among some queers who wanted to dig deeper for the truth of who we are and what nature makes us for – and, on the sidelines of the LGBTQ+ cosmos, thousands of queers have been exploring community and magical communion in Rad Fae nature gatherings and sanctuaries around the world ever since.
In 1970s San Francisco a group of gay men met in the Faery Circle, led by Arthur Evans, to explore the pagan history of queerness. His book Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture was a ground-breaking exploration of the political and spiritual reasons for the Christian suppression of same sex love and gender-variance. At the same time queer women, such as Starhawk and Zsusanna Budapest were leading the exploration of spirituality within the feminist movement, proclaiming witchcraft as women’s religion and the acceptance of all forms of love in Goddess honouring cultures. Judy Grahn‘s 1982 book Another Mother Tongue also explored the magical, pagan, spiritual associations of queer nature in pre-Christian, traditional cultures.
Radical Faerie founder Mitch Walker declared in in Visionary Love (1980):
“The Homophile Movement is a dead thing: dead to the gay vision, anti-magickal, counter-revolutionary. Its spokespeople and theorists shun the roots (the radical, source of nurturance and understanding) in favour of surface values: the social norm, success, integration, acceptance, assimilation. Its shallow reality suffocates the vision in us, co-opting gay people and vitiating the creativity and potential of the Gay Movement.”
He was one of a number of queers who were feeling there is much more to who we are than society recognises:
“I look into my heart and hear messages from beyond, beyond that phoney who-I-thought-I-was, beyond straight society, beyond western culture, beyond time and space. I see an ancient, ancient wise being in my Self, I see new forms of evolving conscious beings, new forms of society, culture, reality. I feel the strong presence of a great wheel turning, the wheel of death/rebirth.
“I see visions that the life-source is changing, so that whatever is not of this Changing but is old and prior to it will be cut off, will run out of life and drop into extinction. I see gayness as very much a part of, caused by, leading into and through this Changing. I see gayness as a door, a source, a spirit, a lover, a teacher, or rather as sourcing, enspiriting, loving, teaching. It spirits me away somewhere magickal, strange, profound. I meet teaching wierdness, opening/expanding/dropping me into lights. I feel ecstasy, wonder, delight. I feel SPIRIT.”
Connection to nature – recognising ourselves as part of nature – even as her ‘faerie’ children – is at the core of the queer spiritual search, as we uproot centuries of Christian propaganda claiming that the way we make love is ‘against nature’. At Queer Spirit Festival hundreds of us gather to commune with the earth, air, fire water and spirit, reclaiming queer nature as we celebrate and come home to ourselves and the planet.
At QUEER SPIRIT FESTIVAL we are proud to be walking in the footsteps of so many incredible queer spirited ancestors, proud to be making space where the spiritual conversation can be continued and expanded…
From my 30 year journey with Spirit I would say that our spiritual challenge as queers is to break free of both materialist and dogmatic religious conditioning, and to embrace a direct mystical relationship with life itself. Our gender fluidity or our queer sexuality can be known as a call from the soul to know ourselves fully, being outsiders gives us perspective and the ability to find our own truths, find the keys that unlock who we are, discover all our unique talents and gifts — to realise the heaven within and become a conscious part of the collective evolution — to embrace our inner divinity as we recognise the divine beauty in others — by these means we together become Liberated. Enlightened. Realised. Cosmic.
Oscar Wilde: “‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.”
There is so much more to queer folk than our sexual and gender expression. Feminist pioneer Zsuzsanna Budapest called gay people “the emotional and cultural caretakers of the population.” Modern LGBTQ life would benefit a lot from becoming a ‘Know Thyself’ culture that encourages us to go further in self awareness than our sex drive and taste in fashion! Queer life has so much crisis and challenge going on but crisis makes us sit up and face ourselves. AIDS was the crisis that catalysed me to wake me up to the deeper reality of my soul. Thirty years later I have an amazing life co-creating queer spiritual spaces where we can explore and reclaim our roles as healers and magic makers, where our natural, playful, divine connection to spirit, to subtle and collective levels of consciousness, can emerge… but I am well aware that most queers in the world do not see this version of who and what we are.
And yet some of us, more and more of us in fact, have noticed, our eyes are opening, and at Queer Spirit Festival hundreds of us come together to share our gifts and stories, to celebrate and heal and grow together, to be in love and joy. At Queer Spirit Festival we celebrate the diversity of queer spiritual expression and its potential to bring healing, joy, love, laughter and reconnection to the world. As more queers step into our magic and power, as the history of queer people in spiritual roles in pre-Christian cultures becomes more widely known, everything the western world has long believed about being gay/queer may be about to change.
“The Uranian people may be destined to form the advance guard of that great movement which will one day transform the common life by substituting the bond of personal affection and compassion for the monetary, legal and other external ties which now control and confine society.” Edward Carpenter
I am a Long Term AIDS Survivor and these are my thoughts at World AIDS Day 2025, 30 years after my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self:
Sooner or later the people of the world will wake up to the fact that spirit is what we are, not matter. We are blind to this because in modern society our consciousness is in general operating within a limited frequency range, held in place by collective beliefs and, arguably, mass mind control via the media and other institutions, such as religion and academia. But possibly the collectively held limiting beliefs are the complete cause of the delusion, no dark players required. We’re all in this together.
Sooner or later we will all get that life is a manifestation of consciousness, not consciousness a manifestation of physical life. Why do I predict this? Because that is what happened to me.
Educated in the 1970s, I believe my generation was basically forced to make a choice between religion and reason, faith and science. We were not told about the rich British history of mysticism, paganism, magical paths and spiritual teachers, we were only taught about Christianity and science. No wonder most of us became atheists. I closed my mind to the big questions of life, and got on with enjoying it. I believed life was a meaningless, random event so why would I obey rules put on me that went against my nature? I came out at 21, dropped out of the career trajectory after university, went to London to learn about love and life itself.
At 25 I was told I was HIV+ and had probably 7 years left to live. I took this in my stride, resolving to keep living and loving to the maximum of my ability. Five years later, as my health deteriorated, I suddenly wanted to know why we are alive in the first place — and was death real? I picked up books on meditation, witchcraft and the tao — and surrendered my mind to the possibility of a Higher Self as the trials of AIDS set in; my body was getting sick but my spirit and mind came alive as never before. I dropped atheistic beliefs and opened to possibility — immediately the light came in. The revelation was immense. The realisation was instant. This is a sample of what I wrote as my perspective on life lifted to places I’d not known existed.
Chatting With The Spirits
Spirits meet in the ether, the dimension of their own
They do not need to be in bodies, to know themselves at home.
Our rational brains, our imperfect forms
trap our spirits in problems, set up false norms,
but the memory lives within us, we know what it’s like
to live in eternity, to love and not fight.
.
There is space for us all, enough light to go round
we can all know the secret, we’re not stuck to the ground.
I take hold of my life, choose its direction
I leave behind me, thoughts of pain and dejection.
As I move through the world may I offer the feeling of love
that exists in us all, not just in a heaven above.
We are Creation, we are Water and Earth
We are Fire and Air, from the moment of birth.
When our bodies grow old, or sick with despair
their spirits must leave, return to the air.
They leave behind substance, take up their true form
they dance in higher dimensions, back to their norm.
It will happen to all of us, everyone is the same –
We are all made of star stuff, and life on earth is our game.
Game played by spirits, fulfilling an ultimate plan,
we are all in the game, plant, animal and human.
When we return to the cosmos, all will become clear
but if we look into our minds, we’ll find the truth here.
.
Nothing exists without everything else:
So never see only objects.
Feel how everything fits together
and keep all beings as subjects.
.
Open out those memories
When it’s time to spring clean
no skeletons in closets
let them all be seen.
Know you’ve been here before
and may not come again
as we find liberation
we’ll know now and then.
.
Know that we were of One Spirit
many centuries before the madness
we had knowledge and power
but not understanding.
Now we complete the journey
on which living death was essential
we slowly awake to immortality
and realise our potential.
.
.
I CAME TO SEE HIV AS A CALLING TO KNOW OUR SOULS
TO FACE MORTALITY
AND BREAK THROUGH THE ILLUSIONS, CONFUSION AND LIES OF OUR TIME
REGARDING THE NATURE OF SELF AND SPIRIT.
HIV IS A CALL TO TURN INWARDS
TO FACE THE SELF
FIND ITS MOTIVATIONS, BLISS, DEEPEST DESIRES AND BRING THEM FORTH.
HIV IS A WAKE UP CALL— for individuals but also for humanity –
TO SEE WE NEED NOURISHING IN SOUL
AS WELL AS BODY.
WE CAN BE OPEN TO THE POSSIBILITY THAT THERE IS NO DEATH
ONLY A SHIFT IN PERSPECTIVE
OVERCOME FEAR AND FACE THE SHADOW
EMBRACE THE LIGHT AND GROW
HEALING IS VITAL
“Let he who would be free from the bonds of darkness first divine the material from the immaterial, the fire from the earth. For know ye that as earth descends to earth so also fire ascends to fire and becomes one with fire. He who knows the fire within himself shall ascend into the eternal fire and dwell in it eternally. Fire, the inner fire, is the most potent of all force, for it overcometh all things and penetrates into all things of the earth….
“Man is a fire burning bright through the night, never is quenched through the veil of darkness, never is quenched by the veil of night. ….. Man is a star bound to a body, until he is freed through his strife…only by struggling and toiling to the utmost shall the star within thee bloom out in new life. He who knows the commencement of all things shall free his star from the realms of night.”
I attended the book launch of Adrian Harris’s Nature Connection: Remembering Wholeness.
It was inspirational, I was truly buzzing on the energy, even through an online event.
I loved the combination of down to earth practical language along with an intense light of excitement in Adrian’s eyes.
I thrilled at how we started from talking about slowing down to appreciate nature but quickly reach the experience of our oneness with everything via engaging the magic of our bodily senses.
I think this book is going to be a crucial contribution to the paradigm shift the human species is currently negotiating – a shift that will get much less stressful once we collectively get with the programme. The shift from a materialist view of reality to a multidimensional, spiritual perspective. The shift from being identified with our individuated self to the magic, wonder and power of cosmic consciousness. There have been many spiritual teachers guiding this process since over 100 years, Adrian’s book is groundbreaking as it bridges the worlds of spirituality and science:
It’s so exciting that Adrian, an ecopscychologist, is are waking up scientific minded people to spirit and consciousness via direct experience of the undeniable feeling of AWE. His work stands alongside the cosmic poetic visions of Walt Whitman in the 19th century – who was calling for men to become loving comrades to each other and through that love come home to nature – and that of the spiritual feminists of the 1970s, who offered the same kind of vision directed at women. But Adrian speaks to everyone, coming at a time when feminism and gay rights have done much to create a more equal society – could it be we finally are ready for a vision that speaks to all of us? Ready to embrace the simplicity and also impact of knowledge of the awesomeness of our true nature as humans?
It might be argued that we’ve been pushed to this point where there is no choice but to seek the basic truth of our existence by the immense chaos in our minds and in the world,
but we’ve also reached this point by pursuing equality and embracing embodiment
ie overturning centuries of shame around sexuality and the body –
reclaiming those parts of us as natural, as sacred.
In the 21st century we are becoming more embodied.
Walt Whitman sang of the Body Electric in the 19th century
celebrating “that every atom that belongs to me as good belongs to you”
he sang of the return to nature…
“We two, how long we were fool’d,
Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,
We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return”
and of the union of the self with the cosmic soul:
“And as to you death, and you bitter hug of mortality.. it is idle to try to alarm me……
And as to you corpse, i think you are good manure, but that does not offend me…..
And as to you life, i reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
No doubt i have died myself ten thousand times before.
I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven…..”
Edward Carpenter heard the song
but also understood that the taboos around the body, around sex
were preventing the full embodiment of the cosmic Self…
“There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his quite external body; that we know. Are there not also in every man the making of a universal consciousness.”
“I conceive a millennium on earth – a millennium not of riches, nor of mechanical facilities, nor of intellectual facilities, nor absolutely of immunity from disease, nor absolutely of immunity from pain; but a time when men and women all over the earth shall ascend and enter into relation with their bodies – shall attain freedom and joy; “And the men and women of that time looking back with something like envy to the life of to-day, that they too might have borne a part in its travail and throes of birth.
Carpenter prophesied that:
“The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon which now after a hundred centuries comes back laden with such wondrous associations – all the yearnings and the dreams and the wonderment of the generations of mankind – the worship of Astarte and of Diana, of Isis or the Virgin Mary; once more in sacred groves will he reunite the passion and the delight of human love with his deepest feelings of the sanctity and beauty of Nature; or in the open, standing uncovered to the Sun, will adore the emblem of the everlasting splendour which shines within.” Edward Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (1889)
From Three Seers by Edith Ellis 1910
In early 1900s some believed cosmic consciousness was coming soon:
“The human soul will be revolutionized. Religion will absolutely dominate the race. Itwill not depend on tradition. It will not be believed and disbelieved. It will not be a part of life, belonging to certain hours, times, occasions. It will not be in sacred books nor in the mouths ofpriests. It will not dwell in churches and meetings and forms and days. Its life will not be in prayers, hymns nor discourses. It will not depend on special revelations, on the words of gods who came down to teach, nor on any bible or bibles. It will have no mission to save men from their sins or to secure them entrance to heaven. It will not teach a future immortality nor future glories, for immortality and all glory will exist in the here and now. The evidence of immortality will live in every heart as sight in every eye. Doubt of God and of eternal life will be as impossible as is nowdoubt of existence; the evidence of each will be the same. Religion will govern every minute of every day of all life. Churches, priests, forms, creeds, prayers, all agents, all intermediaries between the individual man and God will be permanently replaced by direct unmistakable intercourse. Sin will no longer exist nor will salvation be desired. Men will not worry about death or a future, about the kingdom of heaven, about what may come with and after the cessation of the life of the present body. Each soul will feel and know itself to be immortal, will feel and know that the entire universe with all its good and with all its beauty is for it and belongs to it forever. The world peopled by men possessing cosmic consciousness will be as far removed from the world of today as this is from the world as it was before the advent of self consciousness.” Richard Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness 1905
But then came World War 1 and World War 2…
Conscious evolution was delayed, but the world was changed,
purged through the most extreme of pain,
ready to release the past and step through the veils,
with no need to go through that pain again… if we can make the change.
In the 60s some believed ‘all you need is love’
but turned out we also need to be free of patriarchal conditioning –
so the way to liberation was led by those who needed it most
women and queers…
Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation were born,
both with a spiritual vision of unity
but both soon caught in division and discord,
those ever present tools of patriarchy
deeply embedded in our minds.
StarhawkAudre LordeZsuzsanna Budapest
Whitman and Carpenter had called to men
to become a loving brotherhood of comrades.
In the 1970s feminist witches gave out the call
to women to return to nature, become a sisterhood,
to remember their ancient witchy oneness with the Goddess,
and awaken the heart to empathy through celebration of diversity,
to overturn the separation and division in society
imposed by the masculine mind
bring about the end of patriarchy!
the first Radical Faerie Call
Some gay men were hearing the call too
Radical Faeries from the late 1970s gathering in nature
embracing the masculine, celebrating the feminine
and discovering sexuality is a divine tool of transcendence,
the Faeries brought the return of ancient holy genderbenders.
But then AIDS culled the pack
and it’s taking decades to get back to the track…
Mitch Walker, writing in Visionary Love, believed in the late 1970s that:
“We gay men are at a key time in the evolution of our gay consciousness. We’ve been struggling to reach a great vision buried in us, which we first sensed only in the vaguest ways. … In the modern Gay Liberation Movement, the history of men’s struggles has been the history of groping towards our vision, sensing it in the values of androgyny, in revolution, in free sexuality. It has led us to Stonewall, to genderfuck, to the birth of a new gay culture.
But during the past few years, it appeared that our movement ran out of steam; many militant groups faded, as did the brassy colourful rebels and our flagrant joyous celebrations. The seemed to be replaced by a new movement, the vocal gay Normals: fighting in the courts, the churches, the mental health professions, gaining advocate after advocate, victory after victory. It was as if the Homophile Movement for Equal Rights, taking new freedom from our radical flowering, thrust towards its goal of mainstream assimilation leading the mass of gays with them and deflowering our movement, the movement toward our vision.
“The Homophile Movement is a dead thing: dead to the gay vision, anti-magickal, counter-revolutionary. Its spokespeople and theorists shun the roots (the radical, source of nurturance and understanding) in favour of surface values: the social norm, success, integration, acceptance, assimilation. Its shallow reality suffocates the vision in us, co-opting gay people and vitiating the creativity and potential of the Gay Movement.”
I am inclined to say the same happened to the feminist movement. It became blind to its own potential. Many women, like many gays, have assimilated into the patriarchal game.
While the gay community channelled its energy into facing the massive shock and challenge of AIDS, in the 1980s-90s spiritual feminists, who were mostly pagan, often openly declaring themselves to be witches and proclaiming witchcraft as women’s religion (as had prominent witches of First Wave Feminism in the late 19th century), and often openly lesbian or bisexual, faced a backlash, much of it coming within the sisterhood from Marxist or materialist, atheistic minded, women, who criticised spiritual feminists for celebrating traditional feminine roles.
Third Wave feminists since the 1990s are less about a spiritual sisterhood and more about individuality and identity – they are often ‘spiritual’ in their outlook but spirituality is no longer the defining centre of their identity, it is more a sideline that informs their outlook – but does not see them declaring that that the female consciousness is fundamentally different to that of male, in that it sees oneness, interconnectedness and oneness versus what separation and difference. It sees what we have in common over what makes us stand apart, and celebrates diversity as the manifestation of cosmic unity.
So far away is modern feminism from this original vision of the movement’s pioneers – of people like Starhawk, Audre Lorde, Zsuzsanna Budapest who are regarded as Mothers of the cause – that the world now suffers the existence of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists – women who are perpetuating the masculine perspective of separation rather than engaging with the oneness of the divine feminine, women who base their beliefs on biology (another patriarchal belief system that keeps us dumb to the true consciousness, the spirit, the cosmic Self within) rather than a sense that women’s power comes through their spirituality.
At Adrian’s book launch over 90% of attendees were women – apart from Adrian there were only two men. I am not surprised that women feel his call, but so can men who are not afraid to embrace the feminine within themselves, who are prepared to accept the ego is not who they really are! The TERFS are ridiculous in their inability to see that a man embracing wholeness, a truly REAL man, has to embrace the feminine aspect of himself. Amongst the TERFS I see women who are embodying their egocentric, aggressive masculine aspect – but calling it feminine!
For so long the spiritual alternative to the predominant scientific worldview of the western world has felt so splintered, often weird. The esoteric seen as a sideline, the exoteric is where it’s at in our modern society. Often it is crisis in our lives that brings us to the realisation we are approaching life with unskilful attitudes, then many go seeking teaching from religious or spiritual sources. Adrian is putting into words something that some of us work out for ourselves, but which relatively few up til now have been open to believe – that nature can bring us home: if we can open our minds, hearts and bodies, nature is all we need.
Adrian’s book shows that humanity is getting ready to make the leap. To simply reconnect – physically, emotionally, mentally and, when we’re ready, spiritually – with nature. Ready to come home to the interconnected oneness of life and consciousness, and also to know, deeply and eternally, that we are part of a loving, beneficent, conscious Cosmos. Often known to the peoples of the planet, for tens of thousands of years, as Mother.
Whitman dreamed of the divine love of male comrades
Feminist mothers spoke of women’s spiritual consciousness
Adrian Harris removes the gender focus and speaks to everyone.
Aphrodite, Greek Goddess of Love – Venus to the Romans – is one of the most ancient manifestations of the divine feminine. She was associated with the much older Mesopotamian Goddess Ishtar, Inanna to the Sumerians, and like her considered to appear in the sky as the planet Venus, and the Phoenician Goddess Astarte. She had two prime aspects – Urania, the heavenly Aphrodite who was regarded, in Plato’s Symposium, as the inspirer of same-sex love, and Pandemos – of the people – inspiration for procreative desire and promiscuity.
Being a Goddess of Love and Sexuality it’s no surprise Aphrodite had many lovers (both male and female) and children. Three prime gods stand out amongst her offspring, the three that Apollo, the sky God, mentions in Lucien of Samosata’s Dialogues of the Gods (written in the 2nd century CE), while conversing with Dionysus. Apollo marvels at the differences between these three sons of Aphrodite, Dionysus associates these differences with their Fathers.
EROS is a described as a stunningly beautiful man with his archer’s bow,
HERMAPHRODITUS as a blend of both masculinity and femininity, and
PRIAPUS as very unattractive, but endowed with an enormous, permanently erect penis.
Eros is here seen as one of several sons of Aphrodite and Ares (the Olympian God of war and courage and son of Zeus and Hera, Mars to the Romans), but in the earliest Greek sources Eros appears as one of the primordial gods bringing the cosmos into being, after Chaos, Gaia and Tartarus (an Underworld realm where the dead are judged). Aristophanes described Eros as emerging from the depths of darkness “graceful… with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest.” Hesiod’s Theogony describes Eros as coming into the world with Aphrodite at her birth in the Ocean.
In the classical myths Eros is the god of erotic love and his power is such that his influence is held responsible for causing many of the lustful urges of other divine beings, and humans too. His cult was prominent in Athens – Plato’s Symposium can be read as a homage to the love god. Eros was seen as responsible equally for sexual attraction between men as between men and women. Love between women was more the territory of Aphrodite but also Athena, who was not interested in relationships with men. Eros can also inspire our passions in non-sexual, non-romantic directions – for example Eros can inspire us to fall in love with our creativity, with projects and places as well as people.
Lucien’s Dialogues no 23:
APHRODITE Eros, dear, you have had your victories over most of the Gods—Zeus, Posidon, Rhea, Apollo, nay, your own mother; how is it you make an exception for Athene? against her your torch has no fire, your quiver no arrows, your right hand no cunning.
EROS I am afraid of her, mother; those awful flashing eyes! she is like a man, only worse. When I go against her with my arrow on the string, a toss of her plume frightens me; my hand shakes so that it drops the bow.
APHRODITE I should have thought Ares was more terrible still; but you disarmed and conquered him.
EROS Ah, he is only too glad to have me; he calls me to him. Athene always eyes me so! once when I flew close past her, quite by accident, with my torch, `If you come near me,’ she called out, `I swear by my father, I will run you through with my spear, or take you by the foot and drop you into Tartarus, or tear you in pieces with my own hands’—and more such dreadful things. And she has such a sour look; and then on her breast she wears that horrid face with the snaky hair; that frightens me worst of all; the nasty bogy—I run away directly I see it.
Hermaphroditus is the child of Aphrodite and Hermes, the messenger of the Gods who is able to move swiftly between mortal and divine worlds. Hermes also had male lovers, as Aphrodite had female, making both of them excellent icons for same sex relationships at the time, and today. Together they brought the world Transness…
In the Dialogues, Lucien tells us that Hermaphroditus was born a remarkably beautiful boy, whom the naiad Salmacis attempted to seduce. The 15 year old boy blushed – “He did not know what love was,” and he pushed her away. Thinking her gone Hermaphroditus strips bare and goes to swim in her pool, but she dives in after him: “She held him to her, struggling, snatching kisses from the fight, putting her hands beneath him, touching his unwilling breast, overwhelming the youth from this side and that. At last, she entwines herself face to face with his beauty, like a snake, lifted by the king of birds and caught up into the air, as Hermaphroditus tries to slip away. Hanging there she twines round his head and feet and entangles his spreading wings in her coils.” He still resists sexual union with her, but she calls to the gods who assist her in her goal: “Now the entwined bodies of the two were joined together, and one form covered both. Just as when someone grafts a twig into the bark, they see both grow joined together, and develop as one, so when they were mated together in a close embrace, they were not two, but a two-fold form, so that they could not be called male or female, and seemed neither or either.” Hermaphroditus saw that the pool’s waters had made him “a creature of both sexes and his limbs had been softened there.” He calls to the Gods: “Father and mother, grant this gift to your son, who bears both your names: whoever comes to these fountains as a man, let him leave them half a man, and weaken suddenly at the touch of these waters!”
In Greco-Roman art Hermaphroditus is shown as a female figure with male genitals. He was associated with marriage as his embodiment of both male and female qualities was seen to symbolise men and women forming sacred unions. 1st century BCE Greek historian Diodorus Sicilus wrote that “Hermaphroditus, as he has been called, who was born of Hermes and Aphrodite and received a name which is a combination of those of both his parents. Some say that this Hermaphroditus is a god and appears at certain times among men, and that he is born with a physical body which is a combination of that of a man and that of a woman, in that he has a body which is beautiful and delicate like that of a woman, but has the masculine quality and vigour of a man. But there are some who declare that such creatures of two sexes are monstrosities, and coming rarely into the world as they do they have the quality of presaging the future, sometimes for evil and sometimes for good.” Oh yes, the sad truth is that some people have been debating the validity of transgender people for a very long time.
Priapus is the son of Aphrodite and Dionysus himself. The two had a brief affair, for which Hera cursed Aphrodite and caused her to give birth to an ugly child with a permanent and huge erection – Priapus. The Gods refused to allow him to live on Mount Olympus so he was thrown to the earth where shepherds raised him. Although endowed with a constant erection, its size meant having actual sex was pretty impossible, causing Priapus much frustration.
The Priapeia, from the 1st century BCE, is a collection of 80 short poems, mostly featuring Priapus congratulating and praising himself for the size and virility of his sexual parts, while also issuing fearful warnings to those who would trespass upon his garden or attempt to steal its fruits, threatening such miscreants with various punishments of a sexual nature, including anal penetration.
Diodorus Sicilus wrote that, “the ancients record in their myths that Priapus was the son of Dionysus and Aphroditê and they present a plausible argument for this linage; for men when under the influence of wine find the members of their bodies tense and inclined to the pleasures of love.” He also relates a “myth about the birth of Priapus and the honour paid to him, as it is given by the ancient Egyptians,” giving the story of the dismemberment of Osiris by the Titans and the search by Isis for his body – “the only member she was unable to recover was the organ of sex she commanded them to pay to it the honours of a god and to set it up in their temples in an erect position.”
Diodorus tells that honour is given to Priapus “not only in the city, in the temples, but also throughout the countryside, where men set up his statue to watch over their vineyards and gardens, and introduce him as one who punishes any who cast a spell over some fair thing which they possess. And in the sacred rites, not only of Dionysus but of practically all other gods as well, this god receives honour to some extent, being introduced in the sacrifices to the accompaniment of laughter and sport.”
Three sons of Aphrodite – three sons of Love
one the sexy, mischievous, playful Eros, beloved of men and women (but not Athena!), son of Ares, God of War (Athena’s brother), the only ‘heterosexual’ of the 3 fathers
one a blend of male and female, Hermaphroditus, who blessed the marriages of women with men – son of Hermes, bisexual Olympian messenger
one a fierce, lustful, ithyphallic beast, Priapus – son of the genderfluid God of Ecstasy, Dionysus
I think it’s easy to see the energies of these three sons of love in our world today:
those who are inspired by Eros are focussed on union with other, be that same sex or other sex.
those who are inspired by Hermaphroditus are called to union of male and female within themselves
those who are inspired by Priapus are led by the sexual drive alone
We do not have to define ourselves by who we are attracted to. That is a very recent development in human thinking (since the 19th century).
Gay men and lesbians who question the inclusion of trans people in our global community, often saying that trans is not a sexual orientation and so doesn’t belong with homosexuality, are sadly suffering from a very limited sense of who they are. The increased visibility of Trans people is a wake up call – to us all – challenging the illusions of the scientific-materialist paradigm, in which biology is somehow supposed to tell us who we are. The challenge is to realise that there is more to us than we’ve likely been told, and the ancient myths are clues and signposts to help us discover our deep divine nature.
Gay people and straight people are the same in the sense that we can be driven by Eros or Priapus. Meanwhile those inspired by Hermaphroditus are here to suggest to us all that wholeness will not be found in either of those two routes – wholeness comes via the union of male and female inside us (which opens the mystical doorway to the path that leads to union of our mortal human self with our eternal, divine, aspect).
“The history of feminism tends to be written as a secular movement, one indifferent at best to the spiritual side of life, if not actively hostile. And while that might be true of some individual figures,most of feminist history has emerged from—and alongside—esoteric developments like Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Paganism.”Jessa Crispin, author of The Dead Ladies Project, columnist for the Guardian US and host of the podcast Public Intellectual. jessacrispin.com
“Spiritual feminism is characterised by a spirituality that is grounded in the earth and acknowledges that we are all a part of a larger community that is interrelated… it is based on the principles of kindness, compassion, and nonviolence.’’ Carol P. Christ
“The so called division between cultural feminism and political feminism is a debilitating result of our oppression. It comes from the patriarchal view that the spiritual and the intellectual operate in separate realms. To deny the spiritual while doing political work or to cultivate the spiritual at the expense of another’s political and economic well being, is continuing the patriarchal game.” Judy Davis and Juanita Weaver, Dimensions of Spirituality in Spretnak’s The Politics of Women’s Spirituality.
First wave feminism is regarded as beginning at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York in 1848, where 300 women and a few men gathered for the first ever Women’s Rights Convention, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was also engaged in mediumship in the Spiritualist movement and led a group of women in a rewrite of the Scriptures to produce the ‘Women’s Bible’. She believed the Bible and the Church to be “the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation.” Prominent American social reformer and women’s rights activist, Susan B Anthony, who played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement, called the Women’s Bible ‘gospel truth.’
Lucretia MottElizabeth Cady Stanton
Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) was a Quaker preacher in her 20s whose sermons emphasised the presence of the divine in every individual. She became an advocate for black people as well as women to get the right to vote and has been called the “foremost white female abolitionist in the United States.” In her book, Discourse on Women, Mott argued that a true reading of the Scriptures shows that male and female are in an equal position to one another, and that hierarchy is a man-made concept: “‘Male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam.’ He gave dominion to both over the lower animals, but not to one over the other . . .. The laws given on Mount Sinai for the government of man and woman were equal, the precepts of Jesus made no distinction.”
The women at the 1848 Convention penned the Declaration of Sentiments following the format of the Declaration of Independence:“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness . . .. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman . . . ” The list of such injuries included religious and theological as well social topics: “He allows her in Church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry… He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.”
Another prominent first wave feminist, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898), who also campaigned for Native American rights, was a vocal critic and opponent of the Christian Church which she considered to be central to the process of men subjugating women through its doctrine which was used to portray women as morally inferior and inherently sinful. Her 1893 book, ‘Woman, Church and State’ outlined the ways in which Christianity had oppressed women and reinforced male dominance. She campaigned for the secularisation of the state, but also became a Theosophist and “In the closing years of her life Mrs Gage was much interested in the occult mysteries of Theosophy and other Eastern speculations as to reincarnation and the illimitable creative power of man.” This quotation is from an obituary, written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in Free Thought magazine. Gage had contributed an astrological commentary on the Book of Revelation to the Women’s Bible which Stanton wrote served to “mitigate, in a measure, the terrible pictures as they appear in plain English to the ordinary mind.”
Suffragette Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927) was involved in the Spiritualist movement, and branded a witch by the misogynistic press. In 1872, when she became the first woman candidate to stand for the American Presidency – her campaign platform included universal gender and racial equality under the law – she was depicted in a political cartoon as Mrs. Satan in Harper’s Weekly.
Mary Jo Weaver (an American Roman Catholic theologian) wrote about the religious views of the First Wave feminists, in Journal of Feminist Studies 1989, stating:
“I am convinced that their iconoclastic religious writing helped to make the current revivial of Goddess religion possible. Stanton and Gage particularly, in urging women to reject the authority of the Bible and the institutional church, raise a challenge that, although ignored or condemned in their own time, has been taken up by neopagan feminists.”
Second wave feminism
The surge of feminism in the 1960s and 70s, with its emphasis of the deconstruction of gender roles, was closely entwined with developments in women’s spirituality, but by the 1980s a clear divide opened up between feminist activism and the Goddess movement.
A key development in the 1970s was the emergence of women-led witchcraft, who combined feminine spirituality with an activist, political drive. Major figures in the development of feminist witchcraft include Starhawk, Zsuzsanna Budapest, Carol Christ, Naomi Goldberg.
Zsuzsanna Budapest (born 1940 in Hungary), is surely the Grandmother of modern Feminist Spirituality. She fled to Austria at the start of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 with her mother, Masika Szilagyi, a medium, witch and sculptress, and emigrated to the USA in 1959, where she married and had two sons, then divorced and came out as lesbian. (She said that she chose to avoid the “duality” between man and woman.) She is credited as founding the first women-only witch coven in 1971, which was named after the first wave feminist campaigner Susan B Anthony. She lives with her partner Bobbie Grennier in the San Francisco Bay Area and has organised Goddess Festivals since 1991.
In 1975, Zsuzsanna Budapest came to be widely known after she was arrested for “fortune telling” at her candle and book store in Venice, California following a “sting” by an undercover policewoman who received a tarot reading from her. Budapest was charged with violating a municipal by-law which made fortune telling unlawful. Budapest and her defense team described her as “the first witch prosecuted since Salem,” and the ensuing trial became a focus for media and pagan protesters. Budapest was found guilty. In response, Budapest and her legal counsel set out to establish Wicca, and more specifically Dianic Wicca, as a bona fide religion. She engaged in a 9 year process of appeals against the conviction on the grounds that reading the tarot was an example of women spiritually counselling women within the context of their religion. The state’s Supreme Court reversed the guilty verdict as unconstitutional and in violation of the Freedom of Religion Act and laws against “fortune telling” were repealed.
Naomi Goldenberg, who would in 1979 writea book called ‘Changing of the gods: feminism and the end of traditional religions’ heard Zsuzsanna Budapest speak about witchcraft as women’s religion at a conference in Boston, which led during the winter of 1975-6 to her taking along her friend Carol Christ to an Open University class on witchcraft taught by a young woman named Starhawk. Naomi and Carol had been active feminists for several years, Naomi an atheist, Carol a nonpractising Christian who was turned off the faith by its male dominance.
Carol Christ: “What I discovered in Starhawk’s class was a spirituality that named Goddess as female, affirmed the body and its connection to nature as spiritual, recognized death as a part of life, and worked with energy. I remember discussing the first class with Naomi and another friend in the car as we crossed back over the San Francisco Bay Bridge. They were questioning some of the things Starhawk had said, but I felt I had ‘come home.’”
In the autumn of 1977 Carol plus Starhawk, Zsuzsunna Budapest and Naomi Goldenberg gave presentations about the Goddess in a discreet corner of a small seminar on Women and Religion. This was the quiet conception of a new feminist-goddess movement with these 4 women its Mothers – a few months later in the Spring 1978 Carol delivered the keynote address, called ‘Why Women Need the Goddess,’ at The Great Goddess Re-emerging Conference at theUniversity of California in Santa Cruz, to an excited audience of more than 500 women and a few men. Spiritual feminism was born.
Carol Christ’s address, “Why Women Need the Goddess”, which went on to be printed in many publications, critiqued male-dominated religious structures and emphasised the importance of feminine-focussed spirituality, especially the need for women to reconnect with the Goddess as a symbol of empowerment and identity. In it she asked, “Is the spiritual dimension of feminism a passing diversion, an escape from difficult but necessary political work? Or does the emergence of the symbol of Goddess among women have significant political and psychological ramifications for the feminist movement?”
“Because religion has such a compelling hold on the deep psyches of so many people, feminists cannot afford to leave it in the hands of the fathers. Even people who no longer “believe in God” or participate in the institutional structure of patriarchal religion still may not be free of the power of the symbolism of God the Father…
“Religious symbol systems focused around exclusively male images of divinity create the impression that female power can never be fully legitimate or wholly beneficent…”
“The symbol of Goddess has much to offer women who are struggling to be rid of the “powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations” of devaluation of female power, denigration of the female body, distrust of female will, and denial of the women’s bonds and heritage that have been engendered by patriarchal religion. As women struggle to create a new culture in which women’s power, bodies, will, and bonds are celebrated, it is natural that the Goddess would reemerge as symbol of the newfound beauty, strength, and power of women.”
35 years after the original piece, in an article called Why Women, Men and Other Living Things Still Need the Goddess, Carol Christ reflected back and summed up her intentions:
‘In ‘Why Women Need the Goddess’ I discussed four ways the symbol of the Goddess could transform women and culture: 1) the symbol of the Goddess affirms the legitimacy of female power as beneficent and independent; 2) it affirms the female body and its cycles; 3) it affirms female will; and 4) it affirms women’s bonds and heritage.’
“More than anything else the Goddess symbolizes a new and fierce love of women for ourselves that has the power to change the world. Because I did not mention men or God in the essay, it is sometimes assumed that I was saying that the divine power should only and always be imaged as female, that both men and women should pray exclusively to Goddess, or that there is no need for liberating male images of God. This reading suggests that I am simply reversing the status quo as found in Judaism and Christianity. ‘Why Women Need the Goddess’ was addressed to women and situated in the context of women’s space. The fact that I did not address the question of men and God should not be read to mean that I was suggesting that divine power is only or ontologically female. As I wrote in Rebirth of the Goddess, men can also benefit from imaging divine power as Goddess; doing so can help them to respect and honor women, nature, the female body, and all bodies.”
Naomi Goldenberg gave expression to the enthusiasm felt by the women at the birth of spiritual feminism. In her book Changing of the gods : feminism and the end of traditional religions, she predicted “The women’s movement will bring about religious changes on a massive scale. These changes will not be restricted to small numbers of individuals practicing nonsexist religions within a sexist society. Society itself will be transformed to the point that it will no longer be a patriarchy.” But already in 1979 she could see that “Many of today’s feminists are not yet willing to reject Jewish and Christian tradition at such a basic level. Instead, they turn to exegesis to preserve Jewish and Christian religious systems. They prefer revision to revolution.”
For those ready to reclaim women’s spirituality from the male hands of religion, the work of Budapest and Starhawk illuminated the way.
Zsuzsanna Goldenberg, in her work ‘The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries’, first published 1980, which came out of her years with the women of the Susan B Anthony coven, made the case that“What people believe (faith-religion) is political because it influences their actions and because it is the vehicle by which a religion perpetuates a social system. Politics and religion are interdependent.”
“Women’s spirituality is rooted in Paganism, where women’s values are dominant. The Goddess worship, the core of Paganism, was once universal. Paganism is pleasure-oriented, joy- and feasting-prone, celebrating life with dancing and lovemaking. Working in harmony with Mother Nature, we discover and recover the All-Creatrix, the female power without whom nothing is born or glad…
“Male energy pretends to have power by disclaiming the female force. Today, given the patriarchal society within which we live, witchcraft with a feminist (Dianic) politic says clearly that the real enemy is the internalized and externalized policing tool that keeps us in fear and psychic clutter.”
In the book she presents the:
Manifesto of the Susan B. Anthony Coven No. l
We believe that feminist witches are women who search within themselves for the female principle of the universe and who relate as daughters to the Creatrix.
We believe that, just as it is time to fight for the right to control our bodies, it is also time to fight for our sweet woman souls.
We believe that in order to fight and win a revolution that will stretch for generations into the future, we must find reliable ways to replenish our energies.
We believe that without a secure grounding in womens spiritual strength there will be no victory for us. We believe that we are part of a changing universal consciousness that has long been feared and prophesied by the patriarchs.
Starhawk (born 1951), like Carol Christ and Zsuzsanna Budapest, emphasises in her teachings the living reality of the Goddess, found in nature and in ourselves, versus the distant God:
“I don’t like it when people assume that the Goddess, the great female principle, is just God in skirts. The Goddess means that the sacred is imminent – it’s present right here and now, in nature and in ourselves. And by sacred what I mean is not a great something that you bow down to, but what determines your values, what you would take a stand for. If the forest is sacred, we can’t chop it down. It water is sacred, we can’t pollute it, even a little bit. If there is sacred authority in the human body, then no external authority can tell people what to do with it- how to love, whether or not to end a pregnancy.” Starhawk quoted in Visionaries : people & ideas to change your life, 2001
Starhawk’s books The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979) and Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics (1982) are key texts of the modern pagan movement. Since their publication Starhawk has been central to the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion – she is a leading voice of the neo-pagan movement. But fear and lack of understanding of witchcraft, perhaps with a touch of homophobia added in (Zsuzsanna Budapest is lesbian and Starhawk is open about her bisexuality), is likely a reason that a backlash against the spiritual feminists came pretty quickly, and from other feminists.
In The Spiral Dance Starhawk “outlines the three pillars of her thealogy (a feminist approach to theism), which are that Goddess is immanent in the world; what affects one of us affects all of us; and Goddess religion is lived in community. Together, these thealogical imperatives require compassion, continuous striving for justice, and focus on common struggles rather than individual salvation.
“In subsequent work, Starhawk has emphasized the role of social change in Wicca with a particular emphasis on feminist transformation of patriarchal power over individuals, institutions, and policies. Consistent with many feminist theorists, Starhawk decries ‘power over’ and urges the embrace of ‘power-with.’ Ultimately, she calls for a transformative understanding of the social constructions ‘male’ and ‘female’.” From Encyclopedia of Women in Today’s World.
“STARTING IN THE LATE 1970s, alongside the enormous and continuing growth of women’s spirituality, there sprung up, in almost parallel fashion, a small spiritual movement among men. This movement was connected with the feminist critique of patriarchal notions of religion and authority, and with the attempt of both gay and straight men to create a new definition of maleness.
“One important impulse behind the notion of radical faeries was the idea that there had to be something beyond assimilation. Just as radical feminists wanted to go beyond women attaining equal rights in a man’s world, toward a notion that feminism implied a totally different reality, a different language, a different attitude toward power and authority, this group of gay men saw their own movement as implying a totally different view of the world, with different goals and different spiritual values than the “straight” world…” Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 1986
The Radical Faerie community continues to grow to this day, but in the 1980s and 90s the challenge of AIDS absorbed all the energy of queer activism, and took many creative, talented, magical men out of life’s game, mostly ones born in the 1950s and 60s, who might have united with the spiritual feminists to form a conscious coalition to lead the world into the Age of Aquarius. I am an AIDS survivor, my spiritual awakening came with that trial – it became my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Spirit – but as I offer my spiritual learnings that stem from that time I am aware that many of my brothers are just the other side of the veil that lifted for me, and our mission is to work together open the portal to the spiritual reality.
One of the founder Faeries, Mitch Walker, declared in his 1980 book Visionary Love: “All faggots are feminists, and militant ones at that. To cultivate your woman-energy, your feminism, is to increase your ability to see and walk through the great portal. In fact it’s essential.” The portal is the entrance to cosmic consciousness in ourselves, the consciousness of unity, love, bliss — of the immanent Goddess.
Charlene Spretnak’s 1982 book The Politics of Women’s Spirituality featured 50 essays by ‘Founding Mothers of the Movement’, including three by Starhawk. In the introduction Spretnak describes Goddess as “the intrinsic unity of all forms of being, the ‘life force’ or ‘life energy.’ Experiences of union with the One are accessible to everyone here and now; the truth of oneness is expressed in the consciousness of everyday existence.”
Spretnak honours the spirituality of the first wave feminists, explaining how “Analysts in both the first and second waves of feminism have exposed the sexism behind Judeo-Christian symbolism, ideology, structure, and ministry, but such revelations have often been dismissed by the feminist movement at large as wastes of energy that would better be spent on real political work. The message, however, that was voiced initially by Matilda Joslyn Gage in Woman, Church and State (1893) and by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Revising Committee in The Woman’s Bible (1895) is not that patriarchal religion is merely “unfair” in itself: The lies about the nature and function of woman that are intrinsic to patriarchal religion have informed the legal, educational, political, economic, and medical/psychiatric systems of our society and are accepted as “natural truths” by even the most modern and/or atheistic citizens.”
“Many women are fighting valiantly to become Judeo-Christian clergy and are attempting to reform the sexist language and concepts of that tradition. Others of us, however, have concluded that Judeo-Christian spirituality is too relentlessly patriarchal – in origin, content, form, and implication -to be redeemed. Although it has certainly been successful as an arm of patriarchal politics, we feel that patriarchal religion has failed, and failed with disastrous effects on hu mans and on the Earth, at perceiving and communing with “the higher powers” in a constructive and life-affirming way. We are committed to the evolution of postpatriarchal spirituality.”
“The worldview inherent in feminist spirituality is, like the female mind, holistic and integrative. We see connectedness where the patriarchal mentality insists on seeing only separations.”
Starhawk in Politics of Women’s Spirituality:
“Mary Daly, author of Beyond God the Father, points out that the model of the universe in which a male god rules the cosmos from out-side serves to legitimize male control of social institutions: “The symbol of the Father God, spawned in the human imagination and sustained as plausible by patriarchy, has, in turn, rendered service to this type of society by making its mechanisms for the oppression of women appear right and fitting.” The unconscious model continues to shape the perceptions even of those who have consciously rejected religious teachings. The details of one dogma are rejected, but the underlying structure of belief is imbibed at so deep a level it is rarely questioned. Instead, a new dogma, a parallel structure, replaces the old. For example, many people have rejected the “revealed truth” of Christianity without ever questioning the underlying concept that truth is a set of beliefs revealed through the agency of a “Great Man,”
“The symbolism of the Goddess is not a parallel structure to the symbolism of God the Father. The Goddess does not rule the world; She is the world. Manifest in each of us, She can be known internally by every individual, in all Her magnificent diversity. She does not legitimize the rule of either sex by the other and lends no authority to rulers of temporal hierarchies. In Witchcraft, each of us must reveal our own truth. Deity is seen in our own forms, whether female or male, because the Goddess has Her male aspect. Sexuality is a sacrament. Religion is a matter of relinking, with the divine within and with Her outer manifestations in all of the human and natural world… In the Craft, all people are manifest gods, and differences in color, race, and customs are welcomed as signs of the myriad beauty of the Goddess.”
The book, and spiritual feminism in general, were heavily critiqued for raging against ‘masculism’ and yearning for an Eden run by women. In the book, Hallie Iglehart wrote: “Objections to womanspirit seem to fall into three main categories: all spiritualities and religions are oppressive; spirituality is escapist; and it is a wasteful use of womantime and womanenergy. These attitude reflect a shallow view of history, and of spirituality and its relationship to political power. The oppression associated with religion and spirituality is real in a patriarchy. The oppression of political power is real -in a patriarchy. To dismiss all spirituality as oppressive, however is akin to dismissing all politics as oppressive. Refusal to recognize an deal with both oppressions is self-destructive. Moreover, we cannot build a strong movement without recognizing the value of all of work, and without communicating and working together.”
From the 1980s and right up until today many feminists did not want to hear about the spiritual side of things. In 1985, Caught in the Web: A Critique of Spiritual Feminism by Suzanna Danuta Walters accused feminine spiritualities of being separatist and old-fashioned forms of cultural feminism promoting biological essentialism and universalised conceptions of womanhood. She described spiritual feminism as different from radical feminism “in both its theoretical project (the development and articulation of a specifically woman-centered spirituality) as well as its explicit political agenda (the creation of alternative and self sustaining women’s community),” in contrast to the Marxist/leftist (and of course atheistic) agenda of the radical feminists – but concluded that spiritual feminism “presents no fundamental challenge to the status quo.” She and more recent writers such as Chris Bobel, in New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation, 2010, object to the way that spiritual feminism finds values in women’s traditional roles and dreams of a mythical age of matriarchal peace. Suzanna Danuta Walters, however, did not entirely dismiss the message of the spiritual women, whose views she describes in great detail, and calls for the left to regard the rise of spiritual feminism as a call to create a culture that honours the human need for a sense of connectedness, just one without the myth and mystery. She concludes, “Political culture should celebrate difference, instead of attempting to place all that is different into a category of OTHER.” (A message some modern feminists have completely lost sight of).
Cynthia Eller, in Relativizing the Patriarchy: The Sacred History of the Feminist Spirituality Movement, 1991, was scornful of the spiritual feminists, accusing them of an apocalyptic view of things. She wrote that it’s “not so much the specific characteristics of feminist spirituality’s future utopia but the fact that what is sought is a radical transformation of society as we have known it for several millennia. While more politically minded feminists have pursued wide-ranging social reforms, they have still maintained a stake in the present order and have been reluctant to trade it in for the hope of a future matriarchy. In contrast, feminist spirituality is apocalyptic in tone, envisioning the dramatic conclusion to society as we know it, and the birth of a society beautiful and new.” And with that damning conclusion, the self-realisation that went along with this vision of a transformed society, the connection to non-dual Goddess consciousness and appreciation of the interconnected unity of life, was dropped from the conversation.
Writing in 2013, American feminist Sally Kempton (1943-2023) reflected: “To my generation, feminism was not only a movement for woman’s economic and political equality. It also involved a deep and fearless self-exploration, a commitment to looking beyond our conditioned assumptions about masculine and feminine. That exploration got lost in a kind of backlash in the 1980s and 1990s.” But for her that exploration became central, and spiritual: following an enlightening LSD trip she was inspired to explore eastern spirituality and in 1982 became a Siddha Yoga swami. Later in life she travelled and taught meditation and non-dual philosophy, putting the blissful experience of Goddess consciousness at the centre of her message. Goddess Worship Is The Path to Bliss: Sally Kempton – YouTube
Sally Kempton
Third wave feminism, from the early 1990s turned the spotlight away from the deconstruction of gender roles and towards individualism, diversity and intersectionality. The unity of sisterhood – and attuning to the spiritual unity of life through Goddess consciousness fell off the feminist agenda, that energy instead channelling into the New Age, holistic spirituality movement, in which many women play prominent roles, a fact which many radical feminists find challenging. They feel spiritual feminism supports traditional female roles which they wish to eradicate. Meanwhile some accuse third-wave feminists of concentrating on sex, culture and identity at the expense of important structural issues that still uphold the patriarchal system, including religion.
Ella Poutiainen, of the Department of Gender Studies, University of Turku, Finland wrote in a 2024 study that while “second-wave cultural feminism was historically connected to the rise of alternative, women-centred spiritualities celebrating feminine divinity, contemporary feminine spirituality is rarely explicitly feminist. In addition, spiritual women frequently view feminism in negative terms. The ambivalent feminism within contemporary feminine spiritualities is captured in Kempton’s illustration of women’s interest in spirituality as a new phase of feminism – a feminism of the soul.” Sally Kempton, mentioned above, saw “goddess practice as a form of sacred feminism – not political feminism but feminism of the soul.” She left the political field and focussed on spirituality for the rest of her life.
And yet there is certainly some interest in spirituality within the contemporary feminist movement. Kristen Aune presented a study, in 2011, in a Feminist Review article called “Much less religious, a little more spiritual: the religious and spiritual views of third-wave feminists in the UK”. Among a wide sample of British feminists, found in local groups, national organizations, conferences, festivals, single-issue campaigns and web-based forums – who were mostly women in their 20s and 30s – she found the most popular response to the question ‘Do you particularly identify with any of the following types of feminism (tick all that apply)?’ was ‘Just identify with feminism generally.’ After this came ‘socialist’, ‘academic’, ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’. ‘Spiritual/religious’ was the fifth least popular, ahead of ‘womanist’, ‘trans’, ‘black’ and ‘separatist’. 39% declared themselves atheists. 11.2 per cent were part of a major religion and only 4.4 per cent of respondents placed themselves in the ‘spiritual but not religious’ grouping. The Goddess, and witchcraft – hailed in the 70s as women’s religion – did not get a mention.
Kristen Aune and Catherine Redfern, inReclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement, 2010, set out to reinvigorate feminism at a time when many young women were not embracing it. Redfern found that some “spiritualities that are perhaps less specific than New Age or neo-paganism have also found favour with feminists. For instance, the spiritual activism of Gloria Anzaldua, the spiritual rituals of Canadian anti-capitalist activists and the Gather the Women global network. Seeing spirituality as ‘a transcendent sense of interconnection that moves beyond the knowable, visible material world’, these feminists believe that spirituality enables them to approach activism with joy rather than anger, giving them energy to heal the world through transforming the self and relationship with others.”
CONCLUSION
“Feminist spirituality must be intersectional, recognizing the multiple and intersecting forms of oppression that women face. This means acknowledging the ways in which racism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia intersect with sexism to create unique experiences of oppression.” wrote Riane Eisler in The Chalice and the Blade, 1987, the clarion call for third wave feminism. But feminist spirituality was slipping away from the conversation. Feminism might be said to have made it possible for some women to play the games that men invented, it has changed society but it has not led to liberation from all patriarchal norms, it has not led to the ‘massive scale’ religious changes and the transformation of patriarchy that the 1970s witches dreamed of – not yet.
Feminism without spirituality may produce successful women, but some of them seem to behave more like men, spreading ignorance and division in the world. JK Rowling being a prime example. Feminism without knowledge and experience of the Goddess has made possible the recent upsurge of transphobic separatism in the feminist movement – the emergence of TERFS, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, who quote biology, not spirituality, as a basis for their beliefs. Spiritual feminists, who see the Goddess alive in all beings, recognise that trans people are part of the divine design, and they also likely know that ‘gender-variant’ individuals have always existed, historically often fulfilling spiritual roles in pre-Christian communities around the world. While some modern, so-called, feminists seem to be pulling us back to a time of defined gender roles – or taking for themselves the right to be as aggressive and elitist as men can be – it would help to recall the basics, to listen again to the Mothers.
Audre Lorde
Charlene Spretnak: “Efforts to radically transform society must fall short if the deepest informing assumptions and core values are not challenged.” (States of Grace, 1991)
Audre Lorde: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
Starhawk has written that in spiritual feminism, ‘there are no fixed gender roles; women and men are equally capable of being warriors or healers.’’ She has said: “Too often we have seen the movement for trans and nonbinary rights as separate from the movement for women’s rights that arose from the second wave of feminism. That division only serves to reinforce the structures of authoritarian male rule. Our issues are not separate, and our interests are far more common than they are divided.”
Zsuzsanna Budapestunderstood and advised back in the early 80s that: “By accepting all elements in nature, we make whole the collective and individual Soul.” She wrote about queer people in Grandmother Moon, 1991: “One of nature’s most pleasant ways of coping with overpopulation is to increase the number of homosexuals in the community. Rather than producing children, gays provide support for those in the community who do have children. The gay uncles and aunts are the legendary fun relatives we remember as adults. Their productivity is directed into other areas. They have enriched our culture with outstanding works in the arts-theater, dance, music, and so on. They are the emotional and cultural caretakers of the population.” This equally applies to trans as well as gay people – we are all created by nature, we have gifts to share.
Carol Christ: “…identifying as queer means no longer having to try to fit in, to be like the others, to be normal. Identifying as queer means that it is fine to be different, eccentric, not like the others. It means telling the gender police to “go jump in a lake and swallow a snake and come out with a belly ache.”
TERFs are particularly disturbed by people who were born men wanting to live as, wanting to be, women – but a spiritually aware, consciously evolved, feminist would surely see this desire as a huge compliment to the divine feminine – because YES, the Goddess presence is in everyone, and – as many mystics have been saying for some decades – She is coming back strongly into human awareness. The thing is, in a culture that denies the Goddess, that does not understand how her shakti (the Hindu term for Her presence) exists within us, a person in western society born male yet with a strong connection to the divine feminine has to work out what to do with that part of themselves, without a coherent metaphysical framework.
Pagan spirituality can provide such a framework, which, whether a person decides to undergo physical transition or not, addresses the multi-layered nature of gender expression and sensation in all parts of our being – body, mind, soul and spirit, and gives us tools to elevate the exploration of gender, if that is a journey we feel called to take, into a spiritual quest of liberation and fulfilment.
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Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) wrote that: “Man enjoys the great advantage of having a god endorse the code he writes; and since man exercises a sovereign authority over women it is especially fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being. For the Jew, Mohammedans, and Christians, among others, man is Master by divine right; the fear of God will therefore repress any impulse to revolt in the downtrodden female.” Until the world’s feminists grapple with this, patriarchy will continue to hang on to its deep, religious, roots, will continue to divide us and rule over us. Science is of course patriarchy’s latest way of perpetuating itself – once more it found a way to impose a collective belief system, and when ‘feminists’ espouse biology as a justification for harrassing and darkening the lives of other people, I think they have been blinded by the male gaze – that keeps us all turned outward, seeing separation, difference and division – and are failing to embrace the female vision, the Goddess sight that illuminates our inner worlds and which sees unity through diversity, sees the interconnectedness of all things and feels the love – the force that ties it all together.
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WHEN WE LIVE FROM LOVE WE ARE WITH THE GODDESS, OUR MINDS OPEN TO THE ONENESS GOING ON ALL AROUND US.
Feminism turned away from the spiritual quest.
But the spirit is the realm of the feminine. The DIVINE feminine.
We are all part of Her. She is part of Us.
Be we woman, man, transgender. Be we gay, straight, bisexual.
The Goddess is in everything.
And when humanity finally wakes up to this, everything WILL change, for the better.
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In Spretnak’s 1982 book, Hallie Iglehart, wrote an essay called ‘The Unnatural Divorce of Spirituality and Politics.’
“An unnecessary and destructive chasm exists between “spiritual” and “political” feminists. It is unnecessary because we are saying the same things about the abuse of power-over relationships, the right to physical and mental health, the destruction of the environment, the importance of the personal and the political, the individual and the collective, and the necessity of the overthrow of the patriarchy on all levels. We have the same goals and values, but sometimes use different words to de-scribe them or tools to actualize them. The split between us is created and maintained by patriarchal dualistic concepts of “spirituality” and “politics.” It is destructive because it prevents the synthesis of the “spiritual” and “political” approaches necessary to establish the kind of world we want to see. When we do make this synthesis within our-selves and within the feminist movement, we will have more power than we ever imagined possible...
“Ultimately, the goals of spirituality and of revolutionary politics are the same: to create a world in which love, equality, freedom, and fulfillment of individual and collective potential is possible. If we unite the two approaches to these common goals, we will experience this fulfillment.”
POSTSCRIPT
From Zsuzsanna Budapest’s Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries:
“What a beautiful spaceship we have to live on! As the Blue Planet in space, we have the only water in the entire solar system. Without water, there is no organic life. Aphrodite still lives here. Our Mother, Earth, Gaia, Demeter, Kore, Tara, Ceres, has dictated all seasons and changes into a calendar of life. Food is life. Knowing how to plant and reap is the core of every culture’s reservoir of knowledge. That is one cycle of change.
“Then there is the other-changes of the spirit, management of feelings, relationships, and personal well-being. Love is the food of the spirit. The communal events that bind communities together around spiritual issues make up our lives and are the highlights in our humanities.
“Having celebrations of all sorts-calling, summoning the people to rejoice, parading, gathering together, feasting, purifying togeth- er, making oaths together, producing culture together, worshipping together-were stock and trade of the most important concerns of the life-oriented society that women created. It is true these festivals and holy days were observed by both sexes for the most part, but they were “priestessed” by women.
“Although diverse in function, the celebrations all had to do with the theme of the communal spirit of the year. Following the simple observance of these festivals, holy days and Sabbats would give rich exposure to the other people in one’s community, and isolation of any one person (unless chosen) was virtually impossible. Hence, there was no loneliness as we know it today, that gnawing awareness that nobody cares. No one had to experience any deep degree of lovelessness, because the attitude toward love was such that, at least ritualistically, everybody had a chance to participate in communal sex as well as communal nurturing. Even the priestesses of Aphro- dite vowed to distribute their favors evenly.
“Today’s calendar, with the meaningless and artificial days of so- called “celebration,” which is usually synonymous with drinking and time off from work, pales in comparison with the genile Path of Old. Therefore, try to celebrate the many holy days of this ancient calendar as often as you can, choosing at least one or two from each end of the wheel, and making the celebration of these sacred days a tradition for your family from now on.
“Do not allow your soul to grow without tending to the spirits of old-our ancestors. You are part of a never-ending continuation and it is perfectly all right to take heart and sustenance from the past.
“When you allow the spirits to awaken in you, difficulties will be clarified and unseen powers suddenly revealed. Do not forget that the Goddess is re-emerging in the public consciousness today, but She has been with you from the beginning, and She is all that is attained at the end of desire.
“Tread lightly into the soul’s hidden desires. The hunger of the spirit will be satisfied by the motherly hands of the Goddess. The cost humanity will have to pay for ignoring and denying the Female Principle of the Universe is soaring. It is through this Female Prin- ciple that the Way will be found. Let this spaceship find home in the Mother’s harbor-paradise restored, at least spiritually. By accepting all elements in nature, we make whole the collective and individual Soul.”
I came across this beautiful description of the divine masculine, in the form of the Horned God Pan, written by Zsuzsanna Budapest, it’s from her 1981 book The Aquarian Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries.
WHO IS THE GENTLE GOD PAN? Why is he endowed with hoofs? Why does he wear horns? Why is he naked? Why?
In a society where the male is totally socialized, made antiseptic with clothes, deodorants, designer hairdos, cosmetics, and designer smells, it’s hard to visualize the Male Principle of the Universe.
What does manhood mean without violence or competition? We pondered these heady questions, and more, in my workshops from the Midwest to Alaska to the Bay Area. There was a time when the great god Pan was pronounced dead.
In the Mediterranean countries, where worshipping him was at its most vigorous, the last of his altar’s fires went out. However, today I think he is being reborn again, returning to a more understanding world that’s missed his presence. Pan (meaning all that is male in the universe) wore many names:
Bacchus, Dionysus, Zagreus, Jove, Dios, Satyr, to list a few. He is the essence of manhood; he is wild, he has a glint in his eye. Today we would label him crazy. He is utterly free. He is not, however, dangerous to women. He is not a rapist, not a violent male. He likes to party, he enjoys sex, and is ever ready for it. He is not possessive (his women are free, too). He wears horns not because he is cuckholded, which is silly, but because he represents the animal kingdom as well, hoofs, hairiness, nakedness, and all. Pan loves solitude, too. I talked to modern men who have seen him around lakes, in the Rocky Mountains, in the deserts. The great god Pan is here.
Pan appears to groups who call him. His power, a sexual love of life, permeates us all when we feel good. Women contain him; he is within us just as he is within men. Pan is a dancer, a magician, a healer, a priest. He is the son of the Earth Mother. He has total communication with all that is natural. As Dionysus, he could make water spring from rocks. As Pan, he could dance wildly for five days and nights without stopping to rest. As Jove, he initiated young men into men’s mysteries, wielded thunder, became the fire god.
Pan is bisexual or pan-sexual. Shame had to be invented in order to get rid of all this freedom he bestowed on his followers. Guilt had to be invented and his people threatened with eternal fires to make them give up their wildness, their freedoms. Pan, finally, is the divine artist, Bacchus, who attends festivals and plays the Pan pipes, which makes all who hear glad.
Christians took one look at him and decided this was going to be the bad guy, their devil, to offset their good guy, Jesus, in his long white nightgown. Jesus only related to his mother, Mary, and to Mary Magdalene. The Virgin and the whore, because of Jesus, became archetypes for women to emulate. Women still suffer from this stifling, unnatural demand.
Pan, on the other hand, related to women as women. As full, complete, sexual human beings, in all walks of life, including the priestesshoods. Chastity didn’t have any particular merit with Pan since he didn’t seek to control women’s sexuality. He paid a high price for his feminism. His image was stolen and made into that of the devil incarnate.
