African Wisdom Teacher Malidoma Some of the Dagara Tribe brought his tribal understanding of gender and sexuality to the West in the 1990s. He, and his wife Sobonfu Some, both taught that it was accepted in their culture that a person’s inner gender may be different to their physical sex, and that the sexuality of same sex orientated individuals was regarded a spiritual energy that was used for the greater good of the community. Gay sex was seen as a way to open gates to other dimensions, to worlds of nature spirits, ancestors, angels and deities.
Malidoma calls gay men ‘gatekeepers’ and lesbians ‘witches’.
Sobonfu’s teachings are encapsulated in her beautiful book ‘Spirit of Intimacy,’ where she writes about the value of ritual in our lives in order to maintain an intimate relationship with existence itself. She also identifies where the rituals come from – the queer people.
I was fortunate to meet Sobonfu Some in 2011 and ask her to speak about gays and lesbians. She held her hands up in joy and with a huge smile declared ‘They are the special ones… Without them nothing can happen.’
Malidoma, from a 1993 interview:
“So to then limit gay people to simple sexual orientation is really the worst harm that can be done to a person. That all he or she is is a sexual person. And, personally, because of the fact that 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.
“I think this is again victimization by a Christian establishment that is looking at a gay person as a disempowered person, a person who has lost his job from birth onward, and now society just wants to fire him out of life. This is not justice. It’s not justice. It is a terrible harm done to an energy that could save the world, that could save us. If, today, we are suffering from a gradual ecological waste, this is simply because the gatekeepers have been fired from their job. They have been fired! They have nothing to do! And because they have been fired, we accuse them for not doing anything. This is not fair!”
He was quite certain where the fault lie – Christianity. In the West we have been held in the yoke of divisive Christian ideology for so long that few people today are aware that in the pre-Christian world – and indeed for some centuries after its rise – people simply accepted sex as sex. Men were able to have penetrative sex with both females and males without much issue, and there were always men who wanted only to be passive with other males – these were the ‘homosexuals’ of the time, and although that word did not exist, many other terms for a passive male did, including pathicus, cinaidos, sodomite, ganymede, catamite and molly.
Malidoma:
“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 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 are out of a job. This is the worst thing that can happen to a culture that calls itself modern.
“…the thing about it is that humans are going to be begetting gatekeepers, no matter what. This is the chance that we’ve got. So maybe that means that sooner or later we’re going to wake up to the horror of our own errors, and we’re going to reconsecrate our chosen people so that they can do their priestly work as they should. Otherwise, I just don’t understand. I just don’t understand. My position about it is not so much that gays be just forgiven. That’s just tokenism. But that they serve as an example of the wrong, or the illness, that modernity has brought to us, and that we use that to begin working at healing ourselves and our society from the bottom up. That way, by the time we reach a certain level, all the gatekeepers are going to find their positions again. We cannot tell them where the gates are. They know. If we start to heal ourselves, they will remember. It will kick in. But as long as we continue in arrogance, in egotism, in God-knows-what form of violence on ourselves, no, there’s that veil of confusion that’s going to continue to prevail, and as a result it’s going to prevent great things from happening. That’s all I can say about that.”
What do Gatekeepers do?
Open portals to other dimensions!
Malidoma:
“The Earth is looked at, from my tribal perspective, as a very, very delicate machine or consciousness, with high vibrational points, which certain people must be guardians of in order for the tribe to keep its continuity with the gods and with the spirits that dwell there. Spirits of this world and spirits of the other worlds. Any person who is at this link between this world and the other world experiences a state of vibrational consciousness which is far higher, and far different, from the one that a normal person would experience. This is what makes a gay person gay. This kind of function is not one that society votes for certain people to fulfill. It is one that people are said to decide on prior to being born.”
Sobonfu:
“There are many gates that link a village to other worlds. The only people who have access to all these gates are the gatekeepers. I should mention here that there are two different kinds of gatekeeper.
The first group has the ability to guard a limited number of gates to the other world, specifically,those that correspond to the Dagara cosmology – water, earth, fire, minerals, and nature – because they vibrate the energies of those gates.
The second group of gatekeepers… has the responsibility of overseeing all the gates. They are in contact not only with the elemental gates but also with many others. They have one foot in all the other worlds and other foot here. This is why the vibration of their body is totally different from others.”
THIS WISDOM WAS ALSO PART OF THE ANCIENT EUROPEAN WORLD, WHERE GAY SEXUALITY AND GENDER FLUIDITY WERE COMMON AND NORMAL FEATURES OF GODDESS WORSHIP, BOTH IN TEMPLES AND IN POPULAR FESTIVALS.
The word translated as ‘sodomites’ in the King James Old Testament – Qedesha – referring to the priests of the Goddess temples – actually means ‘Anointed’ or ‘Holy Ones.’ An earlier English translation by John Wycliffe called them ‘woman-ish men’ – these were feminine/trans men dedicated to the service of a Goddess, and they were everywhere in the ancient world.
Gender fluid, queer priesthoods populated the temples of the ancient world for millennia. In Classical Greece love between men was hailed as revealing the spiritual heights of existence. The most popular deities such as Dionysus, Attis, Pan, Cybele, Artemis/Diana all had queer associations. Genderfluidity was seen as bringing a person closer to the divine, so cross dressing was common at festivals and rites. Pleasure itself was regarded as sacred. Through ecstatic ceremonies with dance, erotic play and intoxication – all dedicated to the deities – people felt their connection to the spiritual cosmos.
The ancients also understood that the Earth itself is alive. Through rituals humans can commune with her spirits, manifest in nature as animals, plants, trees, mountains… as the elements…
Sobonfu:
“I should mention here that there are two different kinds of gatekeeper.
“The first group has the ability to guard a limited number of gates to the other world, specifically,those that correspond to the Dagara cosmology – water, earth, fire, minerals, and nature – because they vibrate the energies of those gates.
“The second group of gatekeepers, which is our focus here, has the responsibility of overseeing all the gates. They are in contact not only with the elemental gates but also with many others. They have one foot in all the other worlds and other foot here. This is why the vibration of their body is totally different from others. They also have access to other-dimensional entities such as Kontombile, small beings who are very magical and knowledgeable. They are known as leprechauns in the Irish tradition.
“Now what would happen if you’re dealing with a culture that doesn’t care about these gateways? What happens is that a gay person cannot do his job. Gatekeepers are left unable to accomplish their purpose. This is one of the most distinguishing factors about gays in the village. Now, as to their sexual orientation, nobody cares about this questions: they care only about their performance as gatekeepers. I figure if they want people in the village to know about their sexuality, they will share it with them. I once heard that one of the reasons why gatekeepers are able to open gates to other dimensions is in the way they use their sexual energy. Their ability to focus their sexual energy is a particular way allows them to open and close different gates.
“The life of gay people in the West is in many ways a reaction to pressure from a society that rejects them. This is partly because a culture that has forgotten so much about itself will displace certain groups of people, such as the gay community, from their true roles.
“In the village they are not seen as the other. They are not forced to create a separate community in order to survive. People do not put a negative label on them, they are regarded no differently than any other child of the village. They are born gatekeepers, with specific purposes, and are encouraged to fulfill the role they’re born to in the interests of the community.
“In the village, gatekeepers have an eye of both genders. They can help the genders to understand each other better than usual in their daily life. That’s why a group of women, for example, might gather and bring a male gatekeeper to help them understand certain village issues. The same things happens on the other side, with a female gatekeeper coming into the middle of the men’s circle.
“In the village homosexuality is seen very differently that it is seen in the West, in part because all sexuality is spiritually based. Taken away from its spiritual context, it becomes a source of controversy, and can be exploited.”
She comments also that: “Gays and lesbians in the West are often very spiritual, but they have been taken away from their connection with spirit. My feeling is that without that outlet or that role in the culture, they have to find other ways of defining themselves. This could be one of the reasons why they would want to get married or make themselves look as though they do not have a unique purpose.”
For the western mind to grasp the role of gatekeepers we need to learn again how to see, feel and know the earth as a living being – to return to the wisdom taught by all traditional teachings of the Oneness of Life, and to honour all people, and all forms of love between people, because we all come from the earth herself, we are all Her children.
While humanity denies some the right to love and perpetuates the game of division and fear, justified by the so-called decrees of an invisible sky Father, the Gatekeepers cannot find their places and Consciousness cannot become One.
Humanity is suffering in delusion, because GAY LOVE has been denied its place…
GAY LOVE (in which i’m including lesbian love, trans and genderfuck love and all loves that became taboo in a Christian hegemony) is, in the words of African elder Malidoma Some, “an energy that could save the world.”
During the 19th century European ‘scramble’ for Africa, the Zanzibar archipelago, off the African east coast, was a British Protectorate from 1890 until it became part of Tanzania through it’s union with Tanganyika. In the 16-17th centuries the region had been under Portuguese control, before coming under the influence of Arabic cultures under the Sultan of Oman. By the time the British arrived Zanzibar had its own Sultan, and although his mainland territory was soon taken over, the Sultanate continued until the formation of Tanzania in 1964.
In 1899 Hungarian Michael Haberlandt, a professor of ‘ethnology’ at the University of Vienna, wrote a letter to his friend Dr. Oskar Baumann in which he detailed his observations of same sex and gender variant behaviour among the tribal people he had encountered in Zanzibar. This letter was translated and published in ‘Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities’ by Stephen O Murray and Will Roscoe in 1998. Far from being ‘un-African’, records like this, despite the homophobic assumptions of its writer, show just how diverse and queer Africa really was before the import of western attitudes, laws and prejudice.
Michael Haberlandt
Haberlandt was also keen to find a non-African cause of what he called ‘contrariness’ and stated his opinion that “The rather high frequency in Zanzibar is doubtless attributable to the influence of Arabs, who together with Comorosans, and the prosperous Swahili mixed-breeds, account for the main contingent of acquired contraries.”
Speaking of the Arab’s love of pederasty, he went on, “Typically engaging in sex at an early age, oversaturation soon occurs among these people, and they seek stimulation through contrary acts, in addition to normal acts. Later they lose desire for the female sex and become active pederasts. With the occurrence of impotence, they then cross over to passive pederasty. Their love objects belong almost exclusively to the black slave population; only rarely do the poor freeman, Arabs, “Belutschen” and others submit to it out of greed. The adolescent slaves that are selected are kept away from any work, well pampered, and systematically effeminized (kulainishwa).”
But then Haberlandt admits it’s not only the Arabs:
“In parallel to this custom the Negroes of Zanzibar also come to engage in contrary acts. Since slaves are often not available to them for this purpose, male prostitution has developed, which replenishes itself partly from the former catamites of the Arabs, and partly from other Negroes. The aforementioned mainly live in Ngambo and ply their trade very openly Many among them wear female clothing; at almost every dance in Ngambo one can see them among the women. Others go about in male clothing, but wrap a cloth around their heads in place of the cap. Many otherwise reject that distinctive sign.”
Having covered slaves and prostitutes, more follows which shows how accepted and normal gendervariant individuals were in the local tribes, how queerness was seen as amri ya muungu, the will of God:
“Inborn contraries of the male as well as the female sex exist. From youth on, the former show no desire for women and only find pleasure in female occupations, such as cooking, mat-weaving, etc. As soon as this is noticed by their relatives, they reconcile themselves without further ado to this peculiarity. The person concerned puts on female clothes, wears the hair braided in female fashion, and behaves completely as a woman. He associates mainly with women and male prostitutes. He seeks sexual satisfaction mainly through passive pederasty (kufira = to pederast, kufirwa = to be pederasted) and in coital-like acts. In outward appearance, inborn contrary men are not distinguishable from male prostitutes, but the natives make a sharp distinction between them, the professional catamites are despised. while the behavior of the inborn-contrary is tolerated as amri ya muungu (the will of God).”
Haberlandt seems to have got to know some lesbian Africans quite well:
“Contrary-sex aligned women are likewise not rare. Eastern custom makes it impossible, of course, to wear men’s clothing, but they do it in the privacy of the home. They spot other women by their masculine bearing and when their female clothing “doesn’t fit” (Chawapendezwi na nguo za kike). They show preference for masculine accomplishments. They seek sexual satisfaction with other women, sometimes contrarily disposed ones like themselves, sometimes normals who give themselves over to it from coercion or greed. The acts performed are: kulambana – to lick one another, kusagana to rub the private parts up against each other; and kujitia mbo ya mpingo = to furnish oneself with an ebony penis. This last kind is remarkable because a special tool for it is necessary. It is a stick of ebony in the shape of a male member of considerable size, which is fashioned by black and Indian craftsmen for this purpose and is sold secretly. Sometimes it is also made from ivory. There exist two different forms. The first has below the end a nick where a cord is fastened, which one of the women ties around her middle in order to imitate the male act with the other. The stick is pierced most of the way and it then pours out warm water in imitation of ejaculation. With the other form, the stick is sculpted with penis heads at both ends so that it can be inserted by both women into their vaginas, for which they assume a sitting position. This kind of stick is also pierced. The sticks are greased for use. In addition to its use by contrary-sexes, this tool is employed in the harems of the Arabs, where the women, because of strict seclusion, find insufficient sexual pleasure. It is considered an Arabic invention.”
Finally, Haberlandt reveals for us the Swahili terms for queer people, which has a strong parallel with the meanings behind terms given for example to Native American queer shamans:
“Homosexuals of both sexes are designated in the Swahili language as mhe-si-mume (woman, not man). However, the expressions mzebe and the Arabian-derived hanisi, which actually mean an impotent person, also apply. Arabic law is somewhat “tolerant” in the persecution of male contraries, although the Qur’an strenuously forbids pederasty. Female contraries are punished, as are the craftsmen who supply the ebony penis, which is consequently acquired only with difficulty and at a considerable price.”
“Mke si mume is another very old expression that we also find in studies of ethnology and dictionaries of the late 19th century. In some areas like Bardanza, it is used to name both men and homosexual women, and in others, it means sexually receptive man. The English translation of this expression cannot be simpler, but the interpretation is much more complicated. In all texts, it is translated as “woman not man” or “woman is not a man”. However, Swahili dictionaries define Mke as wife and mume as a husband.” From online Gay Dictionary Mke si mume | Swahili gay dictionary | say gay in Swahili | gay in Kenya (moscasdecolores.com)
From introduction to Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: studies in African homosexualities by Stephen O Murray and Will Roscoe:
“Haberlandt’s 1899 article on Zanzibar… is concerned with distinguishing inborn (angeborne) “contrariness” (a psychological condition rather than an act, like sodomy) from that which is “acquired” (erworbene). One of the preoccupations of medical-psychiatric discourse at this time was reconciling an older theory of homosexuality as acquired (through degeneracy, which was conceived simultaneously as a failure of morality and physiology, a favored nineteenth-century explanation for both group and individual behavior) and the newer theory of homosexuality as an inborn orientation. There is no evidence, however, that these distinctions were used by the natives of Zanzibar – Haberlandt does not quote natives on the subject, nor does he provide case histories that might elucidate how and why individuals came to be engaged in the behaviors he reports. Indeed, from the perspectives of the discourse Haberlandt relies on, “contrariness” is an essential psychic condition that can occur in any human population and is the same phenomenon in each case. Native understandings can only be misunderstandings in relation to the “facts” of Western “scientific” discourse…”
April 26th, 2023: President Museveni of Uganda sends the Anti-Gay Bill back to the Parliament, requesting various amendments: “According to the legislative processes, legislators could pass or reject the President’s proposals. Technicality if President Museveni fails to assent to the Bill on second enactment, it will regardless gain the force of law. In the event that the Bill is signed into law with only the changes proposed by the President, persons convicted of aggravated homosexuality will face death. Elsewhere, those who engage in acts of homosexuality face up to 20 years in prison. Children found guilty of engaging in homosexuality face three years in jail, with provisions for rehabilitation, in line with the Children’s Act. A person found culpable of promoting homosexuality faces 20 years imprisonment. There are also punishments for journalists and editors, film directors, and corporate entities/organisations, whose work is interpreted to promote homosexuality.” Museveni declines to assent to anti-gay Bill | Monitor
“It’s already illegal to be queer in Uganda. In 2009, a proposed bill, which was also dubbed the “kill the gays” bill, contained a provision that would allow gay people to be hanged. The nation’s previous Anti-Homosexuality Act — which allowed for life imprisonment for some homosexual acts between consenting adults — was ultimately struck down in court shortly after its passage in 2014.
“As Human Rights Watch reports, the latest bill expands on the criminalization of homosexuality, including prohibiting, for example, touching another person “with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality.” People who are found guilty of the “offense of homosexuality” may be imprisoned for up to 10 years, while people who pursue LGBTQ+ advocacy may be imprisoned for up to 20 years. The bill also effectively declares all same-sex activity as nonconsensual, according to Human Rights Watch.
“The 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Bill also proposes the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” referring to gay sex involving people who are HIV positive, minors, and other “vulnerable groups.” If the bill is passed, Uganda will become the fourth African nation in which homosexuality is punishable by death, according to a Reuters report.”
There is a very good reason the Ugandan LGBTQ+ community finds itself on the front line in the global battle for recognition and rights – so-called ‘Christians’ (instead of following Christ’s teachings of forgiveness) are still seeking revenge for the actions of the region’s kabaka – King – Mwanga in 1886.
“The Baganda kingdom had been one of the most sophisticated in precolonial Africa; in the 1880s, at the time of colonization, the kabaka (king) was a young man named Mwanga, addicted to “the practice of homosexuality,” according to the Christian narrative about the conquest of Uganda, and presiding over a court rotten with “abominable vices” and “shameful passions.” The kabaka was not a convert himself, but at a time when different religions were competing for souls in his kingdom, he maintained a balance of power by retaining both Catholic and Protestant courtiers. When—according to the Christian narrative—some of these men resisted his sexual advances, he executed at least thirty of them, most in one public burning, in March 1886. This led to a coalition of Christians and Muslims who gained the assistance of the British in deposing him in 1888 and, ultimately, to the colonization of Uganda. In the very act of staking out modern Christian Uganda, then, was the expulsion of the abomination of homosexuality: Mwanga’s victims, crusaders against vice, are claimed as martyrs by the church, and the site of their massacre is the country’s most hallowed pilgrimage site. And so, of all the African countries, Uganda was particularly predisposed to the wave of political Christianity that was heralded by the battle within the Anglican Church and entrenched by the burgeoning Evangelical movement.” Mark Gevisser, The Pink Line: The World’s Queer Frontiers (2020)
“The wave of homophobia and transphobia in Uganda, and the region, has nothing to do with Ugandan or African values,” Ugandan human rights activist and lawyer Nicolas Opiyo recently told the Guardian. “It is a disguised campaign by American evangelicals through their local actors… Their claim about African family values is only a ‘dog whistle,’ a hate campaign and an imposition of a narrow Christian worldview upon us all. Once again, the Ugandan gay community is a target of this misinformation, hate, and culture wars.”Ugandans Are Fleeing (smuginternational.org)
“With the industrial and scientific revolutions in full swing, the British Empire, in Victorian times, helped to spread European ideas that medicalised sexual activity and ‘invented’ whole categories of ‘sexuality’ – ascribing a name to a series of specific sexual acts and ascribing that set of acts to particular types of personality: The term ‘homosexual’ was first coined by Hungarian sexologist Kertbeny (1869). This notion was taken up by Westphal in a famous article in 1870 as, “contrary sexual sensations” – regarded by Foucault as the “date of birth” of the categorisation, ‘homosexual’ (Foucault 1990). An 1895 translation of Richard von Kraft-Ebing’s sexologists’ bible Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) saw the word’s first appearance in English. Such Victorian values of prudery gradually changed the British Christian laws against sodomy (first introduced by Henry VIII in 1533, and a capital offence until 1861) into laws against a type of person – the homosexual. As early as 1860 in India, laws against sodomy were simultaneously exported to the colonies. So in the 21st century we see “sodomy laws throughout Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have consistently been colonial impositions,” (Gupta 2008:10) and do not reflect pre-colonial cultural mores. Such laws are, as Gupta titles his treatise, an ‘Alien Legacy’. “No ‘native’ ever participated in their making. Colonizers saw indigenous cultures as sexually corrupt. A bent toward homosexuality supposedly formed part of their corruption. Where pre-colonial peoples had been permissive, sodomy laws would cure them—and defend their new, white masters against moral contagion.” (Gupta 2008:10).
People were not defined by their sexuality in pre-colonial Africa – and there are many examples of gender-fluidity and homosexuality in African history.
“As far back as 2400 BC tombs have been excavated in ancient Egypt with two men’s bodies Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep embracing each other as lovers. In addition to their acceptance of same sex relationships, Ancient Egyptians, similar to other civilisations at the time not only acknowledge a third gender, but venerate it. Many deities were portrayed androgynously, and goddesses such as Mut (the goddess of Motherhood; lit. translation Mother) and Sekmeht (goddess of war) are often depicted as women with erect penises.
“This was not unique to Egypt or this time period. In the 16th century, the Imbangala people of Angola had ‘men in womens apparel, with whom they kept amongst their wives’… The Igbo and Yoruba tribes, found mostly in present day Nigeria, did not have a binary of genders and typically did not assign gender to babies at birth, and instead waited until later life. Similarly the Dagaaba people (present day Ghana) assigned gender not based on ones anatomy, but rather the energy one presents. ” African sexuality and the legacy of imported homophobia (stonewall.org.uk)
In 1906 Finnish sociologist Edward Westermarck reported examples of same sexualities and gender-fluidity around the world in his book The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, including these African references:
“In Madagascar there are certain boys who live like women and have intercourse with men, paying those men who please them…. Men behaving like women have also been observed among the Ondonga in German Southwest Africa and the Diakite-Sarracolese in the French Soudan… Homosexual practices are common among the Banaka and Bapuku in the Cameroons…
“In North Africa they are not restricted to the inhabitants of towns; they are frequently among the peasants of Egypt and universal among the Jbala inhabiting the Northern mountains of Moroccco.”
From Kuchu resilience and resistance in Uganda: a history | Richard Lusimbo – Academia.edu: British anthropologist “Jack Driberg (1888-1946) (albeit from his Western imperialist perspective) observed that some males among a group of agriculturalists north of Lake Kwania in Uganda were called mudoko daka and ‘treated as women’ but ‘could carry as men’ (Murray and Roscoe, 1998). Although Driberg thought this was rare, Lango people informed him that the behaviour was quite common and alsopractised among other pastoralist people to the East, including the Iteso (Teso) of Eastern Uganda and Western Kenya and the Karamojan (Karamojong) of Northwestern Kenya and Northeastern Uganda (Driberg, 1923). Similarly, some among the Nkole, in what is now Southwestern Uganda told Mushanga (1973) that the Bahima of Western Uganda and Northern Rwanda also engaged in same-sex practices.”
From The Lies We Have Been Told: On (Homo) Sexuality in Africa by Thabo Msibi in Africa Today, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Fall 2011): “Uganda has a long precolonial history of same-sex relations among men and women. The Nilotico Lango, an agriculturalist community north of Lake Kwanai, had men who assumed alternative gender status, that of the mukodo dako, these men were treated as women and could marry other men (Murray and Roscoe 1998). Similarly among the Iteso, who lived in communities in northwest Kenya and Uganda, same-sex relations existed among men who felt like women and became women for all intents and purposes, including voices, manner of walking, and speech, there are reports of group masturbation among young Itoso men (Karp, Karp, and Molnos 1973). The Bahima (Mushanga 1973), the Banyo (Needham 1973), and the Baganda (Murray and Will 1998)] are other communities in Uganda where instances of same-sex engagements have been reported. It is no secret that King Mwanga II, the Baganda monarch (kabaka), engaged in sexual relations with other men: he made sexual demands upon his male servants and was enraged when they started refusing to accede to his advances on the grounds of their Christianity, his response was to order the killing of those who were converting to the new religion, and these slain servants are now called the “Uganda martyrs” (Tamale 2007). The king’s same-sex activities were falsely presented by Western colonialists to show that the Baganda were disgusted at them, this was in keeping with the West’s imposition of homophobia in Africa (Epprecht 2008). “The colonialists did not introduce homosexuality to Africa but rather intolerance of it – and systems of surveillance and regulation for suppressing it” Murray and Will 1998.xvi)”
There is actually SO MUCH queer African history once we start digging:
“The earliest recordings of homosexuality in Africa come to us from the ancient San rock paintings of Zimbabwe. Dated back many thousands of years, some of the images depict “egregious sexual practices” such as male-to-male copulation. In what is now southwestern Zimbabwe, Livingstone noticed “immorality” among the younger natives and asserted, in 1865, that the elderly chief’s polygamous monopolization of women was responsible for the sin. Among the Shona tribes of Zimbabwe, no words exist for genital or orgasm but there is a word for homosexual—ngochane. In northwestern Zambia, Victor Turner reported boy circumcision ceremonies in which the young initiates mimed oral copulation with older males, and in 1920, Edwin Smith and Andrew Dale documented an Ila tribesman who crossdressed, worked and slept with the women but did not have sexual relations with them. The Ila tribes called such men mwaami or “prophet.”
“In the nineteenth century, Great Britain controlled the interior regions of southern Africa and granted exclusive mining rights to British magnate Cecil Rhodes in the 1880s. The region was subsequently divided into Southern and Northern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), and the British South Africa Company was established. The lucrative mining industry attracted migrant workers from all over southern Africa and crowded, all-male camps fostered an increase in homosexual relationships that were modified according to various tribal customs. The British noticed the homosexual behavior at the camps and from 1892 to 1923 Southern Rhodesia tried over 250 sodomy cases.During the trials, the most common defense put forward was that sodomy had been a longstanding “custom” among African natives. Black Rhodesians were typically punished with less than a year in prison for the crime while Whites often received longer sentences. By the 1920s, however, court magistrates began dismissing all sodomy cases deemed consensual.
“In southeastern Africa, Bori cults—along with their crossdressing shamans and possession rituals—are still quite common among the Zulu. Shamans are known as inkosi ygbatfazi (“chief of the women”) while ordinary transgenders are called skesana and their masculine partners, iqgenge. Zulu warriors traditionally asserted their manhood by substituting boys for women and in the 1890s, Zulu chief Nongoloza Mathebula ordered his bandit-warriors to abstain from women and take on boy-wives instead. After his capture, Nongoloza insisted that the practice had been a longstanding custom among South Africans. Indeed, homosexual marriage was documented among the Zulu, Tsonga and Mpondo migrant workers of South Africa at least since the early nineteenth century. Boy-wives were known by various names such as inkotshane (Zulu), inkhonsthana (Tsonga), tinkonkana (Mpondo), etc. and were procured by paying a bride price to the boy’s older brother. Wedding ceremonies involved a traditional dance in which the male brides crossdressed and wore false breasts. The celebrations lasted an entire weekend with some of the boys dressed in traditional tribal garb and others in Western-style white gowns. After the weddings, the boy-wives would serve their new husbands in domestic chores, just like ordinary wives, and the male partners in turn would provide them with presents, clothes, blankets and so on. Fidelity was expected and the young inkotshane were not allowed to grow beards. In many cases, the boy-wives were known to outgrow such marital arrangements and either move on to women or marry their own inkotshane. Homosexual marriage peaked among the Zulu during the 1950s, when weddings were held every month, but the tradition had disappeared by the end of the twentieth century.
“East Africa was strongly influenced by Islam for many centuries prior to the arrival of European colonists, but homosexuality and other forms of gender diversity were nonetheless observed among most indigenous tribes in the region. In the nineteenth century, Europeans reported homosexual and transgender behavior on Africa’s East Coast from Tanzania in the south to Nubia (the Sudan) in the north. Bori cults imported from West Africa were also common in the region along with their spirit possession rituals, head priestesses and crossdressing priests.
“Arabs first settled in the Tanzanian islands of Zanzibar and Pemba in the early twelfth century A.D., bringing along with them traditional third-gender types such as the xanith. In 1860, an American consular officer stationed in Zanzibar reported that “numbers of sodomites have come from Muscat (Oman), and these degraded wretches openly walk about dressed in female attire, with veils on their faces.” In 1899, German ethnologist Michael Haberlandt studied “sexual contrariness” among Zanzibar natives. He reported homosexual men that he believed were born with “contrary” desires and which the natives described as amri ya muungu or “the will of God.” In Zanzibar, homosexuals are referred to as mke-si-mume (woman, not man) and also mzebe or hanisi (impotent). Haberlandt noticed their presence at festivals and dances wherein some dressed up as women and others as men, often with special headdresses. Most earned their livings through prostitution. Lesbians were also reported in Zanzibar that dressed as men, undertook masculine endeavors, and utilized dildos to satisfy one another. On mainland Tanzania in the 1930s, British researcher Monica Wilson reported homosexuality among young Nyakyusa males during her fieldwork near Lake Nyasa.
“In the 1920s, American anthropologist Felix Bryk noted homosexual bachelors among the Bagishu and Maragoli tribes of Tanzania and western Kenya. He claimed that such “hermaphrodites” were numerous and called inzili by the Bagishu and kiziri among the Maragoli. In 1909, British anthropologist Sir Claud Hollis observed Nandi circumcision ceremonies in Kenya wherein the boys wore female clothes for eight weeks prior to the ritual. A similar crossdressing rite was found within Maasai initiation ceremonies. The Meru tribes of Kenya have a religious leadership role known as mugawe, which involves priests wearing female clothing and hairstyles. In 1973, British ethnologist Rodney Needham noted that the mugawe were often homosexual and sometimes married to other men. Traditional Bori practices were also observed among the Mabasha tribes of Kenya.
“In 1987, anthropologist Gill Shepherd reported that homosexuality was relatively common in Kenya, even among Muslims (both male and female). Most Kenyans initially discourage transgender behavior among their children but gradually come to accept it as an inherent part of the child’s spirit (roho) or nature (umbo). Shepherd observed third-gender men, known in Swahili as shoga, who served as passive male prostitutes and wore female clothing, makeup, and flowers at social events such as weddings, where they typically mingled with the “other” women. At more serious events such as funerals and prayer meetings, the shoga would stay with the men and wear men’s attire. Other Swahili terms for homosexual men include basha (dominant male), hanithi (young male partner) and mumemke (man-woman). Lesbians are known as msagaji or msago (“grinders”). They appear as ordinary women in public but are bold with men and frequently go out of the house alone. Shepherd noted that dominant women in Kenyan lesbian relationships are typically older and wealthier.
“The Somali tribes recognized two categories of men—waranleh (warriors) and waddado (men of God). The latter were considered physically weak but mystically powerful. Among the Semitic Harari people of Ethiopia, German researchers such as Friedrich J. Bieber encountered “Uranism” (a nineteenth-century term for homosexuality and transgender identity) in the early twentieth century. Bieber noted, “Sodomy is not foreign to the Harari,” and also found it among the Galla and Somali “albeit not as commonly.”
“The Konso of southern Ethiopia have no less than four words for effeminate men, one of which is sagoda and refers to men who never marry, are weak, or who wear skirts. In the mid-1960s, Canadian anthropologist Christopher Hallpike observed one Ethiopian Konso that lived by curing skins (a female occupation) and liked to play the passive role in homosexual relations. In 1957, American anthropologist Simon Messing found male transvestites among the Amhara tribes that were known as wandarwarad (male-female). They lived alone and were considered like brothers to the tribeswomen. The husbands of the women were not at all jealous of the close friendship between their wives and the wandarwarad. Messing reported that the wandarwarad were unusually sensitive and intense in their personal likings. He also found “mannish women” among the Amhara known as wandawande.
“In 1969, Frederic Gamst reported homosexual relations among the shepherd boys of Kemant tribes in central Ethiopia and in 1975, Donald Donham observed a class of effeminate men among the Maale of southern Ethiopia known as ashtime. The ashtime “dressed like women, performed female tasks, cared for their own houses, and apparently had sexual relations with men.” Also called wobo or “crooked,” one ashtime complained to Donham of being “neither man nor woman.” Ashtime men were traditionally gathered and protected by the Maale kings. On the night preceding any royal ritual, kings were forbidden to have sexual relations with their wives but could share their beds with the ashtime. In neighboring Eritrea, Paolo Ambrogetti of Italy reported homosexual behavior between youths and older men at the turn of the twentieth century that often involved payment. The youth’s fathers didn’t seem to mind and most of the boys turned to women once they grew older.
“In the Sudan, traditional Zande culture is well known for its homosexual marriages, even into the 1970s, as reported by British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard in 1971. Some Zande princes preferred men over women and could purchase a desired boy for the price of one spearhead. They would then become husbands to the young man, provide him with beautiful ornaments and address him as badiare (beloved). The boy-wife in turn would fetch water, firewood, and carry the prince’s shield. Zande princes often took their boy-wives to war but kept them behind at camp. They were strictly off limits to the other soldiers and if any man had relations with them he could be sued for adultery. If a prince died in battle, the boy-wife would be killed since he had eaten the prince’s “oil.” Unmarried boys, known as ndongo-techi-la, also accompanied the Zande men to battle and served as women to the common soldiers. By the end of the twentieth century, the Zande tradition of homosexual marriage had largely disappeared from the Sudan.
“In 1947, British anthropologist Siegfried Nadel reported masculine-type homosexuals among the Heiban tribes of Sudan and transgender types among the Otoro, Moro, Nyima and Tira. Korongo tribes called effeminate men londo whereas the Mesakin referred to them as tubele. Homosexual marriage was observed in both tribes and a man could marry a younger boy for the bride price of one goat. In 1963, Dr. Jean Buxton complained about the great amount of homosexual behavior he found among the Mandari tribes, and in 1977, Pamela Constantinides described homosexual and effeminate male priests in a healing cult known as Zaar. The Zaar cult was similar to the Bori and served as a refuge for women and effeminate men in conservative, Muslim-dominated Sudan.”
Ugandan Queers in fact have their own term for each other – Kuchu:
“Kuchu is a word (plural: kuchus), apparently of Swahili origin, that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) Ugandans have minted to describe their identities. “We do not use the word ‘queer,'” explains Frank Mugisha, chairman of Sexual Minorities Uganda, an umbrella entity that brings together LGBTI organizations for advocacy purposes. ‘We’ve got our own word that encompasses the whole idea: kuchu.’” ‘Call Me Kuchu’ – the secret world of Uganda’s LGBT rights activists | LGBTI Network | 29 Oct 2012 | Amnesty International UK
Kuchu resilience and resistance in Uganda: a history | Richard Lusimbo – Academia.edu : “Prior to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill’s (AHB)introduction into the Ugandan Parliament in 2009, the LGBTI community was already pushing back against the anti-homosexuality movement. Although LGBTI people are persecuted by some religious groups and traditional leaders who argue that homosexuality is ‘un-African’ and immoral, a plethora of historical and anthropological evidence debunks this claim… What is actually ‘un-African’ is homophobia not homosexuality. As early as1999, in response to growing societal discrimination, Ugandan LGBTI people, locally known as kuchus, began organising formally and informally. But it was not until 2002 that Ugandan LGBTI activists started acampaign to raise awareness about their community, their experiences and the difficulties they face in daily life, following a statement by the country’s President Museveni. In March 2002, while accepting an award for Uganda’s HIV/AIDS prevention programmes, Museveni stated, ‘We don’t have homosexuals in Uganda.’
“The growing visibility of kuchus in the country seemed to anger many traditional leaders and religious groups, including US-based evangelicals fromthe Christian right such as the Family Research Council and The Family (also known as the Fellowship). Many activists believe this helped to create a moral panic in Uganda in which local leaders began openly demonising homosexuality and seeking to increase criminal penalties against it and its ‘promotion’. Perhaps the most infamous example of the influence of US-base devangelicals is Scott Lively, a pastor from Springfield, Massachusetts. Lively came to Kampala in 2009 and addressed hundreds of Ugandan religious leaders,teachers and social workers to brainstorm anti-gay efforts at a conference entitled, ‘Seminar on Exposing the Homosexual Agenda’. Afterwards, Lively was invited to private briefings with political and religious leaders, and addressed the Ugandan Parliament for four hours. His speech at the seminar conflated homophobic rhetoric and holocaust revisionism as follows:
“The gay movement is an evil institution thats [sic] goal is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of promiscuity. [There is] a dark and powerful homosexual presence in other historical periods: the Spanish Inquisition, the French ‘Reign of Terror’, the era of South African apartheid, and the two centuries of American slavery. This is the kind of person it takes to run a gas chamber or to do a mass murder … the Rwandan stuff probably involved these guys.”
Scott Lively
“Just a few days later, as a consequence of the Family Life Network conference,the National Anti-Gay Task Force, whose mission is to wipe out gay practices in Uganda, was formed and the Ugandan MP David Bahati unveiled his AHB (anti-Homosexuality Bill). The bill included the death penalty and other severe punishments for consensual same-sex acts. The international Western media called it the ‘Kill the Gays Bill’. Uganda’s President Museveni signed the AHB into law on 24 February 2014, when it became known as the Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA). Although the death penalty had been removed, many other provisions remained the same as in the original bill. After the AHA came into effect, Ugandan human rights activists reported an increase in anti-gay harassment, detailing evictions, threats of violence and death, unlawful raids, arrests and ‘corrective rape’. A Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) Report (2014) documented 162 cases of human rights abuses based on sexual orientation or gender identity during a period of just four months following the passage of the law.”
Mark Gevisser, The Pink Line: The World’s Queer Frontiers (2020):
“The United States applied sanctions against the country, and Scott Lively stood trial in his hometown in Massachusetts for ‘crimes against humanity.’ When the judge finally ruled in 2017 that he could not take the case because it was outside his jurisdiction, he nonetheless said he believed the American pastor had violated international law by having aided ‘a vicious and frightening campaign of repression against LGBTI persons in Uganda.’”
Anti-gay advocates ferociously deny the presence of same sex relationships and transgender/’thirdgender’ people in traditional African societies. This is simply wrong. The reason I have included so much evidence to demonstrate the rich variety of African queer history in this blog article (and I could have included more), is because there is so much.
LGBTQ+ people have no ‘agenda’ other than to be free to be ourselves and love whom we choose. The attacks on and scapegoating of queer people is a way long used by religious and political leaders to hide up their own abuses of power and distract from other issues (since the latter days of the Roman Empire in fact). The claims that queer people are a threat to ‘traditional family’ is a way of averting attention from the abuse that goes on in so many nuclear family structures. For the record, when we also hear claims that transgender people are ‘erasing’ women this is certainly a big distraction from the real issue of ongoing male domination and abuse of females.
Africa misses the wise voice of the great Desmond Tutu, who viewed discrimination of LGBTQ+ people to be equally evil as apartheid:
“People took some part of us and used it to discriminate against us. In our case, it was our ethnicity; it’s precisely the same thing for sexual orientation. People are killed because they’re gay. I don’t think, “What do I want to do today? I want to speak up on gay rights.” No. It’s God catching me by my neck.”
“I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this. I am as passionate about this campaign as I ever was about Apartheid. For me, it is at the same level.”
In 18th century England a growing “hatred of sodomites, generated by disgust and fear, was justified, even encouraged, as a defence of society, love and of women. This virulent hatred, and the spontaneous acts of violence it inspired, were enough to stop those people who objected, such as philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1738-1832), from making their thoughts known…
“For Jeremy Bentham, the hatred of sodomy was rooted in the disgust that most people felt toward the practice. He observed that “in persons of weak minds, anything which is unusual and at the same time physically disgustful is apt to excite the passion of hate. Hatred when once excited naturally seeks its gratification in the tormenting or destruction of the object that excited it.”Frances Henry 2019 Love, Sex, and the Noose: The Emotions of Sodomy in 18th-Century England (uwo.ca)
Jeremy Bentham
In 21st century English speaking nations we are seeing history repeat itself in the form of hateful tirades against transgender people, lies about trans rights posing threats to women, family and society –
– and indeed all same-sex loving and gender-variant people are under attack in countries such as Uganda, where religious leaders and politicians have been stoking up anti-gay rhetoric for decades, even to identify as LGBTQ+ is in danger of becoming a criminal offence.
When will humanity learn its lessons and learn to honour all forms of love?
Homophobia is the result of centuries of lies, fueled by religious beliefs and political expediency. This has been going on since the 4th century CE, overturning centuries in which gay sex and relationships were part of the established order of pagan society, and genderfluidity was much associated with spiritual service in the Goddess temples. The first laws against gender fluid expression and same sex love appeared from the 4th century. In 390 a law attacked “the poison of shameful effeminacy,” in438 this was expanded to call for all who engaged in gay sex to die“in avenging flames in the sight of the people.”The Code of Justinian, in 533 CE, which blamed sodomy for ‘famines, earthquakes and pestilence,’ set a legal climate regarding homosexuality that would influence Europe until modern times, and his violent actions in 528 against men who loved men established a climate of fear, which still haunts queers around the world. A war against queer expression has been underway ever since.
So long has this been going on most people have no idea why it actually began, but these two voices from the Victorian era were well aware of the roots of religious and political homophobia:
“The Hebrews entering Syria, found it religionised by Assyria and Babylonia, when the Accadian Ishtar had passed West, and had become Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth, or Ashirah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phoenician Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-goddess who is queen of Heaven and Love. . . . She was worshipped by men habited as women, and vice versa; for which reason, in the Torah (Deut. xxii. 5), the sexes are forbidden to change dress.” Richard Burton in ‘The Thousand Nights and a Night’ (1886)
“When the Empire adopted Christianity, it had therefore the traditions of the Mosaic law and the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans to guide its legislators on this topic. The Emperors felt obscurely that the main pulses of human energy were slackening; population all tended to dwindle; the territory of the empire shrank slowly year by year before their eyes. As the depositaries of a higher religion and a nobler morality, they felt it their duty to stamp out pagan customs, and to unfurl the banner of social purity.” John Addington-Symonds wrote in A Problem in Modern Ethics (1896).
Where once religious books were used to justify attacks on queer people, nowadays science is as likely to be invoked. The belief in Adam and Eve has become belief in a biological gender binary, which is a false and ignorant interpretation of the scientific evidence. Genetics shows that all life starts out as female – the XX chromosome – and the Y that produces male features is a development out of that. For this reason the feminine in everyone – including men – should be recognised, respected and revered. Some people have a more complex chromosome make up, such as XXY, reflecting on the genetic level what has always manifested in some people’s external appearance and behaviour.
‘Third-gender’ – ‘transgender’ – ‘intermediate types’ – ‘non-binaries’ – have always existed. There have always been male bodied individuals with strong feminine characteristics. And female bodied people with strong male characteristics. And people who visibly manifested a balance of male and female in their body and personage.
As Edward Carpenter wrote back in 1914:
“Since the Christian era these intermediate types have been much persecuted in some periods and places…that they might possibly fulfil a positive and useful function of any kind in society is an idea which seems hardly if ever to have been seriously considered… In pre-Christian times and among the early civilisations… the intermediate people and their corresponding sex-relationships played a distinct part in the life of the tribe or nation, and were openly acknowledged and recognised as part of the general polity.” From Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk
In 2023 humanity’s growth is still darkly afflicted by those amongst us whose ‘weak minds,’ as Bentham bluntly put it, cause them to take offence at the ways and habits of others, which they then seek to curtail. Influential figures including politicians make homophobic and transphobic statements which directly influence some people to make aggressive and violent attacks on queer people simply for being who they are.
But queer people have our own destiny, our own purpose, our own mission on planet earth. And some of us are remembering it.
they may knock us into sickness, physical, emotional or mental
but the thing to remember is this is how it’s meant to
manifest
for we can also use them to set our selves free
from beliefs from the past that are delaying our destiny:
the Ram is waking us up to the real sense of Me
= that belongs to all, to fish, bird and beast
that belongs to both the living and deceased
that is the same in penitent and priest
in both the billionaires and the brassic
in all genders, all sexualities, allraces
we’re all simply people in the end
what does it matter if we drive straight or we bend?
All beliefs not in alignment with the I Am that we are
must cease.
We are all the I Am
gradually we remember the plan –
how long ago we knew we would sleep
and through long ages our true identity keep
hidden in mysteries, faiths and philosophies.
“In the womb before the world began, I was a child among other gods and children who were, or may be, or might have been. There in the dark when we could not see each other’s faces, we agreed with one mind to be born, to separate, to forget the pact we made that we might learn the secrets of our fraternity. We agreed to know sorrow in exchange for joy, to know death in exchange for life. We were dark seeds of possibility whispering. Then one by one we entered alone. We walked on our legs, and as we had said, we passed in well-lit streets without recognizing each other; yet we were gods sheathed in flesh, the multitude of a single spirit. Gods live even in darkness, in the world above your heads, in the crevices of rocks, in the open palms of strangers.” Egyptian Book of the Dead
The Oneness of Existence became hard to find
once Creation gave us ‘independent’ mind –
the test came upon us, and is always here,
do we use our selfhood to be cruel or kind?
Will I treat you as Other or as my Self,
incarnate in another form?
IF I HONOUR YOU AS DIVINE
can we go beyond mind
and into the presence that lies behind
and sits inside
illuminating the night
of separation
that came upon our spirit nation.
The calm comes across the great divide
the treasures of heaven are right there inside
us all, and in any moment our souls can
come home.
We’re not just stardust, we’re starlight
and we belong in constellations –
not nuclear families destined to explode,
the fallout often landing in children’s laps,
for when love can not expand and grow –
it inevitably implodes.
We belong in constellations, clans and bands –
love isn’t only a mum-dad-kids thing,
it’s a flowing presence, an ever blossoming flower
This 16th century poem shows what we might call today a wonderfully ‘queer’ vision of the relationship between the creator and the creation, which presents the latter as God’s bride, as the feminine partner of the Father creator. This resonates with Hindu philosophy of Shiva (transcendent consciousness = male) and Shakti (material reality = female). The concept exists also in Judaism, where God’s presence in creation is seen as feminine and called shekhinah. The poem points to the miracle potential of the non-dual union of humanity and spirit.
Females birth new life into the world and it shouldn’t be too hard to work out therefore that physical life is feminine at the core, that the feminine exists in everything. Male members of the species are often well out of touch with their inner feminine, after centuries of men fooling each other into thinking they are the superior gender. A truly evolved male person embraces his inner femininity, his inner Venus. He only has to look at his birth chart to find out through what kind of energy she manifests, and what she wants in his life!
So long have men subjugated and denied the power of the feminine. Prejudice and persecution of gay, lesbian, bi and trans people is part of this fear of the feminine in us all. Shockingly, some women today have become so materialistically minded that they buy into the persecution of gender and sexuality minorities, instead of meeting them with compassion and understanding – the classic ‘feminine’ traits. Methinks women shouting angrily against trans people are in the grip of their own, unacknowledged, domineering, toxic, inner masculine.
Christianity is often used to justify persecution of queer people, as it was used for centuries to justify slavery and the subjugation of women, of native cultures. But this is not real Chistianity, this is the dark, twisted version that Jesus predicted:
“the time cometh when darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people, and the enemies of truth and righteousness shall rule in my Name, and set up a kingdom of this world, and oppress the peoples, and cause the enemy to blaspheme, putting for my doctrines the opinions ofmen, and teaching in my Name that which I have not taught, and darkening much that Ihave taught by their traditions.
“But be of good cheer, for the time will also come when the truth they have hidden shall be manifested, and the light shall shine, and the darkness shall pass away, and the true kingdom shall be established which shall be in the world, but not of it.”
Quoted from The Gospel of the Holy Twelve, also known as the Gospel of the Nazarenes, believed by some to be the Gospel described by many commentators of the early Church as the original teachings of the Nazarene called Christ. A copy of this Aramaic gospel was found in a Tibetan monastery in 1870. In it God is repeatedly called the Father-Mother or the All-Parent, and Jesus says that the Law given by Mose had been altered, betrayed and adulterated by the priests of Persia during the Jewish people’s captivity there. The true Law given by Moses was, this scripture maintains, the same ancient Law that is pre-written in the hearts of all men – the “Law of Love and the unity of all life in the One-Family of the All-Parent”. and declares that the key to salvation, Eternal Life, and the Kingdom of Heaven is to live in accordance with the inner Law of Unity, and through the reconciliation and integration of these two primordial elements of being, the male and female.
ON THE CREATION:
He created the world
A place for the bride
Fashioned with great wisdom
And divided into two rooms.
One above and one below.
And the lower part of the place
Was made of infinite differences,
But the one above was adorned
With glorious jewels
So the bride might know her Bridegroom.
And in the higher sphere,
The order of angels was unfurled
But human nature was placed in the lower,
For in his making man was a lesser thing.
And although beings and places
Were divided in this way
All are part always of one body
Which is named the bride
For the love of one bridegroom
Has made them all one bride.
Those above possessed the bridegroom in ecstasy
And those below lived in hope rooted in the faith
Which He infused in them
When He said that one day
He would raise them up
And raise them from their dereliction.
So no one would insult them any more
For he would himself come with them
And live with them
And God would be man and man would be God
And he would talk with them
And eat and drink with them.
And he would remain with them constantly
Until the end of the world
And when that end came He and all of them would join together
In eternal song
For he was the Head of the bride he had
Whom he would take tenderly into his arms
And there give her his love
And so when they were joined as one
He would lift her to the Father.
And there the bride would rejoice
In the same joy
That God rejoices in.
For as the Father and the Son
And he who proceeds from them
So it would be with the bride;
Absorbed within God
Live in one another
She will live the life of God.
John of the Cross (1542-1591) was a Spanish priest, mystic and Carmelite friar, a major figure in the Counter Reformation, which brought emphasis back to a mystical experience of the divine, in reaction to the dry and anti-magical teachings of Protestant faiths. He was canonised in 1726 and is known as the ‘mystical doctor’. He also wrote homoerotic love poetry to Jesus (not as rare as it may sound, eg many Islamic mystics throughout many centuries also used homoerotic imagery to describe their relationship with the divine):
“St. John of the Cross spent a grueling nine months as a prisoner in a monastery of the Order in Toledo. He was kept locked up because, inspired by his friendship with his fellow reformer, the Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila, he was so insistent that the Carmelite friars practice mortification and austerities. The other friars had him sent to his cell to keep him quiet. He was flogged in front of the community at least weekly. While locked away, he wrote numerous poems and elaborate commentaries on these poems. Like the spiritual poetry of the Persian Islamic Sufi mystics a few centuries before, St. John’s poetry is hotly homoerotic.
“On a Dark Night” describes John’s romantic fantasy of running off into the night to meet a lover. “On a dark secret night, starving for love and deep in flame,” he begins, “…unseen I slipped away.” Wearing a scarf over his face, he fled unseen, climbing down what he called a secret ladder (perhaps a trellis outside his cell?), guided only by the fire burning in his breast.
“He goes out to a spot outside the fortress walls of the old medieval walled city of Toledo, a spot which he describes as “a place where no one comes.” But there waiting for him is his Beloved. John rhapsodizes: “O night that guided me, O night more lovely than the dawn, O night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!” In the darkness then they make love.
“Afterwards, the beloved falls asleep with his head on John’s chest. As the wind blows through the cedars overhead, John caresses and fondles him and then falls asleep himself, now with his face lying on his beloved’s breast (like his Apostle namesake who lay on the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper).
“When the sun rises John wakes feeling that all his cares are gone, and he sees that he and his beloved are lying among a field of lilies.
“The allegorical explanation is that this is about the stage of depression and aridity in the religious life, the so-called “dark night of the soul.” The secret ladder is living faith; the disguise, the three theological virtues, faith, hope and charity. But that is not what’s in the poem! There is nothing about depression or spiritual suffering, much less the theological virtues. It’s about sexual passion. Perhaps the lover and beloved represent the soul and Christ, but that is still a homoerotic image.
“Perhaps it is all allegory and St. John never left his cell. But it really sounds like he was sneaking out and engaging in 16th Century bush sex, or at least fantasizing it. What was mystical was that he probably was in such a state of religious intensity (and neurotic denial) that he truly experienced the men he was meeting out there in the bushes as palpable manifestations of Christ.”
ONE DARK NIGHT by John of the Cross:
One dark night, fired with love’s urgent longings – ah, the sheer grace! – I went out unseen, my house being now all stilled.
In darkness, and secure, by the secret ladder, disguised, – ah, the sheer grace! – in darkness and concealment, my house being now all stilled.
On that glad night in secret, for no one saw me, nor did I look at anything with no other light or guide than the One that burned in my heart.
This guided me more surely than the light of noon to where he was awaiting me – him I knew so well – there in a place where no one appeared.
O guiding night! O night more lovely than the dawn! O night that has united the Lover with his beloved, transforming the Beloved into his Lover.
Upon my flowering breast, which I kept wholly for him alone, there he lay sleeping, and I caressing him there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.
When the breeze blew from the turret, as I parted his hair, it wounded my neck with its gentle hand, suspending all my senses.
I abandoned and forgot myself, laying my face on my Beloved; all things ceased; I went out from myself, leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.
QUEER SPIRIT FESTIVAL, 17-21 August 2023 at Bridwell Park in Devon, UK, is a celebration of the creativity, love and spirituality of LGBTQ+ people. Our theme this year is RECLAIMING QUEER NATURE in all its magical, world-changing, enlightening and liberating potential. I gave this interview to Brian Madigan of GayGuru.com about the origins and aims of the festival:
It’s time to reclaim queer nature from the lies that have been told about it. There’s a spiritual evolution going on on planet earth and queers have a crucial role to play in it. In pagan cultures queer nature had spiritual associations, none of them came up with the idea that the creator made something ‘in error’, ‘against nature’ . Pagan traditions teach us how to connect and align ourselves with the earth and the solar system’s natural energies, they bring us into relationship with unconditionally loving divine presence. It’s not just queer sexuality and gender expression that’s been suppressed for centuries – it’s our liberating queer spirit. Modern journey of Gay liberation isn’t complete until it embraces the spiritual, and the spiritual liberation of queer people will be the catalyst for spiritual liberation of the whole world. Shokti
“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, gay rights activist and Radical Faerie founder.
As strange as it will seem to most people, 2000 years ago queerness and religion were intimately associated, and had been for millennia.
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.”
In the early 20th century English gay philosopher Edward Carpenter wrote that:
“The Jewish peoples – perhaps by way of protest and reaction against the excesses of the surrounding Syrian tribes – insisted on a complete divorce between sex and religion; and that alienation of the two has lasted on down the Christian centuries. But in much of the old pagan world it was just the contrary. Sexual rituals were an intimate part of religion; and the wonder and glory of sex were a recognised manifestation of divinity.”
Arthur Evans wrote in Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture (1978):
“The old religion was polytheistic. Its most important deity was a goddess who was worshipped as the great mother. Its second major deity was the horned god, associated with animals and sexuality, including homosexuality. These and other deities were worshipped in the countryside at night with feasting, dancing, animal masquerades, transvestism, sex orgies, and the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Sensual acts were at the heart of the old religion, since theirs was a worldly religion of joy and celebration.”
Same sex love was once deeply associated in traditional cultures around the world with philosophy, magic and also, along with gender fluidity, with the spiritual life of the community. In tribal settings queer shamans were highly regarded because their spiritual energy kept the community connected to the spirit of the earth, the ancestors and the Great Mother/Great Spirit. In the pagan civilisations of ancient Europe, queer people had prominent roles in temples, rituals and festivals – and, 1000 years after the Christian Church, hand in hand with armed and brutal political forces, had began its campaign to eradicate queerness from its domains in Europe, when Europeans went out to explore and conquer, they found the same phenomenon going on in every part of the world.
The spiritual role of queer people in past societies has not yet been addressed by the modern gay liberation movement, but European sociologists were studying this phenomenon over a century ago:
Finnish philosopher and sociologist Edward Westermarck (1862-1949) wrote in his study ‘The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas’ that:
“the change of sex was usually accompanied by future shamanship; indeed nearly all the shamans were former delinquents of their sex.”
Historian Antonio Cardonega, writing in the 17th century, mentioned that sodomy was: “rampant among the people of Angola. They pursue their impudent and filthy practices dressed as women,” and stated that the sodomites often served as powerful shamans, were highly esteemed among most Angolan tribes and known as “quimbanda.”
Thomas Falkner, in his ‘Description of Patagonia’ (1775), said that among the south Americans:
“The wizards are of both sexes. The male wizards are obliged (as it were) to leave their sex, and to dress themselves in female apparel, and are not permitted to marry, though the female ones or witches may. They are generally chosen for this office when they are children, and a preference is always shown to those who at that early time of life discover an effeminate disposition. They are clothed very early in female attire, and presented with the drum and rattles belonging to the profession they are to follow.”
In 1724 Jesuit Father Joseph-Francois Lafitau published, in French, a massive work named ‘The Customs of American Savages Compared to the Earliest Times’ in which he drew comparison between the native shamans and the traditions of the ancient world:
“…among the Illinois, among the Sioux, in Louisiana, in Florida, and in Yucatan, there are young men who adopt the garb of women, and keep it all their lives. They believe they are honored by debasing themselves to all of women’s occupations; they never marry, they participate in all religious ceremonies, and this profession of an extraordinary life causes them to be regarded as people of a higher order, and above the common man. Would these not be the same peoples as the Asiatic adorers of Cybele, or the Orientals of whom Julius Fermicus speaks, who consecrated priests dressed as women to the Goddess of Phrygia or to Venus Urania, who had an effeminate appearance, painted their faces, and hid their true sex under garments borrowed from the sex whom they wished to counterfeit?”
In ancient Europe and Asia Minor, worship of the Goddess was led, for thousands of years, by women priestesses and priests who were effeminate male or what we now call ‘transgender’ – life was seen as coming from and held by the Great Mother and spiritual life was associated with the feminine and so led by those who embodied female spirit. Eunuch was a term used in a very broad sense to refer to men who did not procreate, and eunuchs were often looked upon as a third gender. Jesus refers in the Gospel of Matthew to eunuchs saying:
“…there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”
Basilides, a Gnostic Christian in Alexandria living around 125/150 CE, argued Jesus was here referring to three types of male celibates: “those with a natural revulsion to women; those who practice asceticism out of a desire for glory from their peers; and those who remain unmarried to better do the work of the kingdom” (quoted in a work by Clement of Alexandria). Note the first type here – exclusively same sex oriented people have always existed, they did not suddenly find a sense of identity and community in the 19th century, as many today think.
The effeminacy of priests was so deeply embedded in the collective consciousness that Christianity insisted its priests be celibate (and continue to wear frocks), for the public would not readily accept married priests. “The Mother of the Gods also admits effeminates, and the Goddess would not judge so, if by nature unmanliness were a trivial thing.” wrote Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus in the 2nd century. Castration was common among the Goddess priesthoods and was popular too among the early Christians. Homosexuality had been part of religious life for so long that some Gnostic Christians favoured it over procreative sex: historian Randy Connor quotes 4th century Cypriot bishop Epiphanus on one of these Gnostic sects – “Those among them who are called Levites… do not have intercourse with women, but with each other. And it is these who are actually distinguished and honoured among them.”
The Roman bishop Hippolytus, writing in the first half of the third century, described at length the cult of the Naasenes in which Christianity and Attis worship appear to have been thoroughly merged. According to Hippolytus, the Naassenes: … “constantly attend the mysteries called those of the “Great Mother,” supposing especially that they behold by means of the ceremonies performed there the entire mystery. For these having nothing more than the ceremonies that are performed there, except that they are not emasculated: they merely complete the work of the emasculated. For with the utmost severity and vigilance they enjoin (on their votaries) to abstain, as if they were emasculated, from intercourse with a woman. The rest, however, of the proceeding (observed in these mysteries), as we have declared at some length, (they follow) just as (if they were) emasculated persons.“
The tradition of temple service by gender-variant beings that can be traced back nearly 10,000 years in Mesopotamia and Turkey.Ancient Mesopotamian myths suggest that gay and transgendered people were created to be the holy servants of the gods, and the trans priest/esses of Ishtar, the assinnu and kurgurru, were still serving in the area at the time of Jesus, and, as Will Roscoe’s quotation above strikes home … THEY WEREN’T THE ONLY ONES.
The ancient Goddess was considered by her priests to have power over gender:
“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.”
Those are the words of Enheduanna, High Priestess of the Moon in the Sumerian city of Ur. They are part of her poem, Passionate Inanna, which she wrote in the 23rd Century BCE. Enheduanna is the earliest known example of someone signing their name to a literary work.
“The Gala were a class of priests sacred to Inanna. It was said they were initially created by the god Enki to sing “heart-soothing laments,” for the goddess, and they certainly did that. To begin with, one of their primary roles was to sing hymns and laments to the goddess in eme-sal, a Sumerian dialect spoken primarily by women that was used to render the speech of female gods. They presided over religious rites, healed the sick, predicted the future, made music, raised money for the poor, and “dissolved evil” during lunar eclipses. Akkadian omen texts said that having sex with them was lucky. They were well-known and respected members of their communities, and many of them were what we would think of now as transgender.” Transgender Identities in the Ancient Mediterranean › Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Intersex News (lgbti.org)
The goddess Ishtar/Inanna ruled over both sexual love and war – her worship dates back around 10000 years in Mesopotamia, and She remained a constant presence while various empires rose and fell. During the Sumerian period her priesthood were known as the Gala – the cuneiform symbol for their name was a combination of the symbols for penis + anus. This is the most ancient priesthood known on the planet. One myth tells of the God Enki creating them to serve the Goddess, and a Sumerian proverb reads, “When the gala wiped off his anus [he said], ‘I must not arouse that which belongs to my mistress [i.e., Inanna]’”. The legend ties together gay sex and the divine feminine, and the myths relating to Inanna’s other holy servants reveal transexual beings the fulfilling the same function.
A legend from the ancient lands of Sumer and Mesopotamia tells us that the Great Goddess was trapped in the Underworld by her dark sister Ereshkigel, and could only be saved by specially created beings who were neither male nor female. In her rage at their success Ereshkigel cursed all such queer beings but Inanna in response appointed them to be her eternal servants, promising that one day the curse would lift and their holiness would be recognised and restored.
“One type of Gala priestess was the Kurgarru, a biological male who wore a robe that was feminine on one side and masculine on the other. The Kurgarru were highly esteemed in Babylonia; in one story of Inanna, the genderless Kurgarru were created in order to save Inanna from the Underworld. However, even more prestigious were the Assinnu, or the transsexual priestesses of Inanna. The Assinnu underwent ritual castration as part of a mes, or a divine calling of the goddess. The Assinnu were believed to have been imbued with great powers of protection and fortune. Warriors of Ancient Mesopotamia would touch the head of an Assinnu before battle, believing just this brief contact would spare them from danger. However, the most important role of the Assinnu was that of a hierodule, or sacred prostitute. The Assinnu were believed to be the physical incarnation of the goddess Inanna, and by sleeping with an Assinnu a follower of Inanna was essentially coupling with the Goddess herself .” Transgender Identities in the Ancient Mediterranean › Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Intersex News (lgbti.org)
“A gala-tur was a type of junior priest in a temple of Inanna, a sort of trainee gala or high priest. The original purpose of a gala was to sing laments, a profession traditionally carried out by women. By the time of the Akkadians men were gala and gala-tur as well, though they were feminine, intersex or eunuchs. A modern lgbt interpretation is that they were transgender, though perhaps the best identity to give them is third gender. The gala gained a reputation for same-sex activity, but this may be because the literal translation of the term gala (or ga-la) is “penis-anus”.
‘The kur-garra was another type of priest of Inanna. These were the leaders of religious processions and ceremonies and were usually seen carrying a dagger or sword. In later centuries the kur-garra came to be seen as bestowing luck, or providing charms to ward off evil. Like the gala and gala-tur the kur-garra was a female role that was performed by third gender individuals.”
Similarly ancient, the GALLAE eunuch priests served the Goddess Cybele (the ‘Mother of the Gods’ as the Greeks saw her) – with roots in eastern Turkey going back to at least 6000 BCE, Cybele was seen as syncretic with other ancient earth mothers Rhea, Demeter, Gaia, Atargatis (‘the Syrian Goddess’) who also had queer priesthoods. Cybele worship became the official religion of the Roman Empire around 200 BCE, when she was adopted as its Magna Mater, Great Mother. The Romans enlisted her support, on the advice of an oracle, in their campaign to dominate the Meditteranean world. A black meteorite representing her was brought from Anatolia to Rome and a magnificent temple constructed for the Goddess in the city. Her camp, flamboyant, long haired, loud and queer Gallae priests – and her female priestesses, the Melissae (the Bees) – came with her, but the Gallae so shocked the Roman locals that they were forced to live outside the cities. They formed travelling bands, bringing lively, intoxicated, goddess worship to the people and some followed the Roman soldiers wherever they went, bringing the Goddess’ often wild, sexual and ecstatic worship as far east as Britain and Spain.
During the first century of Cybele’s time in Rome, Roman citizens were not allowed to undergo the initiatory act of ritual castration, which was inspired by the story of Attis, lover of Cybele, who castrated himself, while in a frenzy, to avoid marrying a human woman. The Gallae priests mourned for Attis and self-castrated to be better servants to the Goddess. In 101 BCE the law was changed so that certain citizens might become Gallae, and Emperor Claudius (41-53CE) removed the remaining restrictions. This tolerance did not last long. Domitian (81-91CE) once more forbade Roman citizens from becoming Gallae, and although this was reversed again by 239 CE, this last freedom to self-castrate was soon removed for good as Christianity consolidated its power in the Empire.
Encyclopedia Britannica:
“In all of her aspects, Roman, Greek, and Oriental, the Great Mother was characterized by essentially the same qualities. Most prominent among them was her universal motherhood. She was the great parent not only of gods but also of human beings and beasts. She was called the Mountain Mother, and special emphasis was placed on her maternity over wild nature; this was manifested by the orgiastic character of her worship. Her mythical attendants, the Corybantes, were wild, half-demonic beings. Her priests, the Galli, castrated themselves on entering her service. The self-mutilation was justified by the myth that her lover, the fertility god Attis, had emasculated himself under a pine tree, where he bled to death. At Cybele’s annual festival (March 15–27), a pine tree was cut and brought to her shrine, where it was honoured as a god and adorned with violets considered to have sprung from the blood of Attis. On March 24, the “Day of Blood,” her chief priest, the archigallus, drew blood from his arms and offered it to her to the music of cymbals, drums, and flutes, while the lower clergy whirled madly and slashed themselves to bespatter the altar and the sacred pine with their blood. On March 27 the silver statue of the goddess, with the sacred stone set in its head, was borne in procession and bathed in the Almo, a tributary of the Tiber River.
“Cybele’s ecstatic rites were at home and fully comprehensible in Asia, but they were too frenzied for Europeans farther west. Roman citizens were at first forbidden to take part in the ceremonies—a ban that was not removed until the time of the empire. Though her cult sometimes existed by itself, in its fully developed state the worship of the Great Mother was accompanied by that of Attis.”
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.
Roman sophist Philostratus (end 2nd century CE), describing Gallae rituals where the priests embodied the deity Attis in order to have sex with worshippers who came to receive the essence and power of the God. He said that:
“The tie between god and man cannot be thought of in closer or stronger terms, and they are joined by a feeling not only of lifelong gratitude but of personal love, which in its expression passes over into sensual terms.”
Some Christians hated the Gallae. Firmicus Maternus,who lived in the reign of Constantine (4th century – the first emperor to convert to Christianity), wrote of the Cybele worshippers:
“They wear effeminately nursed hair, 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?”
“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.”
Augustine of Hippo (354-430) said of the Gallae:
“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.”
Greek Goddess Artemis, known in the Roman pantheon as Diana, Goddess of the hunt, wild animals, fertility, and the Moon, was worshipped widely in Europe for many centuries, much revered as a manifestation of the Great Goddess of pre-historical Europe. She had female priestesses who, like their goddess, refused sex with men – their virginity was associated with their sacred power. A male group of warriors called the Kouretes, who left homoerotic inscriptions on the rocks on the isle of Thera, also worshipped Artemis, as did trans male and trans female servants too, one group of whom were the megabyzoi, a Persian term, who were highly respected in Ephesus but mocked by some Greeks and Romans. This priestessly group shaved and painted their faces, wore their hair in feminine styles and were known for their purple garments, tiaras and rosary-style necklaces. Alexander the Great was a worshipper of Artemis and loved to dress as her in parades to honour the Goddess. He also took one of her eunuch priests as his lover – these holy servants, the megazyboi, ran public festivals, cast horoscopes and performed hymns and acts of divination. Rituals celebrating Diana including the kordax, a story told in dance in which the participants cross-dressed – the women wore large artifical phalli called lombai and pretended to penetrate the males.
Considered one of the Ancient Wonders of the World, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus in Asia Minor, was constructed in the 6th century BCE. Taking up the invitation laid down by Paul the Apostle, who said “The temple of the Great Goddess Artemis may count for nothing, and… she… be deposed from her magnificence, she whom Asia and the world worship,” Christians burnt down the great temple of Diana at Ephesus in the 3rd century CE – it was rebuilt then burnt again in 405 CE. Note that in the same city, just a few years later, a Church Synod decided to declare Mary the Mother of God, declaring her as divine in her own right, so that their new congregations would be able to channel their deep and devoted love of the Mother Goddess at shrines built to her.
Worship of Diana continued in western Europe for many centuries to come – she was seen, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and by the Inquisition trials of the Middle Ages, as the God of the witches. St Pauls Cathedral in London was built on the site of a Diana temple, and pagans continued to meet there for worship into early modern times.
The Egyptian Goddess Isis also had a long-standing gender-variant priesthood, known for their distinctive shaven heads and white linen clothes, who were described by 2nd century Roman writer Lucius Apuleius, in his book Metamorphoses: The Golden Ass, where he relates how the Isis priests transformed him into a donkey (and back again). Isis worship spread throughout the Roman Empire, but in the 4th century Emperor Constantine forbade their rites, murdered the priests who disobeyed and destroyed their temples.
The gender-bending priests of the threshold goddess Hecate, who was a patron of marginalised people, were called the semnotatoi:
“…in the case of Artemis, transgender worship simply constituted the adornment of male priests in the clothing of the goddess; this ritualistic crossdressing was done in order to communicate directly with the goddess, who would speak neither to biological females nor males in men’s clothing. However, for Hecate, transgender worship was taken much further. In many temples of Hecate, males would castrate themselves in order to serve as a priestess to the goddess. As patron goddess of witchcraft, castration was oftentimes done during the casting of spells and other magical rituals in honor of Hecate. These MTF priestesses, known as the Semnotatoi, were imbued with rights and privileges that neither men nor women were given in the temples of Hecate (Conner). They served a special function in the worship of the goddess, and as such occupied a safe space within the spiritual institutions of Greek society.” Transgender Identities in the Ancient Mediterranean › Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Intersex News (lgbti.org)
Astarte/Aphrodite (Roman Venus), Goddess of Love and Queen of Heaven, was served by the kelabim, loyal ‘dogs’ of the goddess, on the island of Cyprus and other places. 3rd century BCE Greek historian Philochorus wrote that she was served by men “dressed as women, and women dressed as men, because the moon is thought to be both male and female.” Six centuries later, Christian Bishop Eusebius, wrote that in a Lebanese temple of Venus discovered and destroyed by Emperor Constantine, “men undeserving of the name forgot the dignity of their sex and propitiated the demon by their effeminate conduct… The hand of military force was made instrumental in purging the impurities of this place.”
The Christian powers repeated, on a vast scale, the destruction of Goddess worship undertaken in Palestine by Hebrew kings from 1000 to 600 BCE. It had taken four centuries of persecution before those kings could 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 means ‘Holy’ or ‘Anointed Ones’ 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.’
Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941, author of The Golden Bough), in his work ‘Adonis, Attis, Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion’ attributed the adoption by south Pacific island priests of female attire to the fact that:
“…it often happens that a goddess chooses a man, not a woman, for her minister and inspired mouthpiece. When that is so, the favoured man is thenceforth regarded and treated as a woman...
“These unsexed creatures often, perhaps generally, profess the arts of sorcery and healing, they communicate with spirits and are regarded sometimes with awe and sometimes with contempt, as beings of a higher or lower order than common folk.”
19th century British explorer Richard Francis Burton found homosexual and cross-dressing practices common around world, and recorded they had “been adopted by the priestly castes from Mesopotamia to Peru.”
The great eastern civilisations in India, China and Japan embraced same sex love and gender variance as part of the divine order, in sharp contrast to what developed in the West. Several Hindu scriptures explicitly describe people with a homosexual nature. Among these, the Narada-smriti (a first-century B.C. text of religious codes attributed to the sage Narada) states that homosexuality is not curable, that homosexuals are exempted from the duty to procreate. The Sushruta Samhita (a 600 B.C. medical text compiled by the sage Sushruta) says that such tendencies are in-born and the Kama Sutra (a third-century A.D. text on the art of lovemaking by the sage Vatsyayana) also refers to homosexual acts and third-gender people – tritiya–prakriti – and describes the svairini (independent woman) who engages in aggressive lovemaking with other women. Other terms for lesbians and women who are either masculine or impotent with men in the Hindu scriptures include nastriya, stripumsa, shandhi. Similarly, bisexuals (kami or paksha), transgenders (shandha) and intersex types (nisarga, vakri, trnaputrika, etc.) are all present in Hindu scriptures.
In Indian culture gay/trans/thirdgender people were (and ARE) considered to have supernatural powers, as had been also the case in pagan Europe. Revered astrological texts such as the Brihat Jataka and Brihat Samhita mention planetary alignments at the time of conception that indicate a third-gender birth. Such births are associated with the three napumsa planets (Mercury, Saturn and Ketu) and indicate intelligence, mastery of the arts and sciences, detachment from family life, and clairvoyant abilities.
Carrying a combination of male and female spirit queer people were seen in India in pre-British times as being closer to the divine ideal, as symbolised by the depiction of Shiva Ardhanisvara, whose name means “The Lord whose half is a woman”. This form of Shiva represents the “totality that lies beyond duality”, and is associated with communication between mortals and gods and between men and women. French historian Alain Danielou said that “The hermaphrodite, the homosexual and the transvestite have a symbolic value and are considered privileged beings, images of the Ardhararishvara.” The Hijra priestesses of India, who still today worship the Goddess as Bahumachara Mata, are a surviving example of ancient queer/transgender priestcraft.
“The Japanese knew no punishment of public opprobrium for the homosexual until the influence of the West was felt, and the Japanese man who loved a man, it is said, was considered more heroic than the woman-lover in the great era of chivalry in Europe. The Chinese were likewise free of any attitude characterizing love of one’s own sex as wrong, until the influence of the Christian world became dominant.” From The homosexual in America; a subjective approach, by Donald Webster Cory 1957, in which he also wrote that homosexuals have been “the priests in some societies, the pariahs in others, and both at the same time in still others…”
When Jesuit missionaries first complained about the homosexuality in Japanese temples, the monks were offended and had the Europeans thrown out. When Chinese people heard of Europeans burning men as a punishment for gay sex, they considered the westerners to be barbaric.
A primary difference between Christianity and the pagan beliefs that preceded it the world over lies in the attitude to the body and sexuality. In the most ancient epic story in the world, the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’, the King of Uruk, Gilgamesh, who was 1/3 divine and 2/3 human, praises sex as one of the carnal pleasures humans ought to indulge in during their brief tenure on Earth. The epic poem also describes sexuality as a potent force that distinguishes humans from beasts. Ancient Goddess cultures celebrated this, but, under Christianity, God was taken out of the flesh – and out of the earth – and placed in the sky as an apparently loving but very strict Father. The sensual and promiscuous Mother Goddess, whom people knew intimately through nature and their own bodies, and the priesthoods who had long served her, had to go.
The early Church Fathers applauded virginity and decried all sexuality except that necessary for reproduction. But of course the Church would attract many same-sex attracted people into its service across the centuries, and still does, because many gay people are drawn to that kind of community and spiritual work. Medieval penitentials set punishments for sex between monks, but they were not worse than for heterosexual acts. Although the eastern Roman Empire enacted the death penalty for gay sex in 533 CE, it would be another 600 years before the atmosphere really turned against gay sex in western Europe, and it was exactly one millennium after the Byzantine law, in 1533 CE that the death penalty for sodomy was first enacted in England. Henry VIII’s Buggery Act was itself testament to the association of homosexuality and the spiritual life – Buggery had become an alternative term to sodomy during the Middle Ages, adopted due to the reputation for same sex relationships among adherents of the Bogomil heresy that spread across Europe from Bulgaria. The term bogomil in fact means beloved of god.
Due to the anti-sexual attitude of Christianity the link between sexuality and the spirit was lost. Malidoma Some of the Dagara Tribe of west Africa said in the 1990s:
“The modern world was built by Christianity. They have taken the gods out of the earth 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 are out of a job.”
Those ‘real priests and priestesses’, said Malidoma, manifest with certain ‘queer’ characteristics:
“The gay person is looked at primarily as a “gatekeeper.” The Earth is looked at, from my tribal perspective, as a very, very delicate machine or consciousness, with high vibrational points, which certain people must be guardians of in order for the tribe to keep its continuity with the gods and with the spirits that dwell there. Spirits of this world and spirits of the other worlds. Any person who is at this link between this world and the other world experiences a state of vibrational consciousness which is far higher, and far different, from the one that a normal person would experience. This is what makes a gay person gay…
Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture (1978):
“All the evidence indicates that nature people fucked for pleasure. Their purpose was to celebrate sex. Their orgies were acts of sexual worship to the power of sex they felt in themselves and in nature around them. Their religious feasts were characteristically joyous: dancing, feasting, fucking together. The Indians who have been observed in the Americas; the myths that have survived in Europe; the artifacts that exist from all over the world – all attest to the pleasure of what the celebrants were doing. George Scott has rightly observed “that, without exception, the worship of sex by all primitive [sic] races originated in the pleasure associated with coitus, and not in any clearly conceived notion that intercourse would produce children…” Hence it is a misrepresentation for industrialized academics to call such celebrations “fertility rites,” as they usually do. The orgies were not clumsy attempts to increase the gross national product by people who had a very rude understanding of economic laws. Nature people did, indeed, believe that through such acts their bodies would become stronger, the crops would grow taller, the sun would shine brighter, and the rains would come in profusion when needed. But they believed these things because they had a collective tribal feeling of the power of sex throbbing through the whole of nature; their experience of sex was so open, public, communal and intense that they felt it reverberate through the whole cosmos. In this, they were unlike modern industrialized people who practice sex … privately, in the dark, in isolation, and with guilt.”
In the pre-colonial, pre-Christian world gender diversity and same sex relationships were seen very differently to the scientific-biological model most people believe in today. In the Goddess temples of the ancient world and in traditional cultures around the world, many queer people held spiritual roles in service to the community. I suggest the only real solution to the ongoing horror of faith-based homophobia in the world is to reveal and uproot its historical origins – official Christianity, like Judaism before it, wanted to separate itself from the practices of the sex-positive pagan past – and, also, for queer people to reclaim and own the spiritual gifts that our queerness gives us. The Two Spirits of the Native American tribes have begun this process and are setting an example to queer people the world over. They are reclaiming their history. Groups such as the global Radical Faerie movement have been exploring the deep connections between gender-variance, same sex eroticism and the sacred for several decades and at QUEER SPIRIT FESTIVAL in the UK, August 2023, a few hundred of us will be gathering to celebrate the natural, earth-connecting, ground-breaking, liberating spirit of queer people.
“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
The modern LGBTQ+ movement has not yet addressed the religious roots of homophobia, and it won’t until enough of us who are discovering and reclaiming the true spiritual essence of queer nature speak up about it. A century ago this conversation started, but has yet to be properly heard by those it most affects: as Iwan Bloch (1872-1922) co-founder with Magnus Hirschfeld of the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science, said:
“The by no means scanty supply of ethnological facts on this subject which we possess confirms the above view, and shows in what odour of sanctity homosexual individuals have often stood among Nature-folk – for which reason they frequently played an important part in religious rituals and festivals.”
Humanity has lost touch with the erotic presence of spirit pulsing throughout creation because nature’s erotic priest/esses have been denied their roles. BUT, as Malidoma Some of the Dagara Tribe pointed out:
“…the thing about it is that humans are going to be begetting gatekeepers, no matter what. This is the chance that we’ve got. So maybe that means that sooner or later we’re going to wake up to the horror of our own errors, and we’re going to reconsecrate our chosen people so that they can do their priestly work as they should. Otherwise, I just don’t understand. I just don’t understand. My position about it is not so much that gays be just forgiven. That’s just tokenism. But that they serve as an example of the wrong, or the illness, that modernity has brought to us, and that we use that to begin working at healing ourselves and our society from the bottom up. That way, by the time we reach a certain level, all the gatekeepers are going to find their positions again. We cannot tell them where the gates are. They know. If we start to heal ourselves, they will remember. It will kick in. But as long as we continue in arrogance, in egotism, in God-knows-what form of violence on ourselves, no, there’s that veil of confusion that’s going to continue to prevail, and as a result it’s going to prevent great things from happening. That’s all I can say about that.”
Harry Hay (1912-2002) was founder of the first national organisation campaigning for gay rights in the 1950s, the Mattachine Society, and one of the founding father-mothers of the, now global, tribe of Radical Faeries. His life-long passion to liberate gay people from religious, legal and conformist pressures was motivated, he said, by a “vision I’ve held since I was a boy: that the overwhelming urge to sexuality I’ve felt since perhaps the age of eight or nine… had been always urging me that we are supposed to discover something about our sexuality collectively – something it is supposed to accomplish when we invoke it as once voice collectively.”
Will Roscoe wrote in Radically Gay : Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder (1997) –
“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.”
HAY: “The way out of our comprehensional stalemate, the quagmire into which the Binary inheritances of our brain-training and our cultural superstructure have hurled us…. Humanity must expand its experience to thinking of another, that other, not as object – to be used, to be manipulated, to be mastered, to be consumed – but as subject, as another like him/her self, another self to be respected, to be appreciated, to be cherished.”
HAY:1986 March on Washington
“Brothers and Sisters, isn’t it about time we started to tell our parent Society who we really are? Isn’t it about time we helped them to understand that rather than being merely a sexual variation of them, in all other senses exactly the same of they, we are a Separate People with, in several measurable respects, a rather different window on the world, a different consciousness, which may be triggered into being by our lovely sexuality?
“But before we can do that, before we can tell them who we are, we shall have to begin telling each other. Up to now it’s been easier to march in the streets and scream and holler than it has been to sit in a circle and examine and evaluate. It’s been easier to pretend we’re really almost the same as everyone else, although we don’t fool the Heteros for a minute, than it is to dig and dig into the bicameral subterranean channels of collective memory – a cataloguing and a collecting we’ve been avoiding like the plague….
“Our lovely and talented Gay Community with an enormous 100,000 year history of discovery and largely selfless contribution, our Minority of Ducks-in-whatever-henhouse-of-Chickens-they-were-inadvertently-born-into knows that we as a Separate People comprise a total deviation of consciousness that is not to be reduced by the nasty sexual drooling of dirty legalistic inferior minds.”
Hay presents a call to action – which still rings loud today, and deserves to be heard by the wider queer community:
“Now that we are beginning to have a glimmering of how to earn for ourselves Space in which to contemplate affirmatively our particular dimensions of self-realisation, IT IS TIME FOR GAY LIBERATION FAIRIES TO RECONSTITUTE THE AGE-OLD AND AGE-LESS RINGS OF THEIR FOLK RESPONSIBILITIES!…
“IT IS TIME GAY LIBERATION REGENERATES ITSELF INTO THE GAY FAIRY FAMILY OF LOVING-SHARING EQUALS, each choosing of his own volition to be responsible for himself, each choosing of his own volition to be responsible to each of the others of his chosen fairy ring!…
“IT IS TIME FOR GAY LIBERATION TO GATHER FOR COLLECTIVE REBIRTH AND RENEWAL!”
“The key to functioning by consensus is learning to listen to one another non-judgmentally! Radical Faeries have discovered that , by learning to slip the non-essential Hetero-male ego, we can really listen to one another with our inner ears. … To facilitate governing by the process of mutually respectful sharing consensus, Radical Faeries and, if there were of a mind, all Gay Brothers and Sisters, exercising their innate inclinations to process in subject-SUBJECT consciousness, might make a major contribution to Society by helping to create the most politically healthy of all possible communities.
“We need to make the leap in consciousness for a second reason as well – to reclaim our own sense of an ancient and historical legitimacy, parallels to which are continually being held open for us to duplicate by our Brothers of the Third and Fourth Worlds.
“… I am proposing that we take a hand-up example from our potential allies in the Third and Fourth Worlds, whose cultures may well be overtaking, and even out-numbering, our Hetero Western so-called Free World sensibilities in the not-too-far distant first decades of the 21st century. I propose that we Gay Men of all colours prepare to present ourselves as the gentle non-competitive Third Gender men of the Western World with whole wardrobes and garages crammed with cultural and spiritual contributions to share.
“… time for us Gays to reclaim our Third Gender responsibilities…
“It is time for us Third Gender folk… to rejoice in the gifts we bring!“
Pluto is in Aquarius from March 23, 2023, to June 11, 2023, later from January 20, 2024, until September 1, 2024, again from November 19, 2024, to March 8, 2043, at which point it will weave in and out of Aquarius and Pisces.
“Pluto in Aquarius is the beginning of a new era. Just like the caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, this ingress is your unique opportunity to step into the next version of yourself. A new ERA, a new YOU.“ https://astrobutterfly.lpages.co/pluto-in-aquarius/
“While Pluto is in Aquarius, we take social structures and politics especially seriously, and we seek major reform in these areas. Unusual, intense, or dramatic happenings are possible with friends and networks… During this long-term cycle, we are likely to confront issues of control and power related to individuality, equality, friendships, and group associations. We can be on a quest to distinguish ourselves for our progressiveness, scientific minds, ideals, humanitarianism, or unique qualities. It’s also a time when we seek to change and overhaul society through science, inventions, and the mind/ideas.” https://cafeastrology.com/events/pluto-enters-aquarius/
“The last time Pluto changed signs happened in 2008, when it moved into Capricorn, where it has stayed for the last 14 years. While it will, as mentioned, transit into Aquarius on March 23, 2023. It is notable that Capricorn rules government, structure, and the practical. With Pluto in Capricorn, we have seen authoritarian governments and corporations grow in power… In contrast to Capricorn, Aquarius rules independence, community, innovation, scientific reasoning, and the rational. When Pluto goes into Aquarius we can expect reckonings and innovations around technology, air travel, and community organizing.
“The last time Pluto moved into Aquarius was at the end of the Eighteenth Century, between 1778 to 1798, which coincided with the beginning of what some historians consider the Age of Revolution, a time in history when countries all over the world were rising up and challenging the ruling authority. These included major political and social revolutions on every continent.
“Going another 248 years back in time, Pluto’s previous stint in Aquarius (1532 to 1553) bore witness to the Protestant Reformation challenging the Catholic Church’s authority…Each time Pluto goes through Aquarius, the status quo and what is considered both real and established (both Capricorn words) are turned on their head. So, what will it be this time?
“Pluto in Aquarius is bound to be a revolutionary time. It would be silly, if not downright offensive, to claim that we will see world peace bloom by the end of this transit, though only good things can come from taking action to make movements, whether slight or major, in that direction. One can hope that we will see as many of us as possible striving for the Aquarian ideals of equality and community and working together to build a better, fairer society.”https://www.allure.com/story/pluto-in-aquarius-meaning-astrological-horoscope-2023-2024
“It destroys what no longer serves us, which isn’t a pretty process, but creates space for rebirth and new beginnings.” “At its highest vibration, Aquarius is the sign of social fairness that sees all humans as equal… Over the next twenty years, we will see people rise in many countries, revolting against oppressive governments. Pluto in Aquarius will bring back revolution worldwide — something that is very needed.” https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2023/03/11329690/pluto-in-aquarius-march-2023-meaning-effects
“On a more personal level, Pluto can bring transformation, evolution, revelation. Perhaps this means the death of something in your life and the birth of something (or someone!) completely new, or bringing forward of something long hidden… Pay attention to what happens for you personally during the week before March 23, 2023, and throughout the week after. During this time, it will echo some of the ways that you, personally, will experience Pluto’s transit in Aquarius.” https://www.allure.com/story/pluto-in-aquarius-meaning-astrological-horoscope-2023-2024
YET FOR ME SOMETHING IS MISSING IN THESE ASTROLOGICAL PREDICTIONS –
Pluto in Aquarius will be a time in which our understanding of COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS will evolve. Pluto will kick out the idea that we are separate beings, will destroy the illusion of the individual self, will shine Aquarian light on the power and potential of the higher mind, which exists in us all and through which we perceive and know ONENESS with each other and all existence, through which we enter NON-DUALITY/COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS. Egoless states – which can be accessed through meditative and ecstatic practices, with the aid of psychedelics or accessed through the body by practices such as dancing, drumming, creating art, sex rituals – will become the sought-after experience. Many people are highlighting AI as the exciting future that will bring humanity to a new level of awareness – i suggest this is total baloney: technology will turn us into morons if we let it – only by developing the inner metaphysical technology of our own minds and souls will humanity embrace Oneness and discover our own true, immortal, nature.
“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.”Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Futurist and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil believes 2029 will be the year of AI tech reaching the human level of intelligence, followed soon by humanity achieving immortality “when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billionfold by merging with the intelligence we have created.” He talks of nanobots flowing in our blood to help keep us healthy, and of uploading our thoughts and memories to the cloud. https://www.indy100.com/science-tech/humans-predicted-immortality-2030-science-2659644923#Echobox=1679518202
I SUGGEST IN RESPONSE THAT IMMORTALITY IS POSSIBLE BUT NOT THROUGH TECHNOLOGY!
WHAT IS COMING IS UNION WITH THE SUBTLE AND CAUSAL REALMS OF CREATION, EXPERIENCED THROUGH OUR BODIES, HEARTS AND MINDS – THE AWAKENING OF THE SPIRITUAL EYE, THE MYSTICAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY… ONENESS WILL BE REVEALED, IMMORTALITY IS OUR DESTINY….
BUT TO GET THERE HUMANITY HAS TO UNLOCK THE POWERS OF THE HEART, DISCOVER THE DIVINE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE, AND RECONNECT TO THE SACRED NATURE OF EXISTENCE.
PLUTO IN AQARIUS WILL REVOLUTIONISE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS, OF WHO WE ARE AS HU-MANS, ie MANIFESTATIONS OF SPIRIT – HU:
“HU is an ancient name for God. It has been used for thousands of years as a prayer and sacred chant to attune oneself to the presence of God. Millions of people around the world have experienced the joy of HU… In many spiritual traditions, sound plays an important part in uplifting the individual. HU is a key to open your heart to God’s loving presence in your life.” https://www.eckankar.org/experience/hu-the-sound-of-soul/
Back in the late 1960s the BBC radio comedy show Round the Horne brought camp characters and polari, the secret language used by many gay men of the time, to the British nation. The gay innuendos and sexual references went over the head of most listeners, but shone a light on a queer underworld for those who with eyes to see, or rather ears to hear.
A regular sketch on the show with the super-camp duo Julian and Sandy, played by comedians Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, featured the two men in various professions – including, in March 1968 (in episode 2 of series 4) a sketch where Jules and Sandy are running Transcendental Meditation classes at a local ‘Gurumat’ in the King’s Road. The sign on the door says ‘Levitate and Enter’, and once inside, the show’s host Kenneth Horne, is treated to some profound (and very simple) gay wisdom on how to achieve inner peace through THE TRUE VADA – ie clear vision of life’s sacred nature.
First approved for medical use in 2004, TRUVADA is also the name of a true medical phenomenon– a simple pill combination of two chemicals (emtricitabine and tenofovir disoproxil fumarate) – that has proved something of a miracle in that it not only treats people with HIV infection, it is also used by HIV negative people who are sexually active, to prevent infection by the virus in the first place. The TRUVADA medicine, used as Prep treatment by the HIV negative, made it possible for men to have sex with men without fear of contracting a killer disease. From the 1980s until the 2010s FEAR was an ever present factor in gay sexual encounters – except for those of us who were already HIV positive and had nothing left to be afraid of. The Truvada medicine made it safe to be sexual again, the much-hated condom was no longer so essential, GAY LIBERATION can move forwards again…
Liberation is more than a sexual thing! And to be gay is about much more than being sexual. Our sexual orientation influences how we approach the world. Radical Faerie founder Harry Hay spoke of gay men being naturally attuned to subject:SUBJECT consciousness – ie seeing and treating others as self, as another subject, rather than an object to be used, which he saw as the defining quality of heterosexual relationships. Some might argue that on the gay sex scene OBJECTIFICATION is more the norm but perhaps with a reminder of the ‘True Vada’ this could rapidly shift:
from the sketch:
“…to gain your actual bona tranquility…
…to start, perceive a Oneness in all the Universe… without this everything and everyone is as naught…
…without the actual recognition of THAT you are nanty.. nanty.. nanty. But once you attain the TRUE VADA you are at One: I AM HE AND HE IS ME, AND WE ARE THEM TOGETHER…
you’ll find it a bit odd at first – but then we all do…
What we call objectification becomes, once we are able to perceive the Oneness in the Universe, more an act of worship – a search for the divinity shining in everyone.
As Gay Mystic Andrew Harvey puts it:
“When you wake up to the Divine Consciousness within you and your divine identity, you wake up simultaneously to the Divine Consciousness appearing as all other beings. And this is not poetry and this is not a feeling, this is a direct experience of the divine light living in and as all other beings. And until this realization is firm in you, you do not know who or where you are.”
Spirituality is the missing element in the modern story of LGBTQ+ Liberation – but we do not have to turn to homophobic religions to find it! Queer pioneers since the 19th century have offered us many spiritual views of sexuality and gender-fluidity – Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Elsa Gidlow, Harry Hay, Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg, Judy Grahn, Andrew Harvey, Toby Johnson, Andrew Ramer, Raven Kaldera are a few key examples. But even gay comedians have been known to deliver some spiritual truth – and this sketch from Kenneth and Hugh is a magnificent and hilarious example of gay men delivering some of light, some True Vada.
The fact that the Truvada medication has been saving the lives of gay men for two decades now is one of life’s truly magical ironies – but how did the pharmacological industry come up with this name??? Perhaps the research chemists were Round the Horne fans!
The Campfire Theatre’s production of Merboy, penned by Liam Sesay and directed by Scott LeCrass, took our imaginations beyond the labels put on queer people by biology and psychology to access a deeper knowing within, a knowing that humans have long been reaching mythologically.
The queer lad hero of mixed heritage, played with hypnotic passion and ever deepening absorption by Kemi Clarke, grows up in a macho household under a dominating Christian mother – who recognised the free, flirtatious and ‘wayward’ ways of her own youth in her gay son and attempted to suppress them before they could emerge – goes through stages of self-identification, moving through sexual labels until he finds the tender, feminine merboy within. The mythic queer underworld of night creatures emerges – witches who will grant your (probably foolish) wishes if you insist on ignoring their warnings – merboys looking for love but discovering so much more – sailors looking for a high tide ride night after night – hungry horny hotties who can never be satisfied. The shadows are strong but the pull of love is intoxicating, the search goes eternally on and on…
Until our Merboy discovers he loves himself more than he hates the screams of his mother, more than he fears the bargain he made with the night witch, more than he desires the fake marriages and false-lovemaking of the sailors – he loves himself and he rises into himself, wise and experienced, battered but beautiful, stunned but strong. Merboy’s inner Venus shines through his heart at this discovery and in a symbolically rich conclusion Merboy transforms into a manifestation of the Goddess of Love. Merboy is telling us who and what we really are.
I was excited to see gay mythology coming alive on stage, as it does around the campfires that I more usually am found around: I have been part of the global Radical Faerie community for 20+ years – meeting in nature, the community originated in the USA in the late 1970s, gatherings arrived in Europe in 1995 and have been taking place in the UK since 2006. The Faerie name was chosen to refer to the magical, shape-shifting fae folk of ancient tales and Radical is a call to dig for the roots of our nature as queer people – we find those roots in magic, in myth, in nature, in ritual, not in the biological sciences. We take ‘faerie names’ to signify that we are identifying as a magical being, and we co-create spaces where connection, trust, awareness, love and healing can deepen.
Many of the Faeries have pooled their talents with other creative queers to bring Queer Spirit Festival into the world (the 4th summer festival for 600 people is in August 2023 in Devon). Our motivation here is to create a festival where all parts of the LGBTQ+ rainbow tribe can celebrate our innate and eternal connection to nature, and celebrate each other. The theme for 2023 is RECLAIMING QUEER NATURE.https://queerspirit.net/
Ancient myths are full of queer symbols and tales – Zeus and Ganymede, Apollo and Hyacinth, Cybele and Attis, Dionysus and Adonis etc etc. Mermaids, Fauns, Satyrs, Sylphs – nature spirits are, by nature, very queer – and, it’s time the world knew – queer people are very natural too and by nature, spiritual. So natural in fact that some of us are born to physically embody the spirits of nature, as we once did in traditional cultures the world over, and give them expression. Christian Church Father Augustine wrote of the gender-bending, bleach-blond, flamboyant and musical priests of the Great Mother Cybele in ancient Rome: “They are the sons of the earth. The Earth is their mother.” Roman sophist Philostratus said of these queer priests: “The tie between god and man cannot be thought of in closer or stronger terms, and they are joined by a feeling not only of lifelong gratitude but of personal love, which in its expression passes over into sensual terms.” Gender queer priests were prominent in the temples and rituals of the Goddess worshipping pagan age for thousands of years until the rise of Christianity.
Queer people bring sensual spirit into the world from the subtle, invisible dimensions. That’s why we are often found in theatres. Performance on stage developed out of the ancient temples, as a way of telling the stories of the Gods. Dionysus, the feminine male god, was the patron of theatre as well as of ecstatic intoxicated union with the spirit world. The English theatre scene, which developed please note in the decades after Tudor King Henry VIII had thrown the monks out of the Roman Catholic monasteries (using the recently enacted Buggery act as one of his justifications), quickly became a gay subculture and a birthing place for other ones to emerge, such as the Molly Houses of the 18th century. Theatre is the magic of transportation and that’s the kind of magic we bring to the human family.
This camp, poetic and pretty production from the Campfire Theatre at Clapham’s Omnibus Theatre, transported me to its realm very quickly and held me there, but the play doesn’t hold its punches – it takes examples of brutality, from our hero’s brothers, schoolmates and Christian mother and fiercely hammers them in, while tempering the blow with choreographed drag numbers performing 60s girl band hits. The transfixed, transported audience takes it all without issue, because we know how it feels. The gay sex scene gets a brutal portrayal too, which plays to a judgmental stereotype – but please guys let’s not slut-shame – for people like us have been executed for having fun for the past 1500 years- and after 4 decades on the London gay scene, as well as horror stories I know that there’s plenty of friendship, compassion, care, relationships and FUN also happening out there in our much maligned but crucially vital underworld, that there are entrepeneurs running venues that attempt to offer community spirit alongside the freedom to be erotic, and that our dark games can be the very things that awaken us to the light of who we really are.
Creatures of nature. Entirely magical if only we knew it. Well perhaps we do.
Ivan Bloch (1872-1922) worked with Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the first institution advocating for homosexual and transgender rights. In his book The sexual life of our time : a complete encyclopaedia of the sexual sciences in their relation to modern civilisation, published in 1907 Bloch declared:
“Homosexuality – love between man and man (uranism) or between woman and woman (tribadism), a congenital state, or one spontaneously appearing in very early childhood – I consider a ‘riddle’ because, in fact, the more closely in recent years I have come to know it, the more I have endeavoured to study it scientifically, the more enigmatical, the more obscure, the more incomprehensible, it become to me.
“I must recognise that true homosexuality constitutes a special well-defined group… among thoroughly healthy individuals of both sexes… there appears in very early childhood, and certainly not evoked by any kind of external influence, an inclination, and after puberty, a sexual impulse, towards persons of the same sex ….
“They are just as healthy and normal as are heterosexuals. For me there is no longer any doubt that homosexuality is compatible with complete mental and physical health.”
He quotes a 32 year old gay physician:
“My love is as great, as holy, and as pure, as heterosexual love; it is capable of self-sacrifice. Believe me, for a loved one who fully understood me in every respect, I would gladly go to my death… Ah! how painful it is to us when we are regarded as debauchees or as sick persons!”
Also in this work Bloch summarised the deep connection between sexuality and spirituality felt by humanity for most of its history, something that is little understood a century after he wrote this work and still likely to shock people today:
“…throughout its history sorcery in all its forms remained associated with the sexual impulse.
“All sorcery arise from rutting” said an old (Brazilian) Indian..
“Sorcerers and witches are, above all, experienced in the sexual province.”
“…sexual excesses are throughout the world found in association with religion…
“…Among primitive peoples, and in ancient times, religio-erotic festivals first gave an opportunity for the manifestation of this religio-sexual mysticism….
“This sexual religious mysticism meets us everywhere – in the religious festivals of antiquity, the festivals of Isis in Egypt, and the festivals of imperial Rome, both alike accompanied by the wildest sexual orgies; in the festivals of Baal Peor, among the Jews, in the Venus and Adonis festivals of the Phoenicians, in Cyprus and Byblos, in the Aphrodisian, the Dionysian, and the Eleusinian festivals of the Hellenes; in the festival of Flora in Rome, in which prostitutes ran about naked; in the Roman Bacchanalia; and in the festival of bona dea, the wild licence of which is only too clearly presented to our eyes in the celebrated account of Juvenal.
“In India, the sect of Caitanya, founded in the C16, celebrated the maddest religio-sexual orgies. Their ritual consisted principally of long litanies and hymns, stuffed full with unbridled eroticism, and followed by wild dances, all leading up to the sexual culmination, in which the ‘love of God’ (bhakti) was to be made as clearly perceptible as possible. Even worse were the Sakta sects (the name derived from sakti, force, that is the sensuous manifestation of the god Siva). They gave themselves up with ardent sensuality to the service of the female emanations of Siva, all distinctions of caste being ignored, and wild sensual promiscuity prevailing. Divine service always preceded the act of sexual intercourse.
“Ancient Central and South America were also familiar with wild outbreaks of a sexual-religious character. In Guatemala, on the days of the great sacrifices, there occurred sexual orgies of the worst kind…
“Sexual mysticism also found its way into Christianity. When the renowned theologian Usener, in his work ‘Mythology’ writes in relation to these matters, ‘the whole of paganism found its way into Christianity,’ we must point out that in our view what ‘corrupted’ Christianity was not ‘paganism’, but the fundamental phenomena of primitive human nature, the primordial connection between religion and sexuality, which by a natural necessity manifested itself in Christianity not less than in other religions.
“In the 4th C of our era, the Jewish-Christian sect of the Sarabites concluded their religious festivals with wild sexual orgies, which are graphically described by Cassianus. This sect persisted into the ninth century. The later history of the Christian sects is full of this religio-sexual element. Religious and sexual ardour take one another’s place, pass one into the other, mutually increase one another…. the religio-erotic orgiastic festivals of the Nicolatans, the Adamites, the Valesians, the Carpocratians, the Epiphanians, the Cainites and the Manicheans. Dixon, in his ‘Spiritual Wives’ (1868) has described the sexual excesses of recent Protestant sects, such as the ‘Mucker’ of Konigsberg, the ‘Erweckten’ (‘the awakened’), the Foxian spiritualists of Hydesville, etc.
“… in the Greek Church also sexual mysticism gives rise to the most remarkable offshoots. Leroy-Beaulieu gives an account of the Russian sect of the ‘Skakuny’ or ‘Jumpers’ who at their nocturnal assemblies throw themselves into a state of erotic religious ecstasy by hopping and jumping, like the dancing Dervishes of Islam. When the frenzy reaches a climax, a shameless, utterly promiscuous union of the sexes occurs, of which incest is a common feature.
“The oldest heathen cults were familiar with the idea of love unions as a representation of the union of man with God; and in the New Testament the ideas of the bridegroom and the marriage feast play a leading part. Christ is the ‘bridegroom’ of the Church, the Church is his ‘bride.’ Pious maidens and nuns are happy to call themselves the brides of Christ. This ecstatic union has always as its sub-stratum a sexual imagination. Augustine says, “Like a bridegroom Christ leaves His bridal chamber; in the mood of a bridegroom he bestrides the field of the world.”
On the religious battle with the sexual impulse:
“Weininger expressed the opinion (‘Sex and Character, 1904) “the renunciation of sexuality kills only the physical man, and kills him only in order, for the first time, to ensure the complete existence of the spiritual man”; but this is entirely false, and proceeds from an extremely deficient knowledge of human nature. For the ‘renunciation of sexuality’ is, in truth, the most unsuitable way of securing a complete existence for the spiritual man.”
Bloch believed a future humanity would embrace SEXUALITY as a means of expressing LOVE the core essence of life, without shame, fear or prejudice.
“We must recognise love as the spiritual force of life. Love, like the artist, like the man of science, has a right to the peculiar, original activity of its own poetic force, to the production of new spiritual values. The more perfect race that is to come must, in the fullest meaning of the words, be brought forth by love.
“I am ardent advocate of ‘free love’ by which I understand sexual union based upon intimate love, personal harmony and spiritual affinity, entered on by the free resolve of both parties…”
In the 2nd century CE Lucian of Samosata wrote a description of a Goddess temple in Syria and the activities of the sacred, gender-bending priests that worked there. ‘De Dea Syria’ (of the Syrian Goddess) describes the temple as dedicated to Atargatis, a local name for Ishar/Astarte, whom Lucien synchronises with the Greek goddess Hera:
“Dionysus visited Syria on his journey to Aethiopia. There are in the temple many tokens that Dionysus was its actual founder: for instance, barbaric raiment, Indian precious stones, and elephants’ tusks brought by Dionysus from the Aethiopians. Further, a pair of phalli of great size are seen standing in the vestibule, bearing the inscription, “I, Dionysus, dedicated these phalli to Hera my stepmother.” This proof satisfies me. And I will describe another curiosity to be found in this temple, a sacred symbol of Dionysus. The Greeks erect phalli in honour of Dionysus, and on these they carry, singular to say, mannikins made of wood, with enormous pudenda; they call these puppets. There is this further curiosity in the temple: as you enter, on the right hand, a small brazen statue meets your eye of a man in a sitting posture, with parts of monstrous size.”
Lucien speculates on the origin of the custom of self-castration and wearing of female clothing in the priesthood (as was also common with the priests of other Goddesses, such as Cybele, Isis, or Artemis): he tells of Combabus, the builder of the temple, who self castrated when asked by the King to escort Queen Stratonice to Hierapolis, where the goddess had directed her to erect a temple. While there the Queen fell in love with Combabus and he was forced to reveal what his actions. Combabus:
“narrated all that he had done and finally disclosed to her the manifest proofs of his statement. When the queen witnessed this unexpected proof her passion indeed was quenched, but she never forgot her love, but in all her intercourse she cherished the solace of her unavailing affection. The memory of this love is still alive at Hierapolis and is maintained in this way; the women still are enamoured of the Galli, and the Galli again love the women with passion; but there is no jealousy at all, and this love passes among them for a holy passion.”
Lucien continues:
“the custom once adopted remains even to-day, and many persons every year castrate themselves and lose their virile powers: whether it be out of sympathy with Combabus, or to find favour with Hera. They certainly castrate themselves, and then cease to wear man’s garb; they don women’s raiment and perform women’s tasks. I have heard the origin of this ascribed to Combabus as well, for the following event occurred to him. A certain foreign woman who had joined a sacred assembly, beholding a human form of extreme beauty and dressed in man’s attire, became violently enamoured of him: after discovering that he was unsexed, she took away her life. Combabus accordingly in despair at his incapacity for love, donned woman’s attire, that no woman in future might be deceived in the same way. This is the reason of the female attire of the Galli.”
He says of Hera: “…it was she who inspired many with the idea of castrating themselves, so that her lover should not be the only one to lament the loss of his virility.”
The Galli: ‘sacred as they are’
“On certain days a multitude flocks into the temple, and the Galli in great numbers, sacred as they are, perform the ceremonies of the men and gash their arms and turn their backs to be lashed. Many bystanders play on the pipes the while many beat drums; others sing divine and sacred songs. All this performance takes place outside the temple, and those engaged in the ceremony enter not into the temple.
“During these days they are made Galli. As the Galli 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.”
“The Galli, when dead, are not buried like other men, but when a Gallus dies his companions carry him out into the suburbs, and laying him out on the bier on which they had carried him they cover him with stones, and after this return home. They wait then for seven days, after which they enter the temple. Should they enter before this they would be guilty of blasphemy.”
Holy Pigs
Lucien records that some of the Galli, unlike others, “look on swine without disgust, but as holy animals.” Could this be part of the reason that the Hebrew people took against pigs, as they did against same sex relations and cross-dressing – because these things were what those queer pagan people were into…
A Temple Ritual
“The entrance to the temple faces the north; its size is about a hundred fathoms. In this entrance those phalli stand which Dionysus erected: they stand thirty fathoms high. Into one of these a man mounts twice every year, and he abides on the summit of the phallus for the space of seven days. The reason of this ascent is given as follows: The people believe that the man who is aloft holds converse with the gods, and prays for good fortune for the whole of Syria, and that the gods from their neighbourhood hear his prayers. Others allege that this takes place in memory of the great calamity of Deukalion’s time, when men climbed up to mountain tops and to the highest trees, in terror of the mass of waters.”
“What does Hinduism teach about homosexuality? Ancient Hindu teachings describe homosexuality as a “third sex” (tritiya-prakriti), an inborn nature combining both male and female properties. Homosexuals and transgenders were recognized for their unique nature and incorporated into Vedic society accordingly. They were not punished or persecuted under ancient Hindu law and elaborate descriptions of homosexuality can be found in the Kama Shastra (Hindu scriptures describing the art of lovemaking).
“What exactly is the Hindu third sex? The Hindu third sex refers to people we know today as gender minorities— homosexuals, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, the intersexed—people who do not fit neatly into society’s “normal” male and female roles. Such people are sometimes described as “neither man nor woman” or “both man and woman.” In Hinduism, the universal creation is honored as unlimitedly diverse and the recognition of a third sex is one more aspect of this understanding. Gender-ambiguous persons were traditionally awarded a semi-divine status and their participation in religious ceremonies, especially as crossdressing dancers and devotees of the temple deity, was considered auspicious—a symbol of good luck, peace and cultural prosperity. This tradition can still be observed in India today. Many Hindus believe that people of the third sex have special powers that allow them to bless or curse others.
“What are the primary considerations in determining the third gender? There are two primary considerations in determining the third gender—the first being social and the second, biological. The social consideration refers to whether or not a person is sexually procreative (bearing offspring in society) and the biological consideration refers to whether or not a person, by nature and birth, has both male and female characteristics. A completely third-gender person will have both of these aspects but in some instances only one may be present. For instance, a bisexual person is third gender by nature (having both male and female attractions) but if he or she unites with the opposite sex and begets children, such a person is not socially viewed as belonging to the third gender. Similarly, heterosexually potent males and fertile females who never produce offspring throughout their lives are socially viewed as third gender, even though biologically they are not.”
Extracted from Tritiya-Prakriti: People of the Third Sex UNDERSTANDING HOMOSEXUALITY, TRANSGENDER IDENTITY AND INTERSEX CONDITIONS THROUGH HINDUISM by Amara Das Wilhelm (2010)
“We are human beings. And a human being has a divine creative intelligence. One way or another that creative intelligence is going to find an outlet. If it can’t find an outlet through the imagination, which is its natural route, it will find it in a concretized way. That becomes compulsive because there’s no way it can find what it’s looking for in a concrete way. You can’t find the Divine Mother in gobbling food….. If our creative energy is blocked, it will find an outlet in some kind of distorted religion, or addiction. An addiction to me is a distorted religion.
“Jung pointed out that it was no accident that alcohol is also called ‘spirits’ and said that the alcoholic’s thirst for alcohol is equivalent to the soul’s thirst for ‘the union with God.’
“Alcohol in Latin is spiritus, and you use the same word the for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritus,’ he wrote … in 1961. It’s an alchemical formula. It takes spirit to counter spirit.
“Looking at alcoholism and addiction as a longing for spirit might mean that something very different is going on in our society. One might say that we don’t have a crisis with alcohol and drugs as much as we have a spiritual crisis. Addiction is the perversion of spirit, our spiritual nature turned inside out, devouring itself. The epidemic of addiction can also be seen as spirit trying to reenter our society...
“A longing for alcohol does symbolise a longing for spirit. Think of the Greeks with Dionysus, the god of the vine. Intoxication and the transcendent experience with the god were intimately connected….. Alcoholics are longing for spirit because they are so mired in matter, but they make the mistake of concretizing that longing in alcohol. Maybe if they really understood what they were longing for and could go into the realm of the imaginal, the soul’s realm, then something very different could begin to happen.”
“Addicts are trying to run away from God as fast as they can. Paradoxically, they are running right into her arms. Consciousness makes them realise how the soul is trying to lead them into the presence of the divine if only they can understand the symbolism inherent in the addictive substance or behaviour.”
“All the running is away from the tragic fear that we are not loved. Unless we perform well, we are not lovable. That terror leads to self-destructive behaviour. It can also lead to global self-destruction. Addictions may be the Goddess’s way of opening our hearts to what love is – love of ourselves, love of others, love of the dear planet on which we live.”
“Lots of people are trying to find spirit through sexuality. Through orgasms they think they can be released from matter; for one brief moment they hope to experience this extraordinary union of spirit and matter. But if they can’t bring relationship into sexuality then it’s just a fly-by-night thing. Eventually it just becomes mechanical…. Sexuality without love is matter without spirit. People who are unable to love may be addicted to sexuality and be driven over and over again to try to find love. What they are projecting onto sexuality is the divine union they so desperately lack within themselves.”
“Jung said the opposite of love is not hate but power, and where there is love there is no will to power. I think this I a core issue in working with addictions. Sooner or later, the feminine face of God, Love, looks us straight in the eye, and though her love may manifest as rage at our self-destruction, she’s there. We can accept or reject – live or die.“
“THE GODDESS ENERGY IS TRYING TO SAVE US.”
From Conscious Femininity by MARION WOODMAN (1928-2018), Canadian mythopoetic author, poet, analytical psychologist and women’s movement figure, published 1993.
“African history is replete with examples of both erotic and nonerotic same-sex relationships. For example, the ancient cave paintings of the San people near Guruve in Zimbabwe depict two men engaged in some form of ritual sex. During precolonial times, the “mudoko dako,” or effeminate males among the Langi of northern Uganda were treated as women and could marry men. In Buganda, one of the largest traditional kingdoms in Uganda, it was an open secret that Kabaka (king) Mwanga II, who ruled in the latter half of the 19th century, was gay.
“The vocabulary used to describe same-sex relations in traditional languages, predating colonialism, is further proof of the existence of such relations in precolonial Africa. To name but a few, the Shangaan of southern Africa referred to same-sex relations as “inkotshane” (male-wife); Basotho women in present-day Lesotho engage in socially sanctioned erotic relationships called “motsoalle” (special friend) and in the Wolof language, spoken in Senegal, homosexual men are known as “gor-digen” (men-women).”http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/4/homosexuality-africamuseveniugandanigeriaethiopia.html
“The indigenous cultures of South and East Africa have a long history of homosexuality, transgender behavior, and even same-sex marriage between both men and women. In early seventeenth-century Luanda (the capital of Portuguese Angola), Catholic priests Gaspar Azevereduc and Antonius Sequerius documented third-gender natives known as chibados. The chibados dressed like women, spoke effeminately and married other men “to unite in wrongful lust with them.” More shocking to the priests was the fact that such marriages were honored and even prized among the tribesmen. In a similar record, Portuguese Jesuit Joao dos Santos wrote in 1625 that the chibadosmof southwestern Africa were “attyred like women, and behave themselves womanly, ashamed to be called men; are also married to men, and esteeme that unnaturale damnation an honor.” In his writings about seventeenth-century Angola, historian Antonio Cardonega mentioned that sodomy was “rampant among the people of Angola. They pursue their impudent and filthy practices dressed as women.” He also stated that the sodomites often served as powerful shamans, were highly esteemed among most Angolan tribes and commonly called quimbanda.” http://amarawilhelm.wixsite.com/around-the-world/part-8
Dagara: “The gay person is looked at primarily as a “gatekeeper.” The Earth is looked at, from my tribal perspective, as a very, very delicate machine or consciousness, with high vibrational points, which certain people must be guardians of in order for the tribe to keep its continuity with the gods and with the spirits… Any person who is at this link between this world and the other world experiences a state of vibrational consciousness which is far higher, and far different, from the one that a normal person would experience. This is what makes a gay person gay. This kind of function is…one that people are said to decide on prior to being born. You decide that you will be a gatekeeper before you are born…To then limit gay people to simple sexual orientation is really the worst harm that can be done to a person.” Malidoma Some http://www.menweb.org/somegay.htm
Azande: “the Azande tribe in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo in sub-Saharan Africa use their queerness to instill fear and respect in the eyes of their fellow tribespeople. Lesbian Azande women were notorious for being very open and proud of their queerness, wearing it like a badge of honor. This was because, to the Azande, the spiritual potency of women was seen as often more powerful than that of men. Already at a magical disadvantage, Azande men were particularly impotent to the power of queer Azande women. By having sex with each other, lesbians of the tribe were believed to be able to double their spiritual power, making their magical prowess the most powerful in all the tribe. To show off their spiritual might, Azande lesbians sometimes practiced their queer sexuality in public as a way to let everyone know now had 2x the power they once had.” (Tomas Prower https://www.llewellyn.com/journal/article/2696)
“In southeastern Africa, Bori cults—along with their crossdressing shamans and possession rituals—are still quite common among the Zulu. Shamans are known as inkosi ygbatfazi (“chief of the women”) while ordinary transgenders are called skesana and their masculine partners, iqgenge. Zulu warriors traditionally asserted their manhood by substituting boys for women and in the 1890s, Zulu chief Nongoloza Mathebula ordered his bandit-warriors to abstain from women and take on boy-wives instead. After his capture, Nongoloza insisted that the practice had been a longstanding custom among South Africans. Indeed, homosexual marriage was documented among the Zulu, Tsonga and Mpondo migrant workers of South Africa at least since the early nineteenth century. Boy-wives were known by various names such as inkotshane (Zulu),nkhonsthana (Tsonga), tinkonkana (Mpondo)” http://amarawilhelm.wixsite.com/around-the-world/part-8
“Apart from erotic same-sex desire, in precolonial Africa, several other activities were involved in same-sex (or what the colonialists branded “unnatural”) sexuality. For example, the Ndebele and Shona in Zimbabwe, the Azande in Sudan and Congo, the Nupe in Nigeria and the Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi all engaged in same-sex acts for spiritual rearmament — i.e., as a source of fresh power for their territories. It was also used for ritual purposes.” http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/4/homosexuality-africamuseveniugandanigeriaethiopia.html
“The Meru tribes of Kenya have a religious leadership role known as mugawe, which involves priests wearing female clothing and hairstyles. In 1973, British ethnologist Rodney Needham noted that the mugawe were often homosexual and sometimes married to other men… In 1987, anthropologist Gill Shepherd reported that homosexuality was relatively common in Kenya, even among Muslims (both male and female). Most Kenyans initially discourage transgender behavior among their children but gradually come to accept it as an inherent part of the child’s spirit (roho) or nature (umbo). Shepherd observed third-gender men, known in Swahili as shoga, who served as passive male prostitutes and wore female clothing, makeup, and flowers at social events such as weddings, where they typically mingled with the “other” women. At more serious events such as funerals and prayer meetings, the shoga would stay with the men and wear men’s attire. Other Swahili terms for homosexual men include basha(dominant male), hanithi (young male partner) and mumemke (man-woman). Lesbians are known as msagaji or msago(“grinders”).” http://amarawilhelm.wixsite.com/around-the-world/part-8
“1892-1921. Over two-hundred and fifty sodomy cases are tried in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, with the most common defense being that sodomy has been a longstanding custom among the African natives.” Tritiya-Prakriti: People of the Third Sex, by Amara Das Wilhelm
EGYPT: “The Siwa Oasis was of special interest to anthropologists and sociologists because of its historical acceptance of male homosexuality. Some argue the practice arose because from ancient times unmarried men and adolescent boys were required to live and work together outside the town of Shali, secluded for several years from any access to available women. In 1900, the German egyptologist George Steindorff reported that, “the feast of marrying a boy was celebrated with great pomp, and the money paid for a boy sometimes amounted to fifteen pound, while the money paid for a woman was a little over one pound.” The archaeologist Count Byron de Prorok reported in 1937 that “an enthusiasm could not have been approached even in Sodom.. Homosexuality was not merely rampant, it was raging…Every dancer had his boyfriend…[and] chiefs had harems of boys.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history#Egypt
UGANDA: a 2014 report by NGO Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) “Expanded Criminalisation of Homosexuality in Uganda: A Flawed Narrative” was “a response to the anti-gay bill proposal passed in Ugandan parliament in 2009, and is aimed to prove that same sex relationships existed throughout Africa, including the territories that now form Uganda, before the colonisation. According to the report, a commonly cited reason for maintaining, or expanding, criminalisation of homosexuality nowadays, is that homosexuality is “un-African” or, in other words, a foreign phenomenon. The research, however, showed that throughout Africa’s history homosexuality has been a “consistent and logical feature of African societies and belief systems”, and that Uganda’s laws criminalising homosexuality originates entirely from legislations introduced by the British colonial administration in 1902 and 1950.” https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/gay-ugandan-king-proves-that-homosexuality-african-1434416
“The Konso of southern Ethiopia have no less than four words for effeminate men, one of which is sagoda and refers to men who never marry, are weak, or who wear skirts. In the mid-1960s, Canadian anthropologist Christopher Hallpike observed one Ethiopian Konso that lived by curing skins (a female occupation) and liked to play the passive role in homosexual relations. In 1957, American anthropologist Simon Messing found male transvestites among the Amhara tribes that were known as wandarwarad (male-female). They lived alone and were considered like brothers to the tribeswomen. The husbands of the women were not at all jealous of the close friendship between their wives and the wandarwarad. Messing reported that the wandarwarad were unusually sensitive and intense in their personal likings. He also found “mannish women” among the Amhara known as wandawande.”http://amarawilhelm.wixsite.com/around-the-world/part-8
“In the Sudan, traditional Zande culture is well known for its homosexual marriages, even into the 1970s, as reported by British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard in 1971. Some Zande princes preferred men over women and could purchase a desired boy for the price of one spearhead. They would then become husbands to the young man, provide him with beautiful ornaments and address him as badiare (beloved).” http://amarawilhelm.wixsite.com/around-the-world/part-8
Note the frequently recurring links between same sex love and spiritual power.
SPIRITUALITY IS THE MISSING LINK in the modern story of LGBTQ+ emergence.
Persecution of same sex loving and gender fluid people is rooted in the efforts of patriarchal monotheism over two millennia to eradicate pagan worship, sex temples, sacred prostitution and magic. Sodomy and sorcery were seen as going hand in hand in ancient Middle East and Europe. Transexuality was considered to bestow spiritual power, and this was common around the world – eg the Two Spirits of the USA, now finding the way to reclaim their power and their role in the wider community, after centuries of being referred to as ‘berdache’ (the word given to them by Europeans, it referred to the passive partner in homosexual sex). This was also the case in Africa. Homosexuality did not exist in pre-colonial Africa – because the Africans were way too intelligent and attuned to nature to define people by how they liked to have sex!
The Church of England has been divided on the issue of SAME SEX MARRIAGE for a long time, with the issue threatening to split the global Anglican community. This week the Church’s General Synod has voted to allow blessings of same sex relationships but retains its ban on marriage services.
There is a glaring, unacknowledged historical fact missing here, which is that – far from being an innovation – soul unions between same sex couples were actually a feature of European life for thousands of years, even until relatively recent times.
ANAM CARA
“A person without a soul friend is like a body without a head.” Celtic saying
Aristotle recorded that the Celtic people “hold in honour passionate friendships (synousia) between men”, he was the first classical writer to mention loving relationships between men among the Celtic people, in Politics, 4th century BCE. He calls it synousia. The statement comes while he is arguing for the inclusion of women in politics, because when excluded they exert their influence over their husbands:
“The inevitable result is that in such a state wealth is highly esteemed, especially if the men are dominated by the women as it is with most military and warlike cultures, except the Celts and certain other groups who hold in honour passionate friendships (synousia) between men”.
This line has also been translated from the ancient Greek as: ‘openly approve of sexual relations between men.’ He also mentions Scythians, Persians and Thracians as feeling the same.
500 years later, Ardaisan of Edessa wrote in the 2nd century CE that:
“In the countries of the north — in the lands of the Germans and those of their neighbors, handsome [noble] young men assume the role of wives [women] towards other men, and they celebrate marriage feasts.”
Eusebius of Caesarea, wrote in the 4th century CE that “Among the Gauls, the young men marry each other (gamountai) with complete freedom. In doing this, they do not incur any reproach or blame, since this is done according to custom amongst them.”
To the early Celtic Christians, friendship continued to be a sacred encounter. It was considered a path to contemplation, a discipline to uphold, and a treasure of the highest value. Friendship and family ties were the foundation of Celtic society and sometimes associated with St Brigit is the saying “a person without an anam cara is like a body without a head.”
A strand of Classical pagan culture, under the influence of Pythagoras and the Stoics, had increasingly moved away from other groups that celebrated sexuality, coming to view all sexual relationships as physically harmful, and recommending sexual abstention as the wisest course. This also influenced early Christians and during the fourth century of the Common Era, Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome were pushing their own view of sexual morality, which severed love from sex and equated any expression of sexuality with sin. For both of these fathers of the early Christian faith, virginity – or at least chastity – was the only path for a good and holy life. Not everyone saw it this way, however: an alternative viewpoint came from a Celt, known to history as Pelagius, the heretic. True to his Celtic heritage, Pelagius was a Celtic voice in competition with the anti-pleasure views of Augustine which eventually came to dominate the Church. Pelagius did not separate love and sex, and his vision of human life did not include Original Sin, which Augustine claimed was transmitted from parents to children at birth. And nor did most of the northern European people – in 1102 when the Council of London proposed harsh punishments for sodomy, Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury prevented publication of their decree, saying the practice was widespread and few were embarrassed by it or aware it was even an issue.
John O’Donahue (1956-2008) author Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom:
“In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is anam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara is the word for friend. So anam cara in the Celtic world was the “soul friend.” In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam cara. It originally referred to someone to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life. With the anam cara you could share your inner-most self, your mind and your heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention, morality, and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the “friend of your soul.” The Celtic understanding did not set limitations of space or time on the soul. There is no cage for the soul. The soul is a divine light that flows into you and into your Other. This art of belonging awakened and fostered a deep and special companionship.”
Aislingmagazine.com: “Main sources for an understanding of the anamchara are the Lives of the early Celtic saints. For more than six centuries, from the 600s to well beyond 1200 C.E., monastic hagiographers in the Celtic churches of Ireland, Northern England, Cornwall, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and Brittany composed the Lives of literally hundreds of Celtic saints. As well as the two traditions of spiritual guidance that shaped this form of ministry, hagiographies provide a wealth of information about soul friendship and its immersion in the everyday life and spirituality of Celtic Christianity. These writings reveal how common soul-friend relationships were between men and men, women and women, and women and men…
“Finnian, who established the great monastery Clonard, about 520 C.E., was considered the patriarch of early Irish monasticism…mentored from boyhood by Foirtchernn of Britain … had, as an adult, a number of other soul friends: Caemon of Tours in Gaul, and David, Gildas, and Cathmael, sages of the Celtic church in Britain. Finnian calls his student Ciaran “O little heart” and “dear one” and blesses him before Ciaran leaves the monastery of Clonard; Brendan and Ruadan build their cells near one another so that they can hear the ringing of each other’s bells.”
In Celtic culture women held power along with men, and marriage came in various kinds. As Christianity spread monogamy became the norm and all non-procreative sex was condemned, but the tradition of “special friends” and the importance of love did not die out. Monastic penitentials from 600 to 1200 CE set out various punishments for inappropriate acts between over friendly monks, such as kissing, passionate kissing, interfemoral and anal intercourse. Punishments were no harsher however for monks engaging in sodomy than for married couples doing the same, and a typical punishment at this time might be an enforced period of fasting. An old Celtic habit of men sucking on each other’s nipples to affirm friendship, particularly after a quarrel, was slow to change and medieval monasteries were for some havens of safety where same sex affections could be explored.
Seventh-century theologian Maximos the Confessor reflects on what it is that binds communities together, stating that it is “sensual affection” and “desires” (erota) that causes creatures to flock as one. It is from this “erotic faculty” that animals flock together, being drawn “toward a partner of the same kind as one.”
Aelred (1109-1167), abbot of the Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx in northeastern England, found divine love through friendships with other men. His treatise “On Spiritual Friendship” is considered one of the best theological statements on the connection between human love and spiritual love. “God is friendship… He who abides in friendship abides in God, and God in him.”
Aelred’s own deep friendships with men are described in John Boswell’s book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, who wrote“It was Saint Aelred of Rievaulx who gave love between those of the same gender its most profound and lasting expression in a Christian context.”
Aelred supported friendships between monks, comparing them to the love between Jesus and his beloved disciple, and between Jonathan and David, and he allowed the monks at his Yorkshire monastery to express affection by holding hands, a practice discouraged by other abbots.
“You are good and loveable as you are. God is Friendship and all the loves of your life are part of that great friendship for which you are eternally destined. Cherish your friendships for they are the best this world has to offer. Create a small piece of paradise here on Earth by loving and embracing each other; by loving and embracing the whole world. The cruely, chaos and pain of daily living cannot dim your vision of everlasting, perfect love as long as you cling to your precious friendships.” From Spiritual Friendship.
It was not only in monastic communities that loving same sex relationships continued to be acknowledge in the medieval world. The Rite of Adelphopoiesis (in Greek this means literally the making of brothers) refers to a number of ceremonies, used by various branches of the Christian church in the middle ages, to bind two men in spiritual brotherhood, continuing what seems to have been a very ancient, pre-Christian tradition in Celtic and other lands. The rite was controversially described by historian John Boswell as a medieval “same-sex union.”
Known as affrèrement (‘enbrotherment’), legal contracts between men committing to live together, jointly own property, were still around in late medieval and 16th-century France, the new ‘brothers’ pledged to share “un pain, un vin, et une bourse” – one bread, one wine and one purse. While this was was shaped by a need to legally formalise the status of brothers who jointly inherited a family home and continued to live in it together, and many participants entered such an agreement for practical reasons or at most in recognition of deep friendship. However, as scholar Allan Tulchin argued in 2007, affrèrement provided a means by which homosexual partners could normalise their relationship, noting also that they “frequently testified that they entered into the contract because of their affection for one another”. He also observed that, though sodomy was punishable by death in France at the time, prosecutions were extremely rare, suggesting that homosexual relations were largely tolerated.
Reports about the the Molly House subculture in 18th century England tell of gay marriage ceremonies in back rooms of bars, followed by orgiastic celebrations of the union. Why would weddings have been a feature of this, apparently new, culture, unless relationships between men were already long known and recognised, maybe not by the powers that be, but for sure by the same sex lovers themselves, who were quite often aware of ancient myths and histories in which gay love was honoured and celebrated.
Looking at this historical picture, far from being an innovation, same sex marriage gaining some recognition from the Anglican Church is actually a restoration, a return to noble, ancient principles, and a reclaiming of the sacred nature of love between people of the same sex. The nobility of same sex love was honoured and respected in ancient Greece, and same sex relationships were accepted as entirely normal in pre-Christian Europe. Christianity did not have to become a homophobic monster – there were always alternative voices in the Church to those who preached hellfire against ‘sodomites’, and through the centuries, and still today, the religious life has attracted many caring, kind, gentle men who are drawn to be of service to the world. Sexuality is not a barrier to this kind of service, not a hindrance. Sexuality is not a sin. Pleasure is no crime. It is God-given grace.
At the third annual intertribal Native American/First Nations gay and lesbian conference in Winnipeg in 1990 the identity ‘Two-spirit’ became popular as a term chosen to replace the imposed, non-native words ‘berdache’ and ‘gay’, as a way to express the Native/First Nations’ distinct approach to gender identity, sexual identity and and gender-variance.
“Two-spirited” or “two-spirit” usually indicates a Native person who simultaneously manifests both a masculine and a feminine spirit, which is seen as giving the individual certain spiritual powers. Those who possessed “two spirits” were revered, as most tribes held the belief that the third gender had a strong relationship with “the Creator” because they were able to link the gap between men and women. Thoughtco.com defines Two Spirits as “indigenous members who see through the eyes of more than one gender.” The many indigenous communities have or had their own terms in their own languages for the gender-variant members of their communities and the social and spiritual roles these individuals fulfilled — such as wíŋkte (Lakota, translates as ‘wants to be like a woman’) and nádleehé (Navajo, translates as ‘one who changes’), mixu’ga (Omaha, translates as ‘instructed by the moon’).
“American Indian cultures and societies have had and many presently have a variety of ways in which gender is expressed…. gender has not always been defined in dichotomies: boy/girl, man/woman. American Indian groups have at least six alternative gender styles: women and men, not-men (biological women who assume some aspects of male roles) and not-women (biological men who assume some aspects of female roles), lesbians and gays.
“These not-women and not-men seemed either to puzzle the newly arriving Europeans or in some cases the new immigrants were simply aghast and shocked by them.
“Alternative gender roles were respected and honoured, and believed to be part of the sacred web of life and society…. the judeo-Xian tradition honours the male and female gender roles within the scope of heterosexuality, but alternative sexuality is regarded as sinful and outside of god’s plan.” from ‘Two Spirit People: American Indian Lesbian Women and Gay Men’ By Lester B Brown 1997
Europeans arriving in the Americas from the 16th century onwards were shocked by the acceptance and prevalence of gay sex and of the presence and normality of feminine men and masculine women in the native tribes, many of whom took sacred roles and were held in great esteem. The word some Spanish explorers gave these men/notmen was ‘joyas’ meaning jewels:
Don Pedro Fages was third in command of the 1769-70 Spanish Portolà expedition, first European land exploration of what is now the U.S. state of California – he wrote reports about the many, as he called them, ‘sodomites’ that he saw there:
“I have submitted substantial evidence that those Indian men who, both here and farther inland, are observed in the dress, clothing and character of women – there being two or three such in each village – pass as sodomites by profession (it being confirmed that all these Indians are much addicted to this abominable vice) and permit the heathen to practice the execrable, unnatural abuse of their bodies. They are called joyas, and are held in great esteem.”
Jewels could have been a great word if it had stuck, but the one that did meant Bottoms – the northern Europeans applied the word Berdache to these shamans – a word, not necessarily perjorative, depending on one’s stance, that had Persian roots, had come through French into English, and which implied femininity in a male but actually meant a passive bottom in homosexual sex, a boy kept for sex, a catamite.
Berdache was dropped in the 1990s because of its associations and replaced by the term Two Spirit, but historian Will Roscoe points out that we should note that berdache is “a Persian term, its origins are Eastern, not Western. Nor is it a derogatory term, except to the extent that all terms for nonmarital sexuality in European societies carried a measure of condemnation. It was rarely used with the force of faggot, but more often as a euphemism with a sense of lover or boyfriend.”
So perhaps for some the label Berdache did not carry stigma, but in fact the same positive qualities as we can sense in the Spanish term ‘joyas’.
Reports by explorers from the early 16th century onwards repeatedly referred to the presence of third gender people and their spiritual roles, some even comparing them to the ancient pagan priests of Europe.
Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca’s report of his five-year captivity among the Indian’s of Florida, from 1528 to 1533 states:
“During the time that I was thus among these people I saw a devilish thing, and it is that I saw one man married to another, and these are impotent, effeminate men [amarionados] and they go about dressed as women, and do women’s tasks, and shoot with a bow, and carry great burdens, … and they are huskier than the other men, and taller.”
Captain Laudonniere’s account of four French expeditions into Florida during the years 1562-67 observes:
“There are in all this country many hermaphrodites, which take all the greatest paine and beare the victuals when they goe to warre.”
Juan de Torquemada’s ‘Monarchia Indiana’, which he began in 1609, refers to male Indians of Florida marrying each other. These Natives he calls ‘mariones’ (effeminate men), and says that they dress like and do the work of women. He compares these Indian customs to those of the French and Greeks.
Joseph Francois Lafitau’s Customs of the American Savages, Compared with the Customs of Ancient Times, is based on his own experience as a Jesuit missionary in French Canada (1711-17).
In a section on “Men Who Dress as women” among the Native peoples of the Americas, Lafitau writes:
“If there were women with manly courage who prided themselves upon the profession of warrior, which seems to become men alone, there were also men cowardly enough to live as women. Among the Illinois, among the Sioux, in Louisiana, in Florida, and in Yucatan, there are young men who adopt the garb of women, and keep it all their lives.
“They believe they are honored by debasing themselves to all of women’s occupations; they never marry, they participate in all religious ceremonies, and this profession of an extraordinary life causes them to be regarded as people of a higher order, and above the common man. Would these not be the same peoples as the Asiatic adorers of Cybele, or the Orientals of whom Julius Fermicus speaks, who consecrated priests dressed as women to the Goddess of Phrygia or to Venus Urania, who had an effeminate appearance, painted their faces, and hid their true sex under garments borrowed from the sex whom they wished to counterfeit?”
In another section of the some work Lafitou writes on Des Amities porticufieres, or “special friendships,” among the Natives of America:
“the Athenrosera, or special friendships among young men, which are instituted in almost the same manner from one end of America to the other, are one of the most interesting sides of their customs, since they entail a most curious chapter of Antiquity, and serve to reveal to us what was practiced in that regard, particularly in the Republic of the Cretans and in that of the Spartans.”
Pierre François XavierCharlevoix’s Journal of a Voyage to North America contains a letter this Jesuit explorer and historian wrote in July 1721 concerning the tribes of the Seven Nations, especially the Iroquois, the Illinois, and others of the Louisiana area.
“It must be confessed that effeminacy and lewdness were carried to the greatest excess in those parts; men were seen to wear the dress of women without a blush, and to debase themselves so as to perform those occupations which are most peculiar to the sex, from whence followed a corruption of morals past all expression; it was pretended that this custom came from I know not what principle of religion.”
A fur trader named Edwin T. Denig spent two decades with the Crow Nation in the early 1800s, and wrote that “men who dressed as women and specialized in women’s work were accepted and sometimes honored… Most civilized communities recognize but two genders, the masculine and feminine. But strange to say, these people have a neuter.”
Historian Will Roscoe quotes a Crow elder who says, “We don’t waste people the way white society does. Every person has their gift.”
BOTTOMS – JEWELS – TWO SPIRITS
In Two Spirits: American Indian Lesbian Women and Gay Men, written 1997, Lester B Brown explains how through knowledge of their ancient traditions, “Gay American Indians have a much more benevolent and understanding tradition from which to assert their identity and reaffirm their sacred being” and through this be an crucial example to gay, lesbian, bi and trans people in other cultures too.
“In many American Indian worldviews, the universe is composed of beings of various power and purpose. All are to be honoured and respected as part of the plan of the Great Spirit… Much toleration of individualism in many Indian societies derives from the sacredness of an individual’s personal mission in life.
“By divine ordination, GAIs have a sacred mission to achieve as a group and as individuals…
“Native traditions provide cultural resources for the reevaluation of sexuality and gender relations.
“… the spiritual warrior challenges the existing devaluation of alternative sexuality and understanding of gender roles…
“The sacredness of being teaches the honoring of the present world as a given sacred gift from the Great Spirit, and it is in this present-day world that spiritual warriors must achieve their sacred life tasks… Attempting to recreate the past will only distract us from the future, where our spiritual tasks must have their contribution to the flow of human history. … By taking on the understandings, beliefs, ethics and wisdom of the Indian view of sacredness of being, the GAI can reaffirm their identity, worth and purpose, and seek actively to recreate and contribute to a world that continues to hold them at arms length.
“This interpretation of American Indians as bearers of the Great Spirit’s gifts also implies that GAIs have a responsibility to grant access to such knowledge and wisdom to gays and lesbians of other ethnic groups, whose traditions may not be so favourable…. GAIs can share the gift of sacred being with other gays and lesbians, and with the heterosexual and Judeo-Xian worlds.”
“Modern Two Spirits publicly embrace the mixture of masculine and feminine within them, and there are Two Spirit societies all over North America. Gatherings, including powwows which are open to the public, are held regularly as a way of not only building community, but also of educating non-Natives about the world of the Two Spirit. Today’s Two Spirits are taking on the ceremonial roles of those who came before them, working to facilitate spiritual events in their communities. They also work as activists and healers, and have been instrumental in bringing GLBT health issues to the forefront among the hundreds of Native tribes. By bridging the gap between gender roles and indigenous spirituality, today’s Two Spirits are continuing the sacred work of their ancestors.”
English poet Richard Barnfield (1574-1620), a contemporary of William Shakespeare and possibly the ‘rival poet’ Shakespeare referred to in sonnets addressed to a young man. Barnfield wrote such sonnets too and, in 1594, aged 21, published ‘The Affectionate Shepherd’ – telling the story of Daphnis’ love for Ganymede, which sold well but drew censure because of its homoerotic content. That did not stop him publishing similar content, such as the sonnets at the end of this piece. These works shine a light on the possibility that men who loved men had retained, through the many dark centuries since Christianity had gained domination over people’s religious lives, an awareness of the ancient Greek view of the spiritual potential of gay relationships , or at least were rediscovering it again in the Renaissance period. Throughout the Middle Ages Ganymede had been a term for a young gay man, alongside catamite, the less ‘respectable’ Roman term. Poetry celebrating the love of men for youths was common in Greece, Rome and continued to be written by Christian, Jewish and Muslim poets throughout the Middle Ages.
“Although there is little biographical data concerning Barnfield’s private life, the intensity, apparent sincerity, and frequency with which this theme is expressed leave little doubt but that he was homosexual at least at the time he wrote this poetry as a young man. Several critics have suggested that he was the lover of both Marlowe and Shakespeare, and even the “rival poet” vying for the affections of Shakespeare’s Master W. H. He might just as easily have been the lover of any of the writers within the Sidney circle, particularly Abraham Fraunce.” Rictor Norton http://rictornorton.co.uk/pastor03.htm
THE TEARES OF AN AFFECTIONATE SHEPHEARD SICKE FOR LOVE, OR THE COMPLAINT OF DAPHNIS FOR THE LOVE OF GANIMEDE.
Scarce had the morning starre hid from the light Heavens crimson canopie with stars bespangled, But I began to rue th’ unhappy sight Of that faire boy that had my hart intangled; Cursing the time, the place, the sense, the sin; I came, I saw, I viewd, I slipped in.
If it be sinne to love a sweet-fac’d boy, Whose amber locks trust up in golden tramels Dangle adowne his lovely cheekes with joy, When pearle and flowers his faire haire enamels; If it be sinne to love a lovely lad, Oh then sinne I, for whom my soule is sad.
His ivory-white and alablaster skin Is staind throughout with rare vermillion red, Whose twinckling starrie lights doe never blin To shine on lovely Venus, Beauties bed; But as the lillie and the blushing rose, So white and red on him in order growes.
Upon a time the nymphs bestird them-selves To trie who could his beautie soonest win; But he accounted them but all as elves, Except it were the faire Queene Guendolen: Her he embrac’d, of her was beloved, With plaints he proved, and with teares he moved.
But her an old man had beene sutor too, That in his age began to doate againe; Her would he often pray, and often woo, When through old age enfeebled was his braine: But she before had lov’d a lustie youth, That now was dead, the cause of all her ruth.
And thus it hapned, Death and Cupid met Upon a time at swilling Bacchus house, Where daintie cates upon the boord were set, And goblets full of wine to drinke carouse: Where Love and Death did love the licor so, That out they fall and to the fray they goe.
And having both their quivers at their backe Fild full of arrows; th’ one of fatall steele, The other all of gold; Deaths shaft was black, But Loves was yellow: Fortune turnd her wheele, And from Deaths quiver fell a fatall shaft, That under Cupid by the winde was waft.
And at the same time by ill hap there fell Another arrow out of Cupids quiver, The which was carried by the winde at will, And under Death the amorous shaft did shiver: They being parted, Love tooke up Deaths dart, And Death tooke up Loves arrow for his part.
Thus as they wandred both about the world, At last Death met with one of feeble age: Wherewith he drew a shaft and at him hurld The unknowne arrow with a furious rage, Thinking to strike him dead with Deaths blacke dart; But he, alas, with Love did wound his hart!
This was the doting foole, this was the manThat lov’d faire Guendolena, Queene of Beautie;Shee cannot shake him off, doo what she can,For he hath vowd to her his soules last duety:Making him trim upon the holydaies,And crownes his love with garlands made of baies.
Now doth he stroke his beard, and now againe He wipes the drivel from his filthy chin; Now offers he a kisse, but high Disdaine Will not permit her hart to pity him: Her hart more hard than adamant or steele, Her hart more changeable than Fortunes wheele.
But leave we him in love up to the eares, And tell how Love behav’d himselfe abroad; Who seeing one that mourned still in teares, A young man groaning under Loves great load, Thinking to ease his burden, rid his paines, For men have griefe as long as life remaines.
Alas, the while that unawares he drueThe fatall shaft that Death had dropt before,By which deceit great harme did then insue,Stayning his face with blood and filthy goare:His face, that was to Guendolen more deereThan love of lords, or any lordly peere.
This was that faire and beautifull young man, Whom Guendolena so lamented for; This is that Love whom she doth curse and ban, Because she doth that dismall chaunce abhor: And if it were not for his mothers sake, Even Ganimede himselfe she would forsake.
Oh would shee would forsake my Ganimede ,Whose sugred love is full of sweete delight, Upon whose forehead you may plainely reade Loves pleasure grav’d in yvorie tables bright: In whose faire eye-balls you may clearely see Base Love still staind with foule indignitie.
Oh would to God he would but pitty mee, That love him more than any mortall wight! Then he and I with love would soone agree, That now cannot abide his sutors sight. O would to God, so I might have my fee, My lips were honey, and thy mouth a bee!
Then shouldst thou sucke my sweete and my faire flower, That now is ripe and full of honey-berries; Then would I leade thee to my pleasant bower, Fild full of grapes, of mulberries, and cherries: Then shouldst thou be my waspe or else my bee, I would thy hive, and thou my honey, bee.
I would put amber bracelets on thy wrests, Crownets of pearle about thy naked armes: And when thou sitst at swilling Bacchus feasts My lips with charmes should save thee from all harmes: And when in sleepe thou tookst thy chiefest pleasure, Mine eyes should gaze upon thine eyelids treasure.
And every morne by dawning of the day, When Phœbus riseth with a blushing face, Silvanus chappel-clarkes shall chaunt a lay, And play thee hunts-up in thy resting place: My coote thy chamber, my bosome thy bed Shall be appointed for thy sleepy head.
And when it pleaseth thee to walke abroad, Abroad into the fields to take fresh ayre, The meades with Floras treasure should be strowde, The mantled meaddowes, and the fields so fayre. And by a silver well with golden sands Ile sit me downe, and wash thine yvory hands.
And in the sweltring heate of summer time, I would make cabinets for thee, my love; Sweet-smelling arbours made of eglantine Should be thy shrine, and I would be thy dove. Cool cabinets of fresh greene laurell boughs Should shadow us, ore-set with thicke-set eughes.
Or if thou list to bathe thy naked limbs Within the cristall of a pearle-bright brooke, Paved with dainty pibbles to the brims, Or cleare, wherein thyselfe thyselfe mayst looke; Weele goe to Ladon, whose still trickling noyse Will lull thee fast asleepe amids thy joyes.
Or if thoult goe unto the river side, To angle for the sweet freshwater fish, Arm’d with thy implements that will abide, Thy rod, hooke, line, to take a dainty dish; Thy rods shall be of cane, thy lines of silke, Thy hooks of silver, and thy bayts of milke.
Or if thou lov’st to hear sweet melodie, Or pipe a round upon an oaten reede, Or make thyselfe glad with some myrthfull glee, Or play them musicke whilst thy flocke doth feede. To Pans owne pype Ile helpe my lovely lad, Pans golden pype, which he of Syrinx had.
Or if thou darst to climbe the highest trees For apples, cherries, medlars, peares, or plumbs, Nuts, walnuts, filbeards, chestnuts, cervices, The hoary peach, when snowy winter comes; I have fine orchards full of mellowed frute, Which I will give thee to obtaine my sute.
Not proud Alcynous himselfe can vaunt Of goodlier orchards or of braver trees Than I have planted; yet thou wilt not graunt My simple sute, but like the honey bees Thou suckst the flowre till all the sweet be gone, And loost mee for my coyne till I have none.
Leave Guendolen, sweet hart; though she be faire, Yet is she light; not light in vertue shining, But light in her behaviour, to impaire Her honour in her chastities declining; Trust not her teares, for they can wantonnize, When teares in pearle are trickling from her eyes.
If thou wilt come and dwell with me at home, My sheepcote shall be strowed with new greene rushes: Weele haunt the trembling prickets as they rome About the fields, along the hauthorne bushes; I have a pie-bald curre to hunt the hare, So we will live with daintie forrest fare.
Nay, more than this, I have a garden plot, Wherein there wants nor hearbs, nor roots, nor flowers; Flowers to smell, roots to eate, hearbs for the pot, And dainty shelters when the welkin lowers: Sweet-smelling beds of lillies, and of roses, Which rosemary banks and lavender incloses.
There growes the gilliflowre, the mynt, the dayzie Both red and white, the blue-veynd violet; The purple hyacinth, the spyke to please thee, The scarlet dyde carnation bleeding yet: The sage, the savery, and sweet margerum, Isop, tyme, and eye-bright, good for the blinde and dumbe.
The pinke, the primrose, cowslip and daffodilly, The hare-bell blue, the crimson cullumbine, Sage, lettis, parsley, and the milke-white lilly, The rose and speckled flowre cald sops-in-wine, Fine pretie king-cups, and the yellow bootes, That growes by rivers and by shallow brookes.
And manie thousand moe I cannot name Of hearbs and flowers that in gardens grow, I have for thee, and coneyes that be tame, Young rabbets, white as swan, and blacke as crow; Some speckled here and there with daintie spots: And more I have two mylch and milke-white goates.
All these and more Ile give thee for thy love, If these and more may tyce thy love away: I have a pidgeon-house, in it a dove, Which I love more than mortall tongue can say. And last of all Ile give thee a little lambe To play withall, new weaned from her dam.
But if thou wilt not pittie my complaint, My teares, nor vowes, nor oathes, made to thy beautie: What shall I doo but languish, die, or faint, Since thou dost scorne my teares, and my soules duetie: And teares contemned, vowes and oaths must faile, And where teares cannot, nothing can prevaile.
Compare the love of faire Queene Guendolin With mine, and thou shalt [s]ee how she doth love thee: I love thee for thy qualities divine, But shee doth love another swaine above thee: I love thee for thy gifts, she for hir pleasure; I for thy vertue, she for beauties treasure.
And alwaies, I am sure, it cannot last. But sometime Nature will denie those dimples: Insteed of beautie, when thy blossom’s past, Thy face will be deformed full of wrinckles; Then she that lov’d thee for thy beauties sake, When age drawes on, thy love will soone forsake.
But that I lov’d thee for thy gifts divine, In the December of thy beauties waning, Will still admire with joy those lovely eine, That now behold me with their beauties baning. Though Januarie will never come againe, Yet Aprill yeres will come in showers of raine.
When will my May come, that I may embrace thee? When will the hower be of my soules joying? Why dost thou seeke in mirth still to disgrace mee? Whose mirth’s my health, whose griefe’s my harts annoying: Thy bane my bale, thy blisse my blessednes, Thy ill my hell, thy weale my welfare is.
Thus doo I honour thee that love thee so, And love thee so, that so doo honour thee Much more than anie mortall man doth know, Or can discerne by love or jealozie: But if that thou disdainst my loving ever, Oh happie I, if I had loved never!
Barnfield’s collection of 20 sonnets was published 14 years before those of Shakespeare. Like the bard’s, these poems celebrate the charms of a young man. They are described on allpoetry.com as being “of unusual merit as poetry, and would rank as high in quality as in date of publication if their subjectmatter were not so preposterous.” (sic) Preposterosity is, one presumes, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder! Make your own mind up!
The Stoicks thinke, (and they come neare the truth,) That vertue is the chiefest good of all, The Academicks on Idea call. The Epicures in pleasure spend their youth, The Perrepatetickes iudge felicitie, To be the chiefest good above all other, One man, thinks this; & that conceaves another: So that in one thing very few agree. Let Stoicks have their Vertue if they will, And all the rest their chiefe-supposed good, Let cruel Martialists delight in blood, And Mysers ioy their bags with gold to fill: My chiefest good, my chiefe felicity, Is to be gazing on my loves faire eie.
Sighing, and sadly sitting by my love, He askt the cause of my hearts sorrowing, Coniuring me by heavens eternall King, To tell the cause which me so much did move. Compell’d: (quoth I) to thee will I confesse, Love is the cause; and only love it is That doth deprive me of my heavenly blisse, Love is the paine that doth my heart oppresse. And what is she (quoth he) who thou dos’t love? Looke in this glasse (quoth I) there shalt thou see The perfect forme of my felicitie. When, thinking that it would strange Magique prove, He open’d it: and taking off the cover He straight perceav’d himselfe to be my Lover.
Some talke of Ganymede th’ Idalian Boy And some of faire Adonis make their boast, Some talke of him whom lovely Laeda lost, And some of Ecchoes love that was so coy. They spoke by heere-say, I of perfect truth, They partially commend the persons named, And for them, sweet Encomions have framed: I onely t’him have sacrifiz’d my youth. As for those wonders of antiquitie, And those whom later ages have inioy’d (But ah what hath not cruell death destroide? Death, that envies this worlds felicitie), They were (perhaps) lesse faire then Poets write, But he is fairer then I can endite.
A[h] fairest Ganymede, disdaine me not, Though silly Sheepeheard I, presume to love thee, Though my harsh songs and Sonnets cannot move thee, Yet to thy beauty is my love no blot. Apollo, Iove, and many Gods beside, S’daind not the name of cutry shepheards swains, Nor want we pleasure, though we take some pains, We live contentedly: a thing call’d pride, Which so corrupts the Court and every place (Each place I meane where learning is neglected, And yet of late, even learning’s selfe’s infected), I know not what it meanes, in any case : Wee onely (when Molorchus gins to peepe.) Learne for to folde, and to unfolde our sheepe.
Cherry-lipped Adonis in his snowy shape, Might not compare with his pure ivory white, On whose fair front a poet’s pen might write, Whose rosiate red excels the crimson grape. His love-enticing delicate soft limbs, Are rarely framed t’ intrap poor gazing eyes; His cheeks, the lily and carnation dyes, With lovely tincture which Apollo’s dims. His lips ripe strawberries in nectar wet, His mouth a hive, his tongue a honeycomb, Where muses (like bees) make their mansion. His teeth pure pearl in blushing coral set. Oh how can such a body sin-procuring, Be slow to love, and quick to hate, enduring?
Not Megabaetes, nor Cleonymus, (Of whom great Plutarck makes such mention Praysing their faire with rare inuention) As Ganymede were halfe so beauteous. They onely pleas’d the eies of two great Kings, But all the worlde at my love stands amazed, Nor one that on his Angels face hath gazed, But (ravisht with delight) him Presents brings. Some weaning Lambs, and some a suckling Kyd, Some Nuts, and fil-beards, others Peares & Plums, Another with a milk-white Heyfar comes; As lately AEgons man (Damcaetas) did; But neither he, nor all the Nymphs beside, Can win my Ganymede, with them t’abide.
Ah no; nor I my selfe : though my pure love (Sweete Ganymede) to thee hath still beene pure, And even till my last gaspe shall aie endure, Could ever thy obdurate beuty moue: Then cease oh Goddesse sonne (for sure thou ait, A Goddesse sonne that canst resist desire) Cease thy hard heart, and entertaine loves fire Within thy sacred breast: by Natures art. And as I love thee more then any Creature (Love thee, because thy beautie is divine; Love thee, because my selfe, my soule is thine: Wholie denoted to thy lovelie feature), Even so of all the vowels, I and U Are dearest unto me, as doth ensue.
“Whom grace made children, sin hath now made slaves”
William Drummond (13 December 1585 – 4 December 1649) was a Scottish poet, son of the first laird of Hawthornden in Midlothian, John Drummond and Susannah Fowler, sister of a poet and courtier to James VI of Scotland (who became James I of England), William Fowler. William Drummond studied law in France, but the death of his Father and inheritance of the title liberated him at the age of 24 to focus on his love of philosophy and poetry. His mystic vision yearned for primeval simplicity, a return to a state of innocence prior to the discovery of gold and the invention of sin.
From ‘Urania: Spiritual Poems’ section of The poems of William Drummond of Hawthornden, published 1890s:
IF with such passing beauty, choice delights,
The architect of this great round did frame This palace visible, which world we name, Yet silly mansion but of mortal wights; How many wonders, what amazing lights, Must that triumphing seat of glory claim, Which doth transcend all this great All’s high heights,
Of whose bright sun ours here is but a beam!
O blest abode! O happy dwelling-place
Where visibly th’ Invisible doth reign! Blest people, who do see true beauty’s face, With whose dark shadows he but earth doth deign, All joy is but annoy, all concord strife, Match’d with your endless bliss and happy life.
LOVE which is here a care.
That wit and will doth mar,
Uncertain truce, and a most certain war; A shrill tempestuous wind, Which doth disturb the mind, And, like wild waves, our designs all commove; Among those sprights above Which see their Maker’s face, It a contentment is, a quiet peace,
A pleasure void of grief, a constant rest,
Eternal joy which nothing can molest.
WHAT hapless hap had I now to be born In these unhappy times, and dying days, Of this else-doating world, when good decays, Love is quench’d forth, and virtue held a scorn; When such are only priz’d, by wretched ways Who with a golden fleece them can adorn, When avarice and lust are counted praise, And noble minds live orphan-like forlorn?
Why was not I into that golden age,
When gold yet was not known, and those black arts, By which base mortals vilely play their parts, And stain with horrid acts earth’s stately stage? Then to have been, heaven! it had been my bliss; But bless me now, and take me soon from this.
THRICE happy he, who by some shady grove, Far from the clamorous world doth live his own, Though solitare, yet who is not alone, But doth converse with that eternal love. O how more sweet is birds’ harmonious moan, Or the soft sobbings of the widow’d dove, Than those smooth whisp’rings near a prince’s throne, Which good make doubtful, do the evil approve! O how more sweet is zephyr’s wholesome breath, And sighs perfum’d, which do the flowers unfold, Than that applause vain honour doth bequeath! How sweet are streams to poison drunk in gold! The world is full of horrors, falsehoods, slights; Woods’ silent shades have only true lights.
WHY, worldlings, do ye trust frail honour’s dreams, And lean to gilded glories which decay? Why do ye toil to registrate your names In icy columns, which soon melt away? True honour is not here; that place it claims, Where black-brow’d night doth not exile the day, Nor no far-shining lamp dives in the sea, But an eternal sun spreads lasting beams.
William Drummond had a very frank and affectionate correspondence with prominent poet Michael Drayton (1563-1631):
“My dear noble Drummond,” wrote Drayton in a letter dated London, November 9, 1618, “your letters were as welcome to me as if they had come from my mistress; which I think is one of the fairest and worthiest living” [the good Drayton was then fifty-five years old]. “Little did of yours, you think how oft that noble friend Sir William Alexander (that man of men), and I have remembered you before we trafficked in friendship. Love me as much as you can, and so I will you: I can never hear of you too oft, and I will ever mention you with much respect of your deserved worth.” “Joseph Davis is in love with you,” he adds in a postscript. Drummond, not to be outdone in politeness, replies on the 20th of December: “If my letters were so welcome to you, what may you think yours were to me, which must be so much more welcome in that the conquest I make is more than that of yours? They who by some strange means have had conference with some of the old heroes, can only judge that delight I had in reading them; for they were to me as if they had come from Virgil, Ovid, or the Father of our sonnets, Petrarch.”
From The poems of William Drummond of Hawthornden, published 1890s
The Urania poems were included in a collection published in 1623 called Flowers of Sion. They reveal his repugnance of the harsh bigotry found in Scottish Calvinism. “He was no lover of priestcraft,” says the editor of the 1890s book. “The reader will not fail to be struck by the freedom from narrow dogma which characterises Flowers of Sion especially if he regard the time and place its production. It appeals, upon the whole, to Christians of all shades of opinion; more particularly, perhaps, to Christians of a meta- physical turn; and much of it should appeal to non-Christians also. It treats of the sublimest themes – divine love and mercy, the beauty of virtue, the vanity of earthly things, the exaltation of the soul to God. One theme there is which, more than all the rest, kindles the poet’s enthusiasm; and a considerable portion of the book is, in fact, a sermon, in sweet and fervid verse, upon the text, ‘God is Love.'”
In the 19th century Uranian would become the name chosen by poets and philosophers seeking to give same sex love and gender fluidity a noble and mythical history, relating to Aphrodite Urania, the Goddess of same sex relationships.
In his work Cypress Grove Drummond muses on acceptance of death and the metaphysical nature of life. He is one of the first Europeans of modern times to envision the birth of Cosmic Consciousness:
“That time doth approach… in which the dead shall live, and the living be changed, and of all actions the guerdon is at hand: then shall there be an end without an end, time shall finish, and place shall be altered, motion yielding unto rest, and another world of an age eternal and unchangeable shall arise.”
This vision would be echoed in the mystical Uranian writings of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard Bucke, William James and others in the late 19th and early 20th century, all of whom saw same sex love as part of the natural divine order, and a doorway to mystical vision, known as ‘cosmic consciousness.’
From Urania:
“O love and pity! ill known of these times, O love and pity! careful of our bliss,
O goodness! with the heinous acts and crimes
Of this black age that almost vanquish’d is, Make this excessive ardour of thy love So warm our coldness, so our lives renew, That we from sin, sin may from us remove, Wit may our will, faith may our wit subdue.
Let thy pure love burn up all mortal lust, That band of ills which thralls our better part, And fondly makes us worship fleshly dust, Instead of thee, in temple of our heart.
Grant, when at last the spright shall leave tomb,
This loathsome shop of sin, and mansion blind, And (call’d) before thy royal seat doth come, It may a saviour, not a judge, thee find.
prophets such as Whitman, Carpenter, Blavatsky, Bucke and James –
the Cosmic Human soon to be born
a race no longer lost, confused, forlorn –
reunited with the Spirit of Life
of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Love
with the Heavenly Son and the Divine Daughter
moving on from the Age of Slaughter
into a time of Healing, Comfort and Light
the end of humanity’s long dark night.
But in the 20th century the shadow grew
new weapons to prevent us breaking through
the illusions and delusions in the mind
to keep us divided and frightened.
21st century is the time to renew
the human contract with the earth,
to recognise the wisdom of sage and crone
to finally bring humanity home.
Our ancestors’ voices remind us.
“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.”
–Richard Bucke, (1837-1902) from his book, Cosmic Consciousness
“It is an occult law moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as ‘separateness’ and the nearest approach to that selfish state which the laws of life permit is in the intent or motive.”
“The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards.” ―Helena Blavatsky (1831-91), co-founder of the Theosophical Society
“The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all, that manifests itself in and through all. This spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all is what I call God. I care not what term you may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence, the Over-Soul, Omnipotence, or whatever term may be most convenient, so long as we are agreed in regard to the great central fact itself. God then fills the universe alone, so that all is from Him and in Him, and there is nothing is outside. He is the life of our life, and our very life itself. We are partakers of the life of God; and though we differ from Him in that we are individualised spirits, while He is the infinite Spirit, including us, as well as all else beside, yet in essence the life of God and the life man are identically the same, and so are one. They differ not in essence or quality; they differ in degree.
“The great central fact in human life is the coming into a conscious vital realisation of our oneness with this Infinite Life, and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow. In just the degree that we come into a conscious realisation of our oneness with the Infinite Life, and open ourselves to this divine inflow, do we actualise in ourselves the qualities and powers of the Infinite Life, do we make ourselves channels through which the Infinite Intelligence and Power can work. In just the degree in which you realise your oneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will exchange dis-ease for ease, inharmony for harmony, suffering and pain for abounding health and strength. To recognise our own divinity, and our intimate relation to the Universal, is to attach the belts of our machinery to the power-house of the Universe. One need remain in hell no longer than one chooses to; we can rise to any heaven we ourselves choose; and when we choose so to rise, all the higher powers of the Universe combine to help us heavenward.”
Ralph Waldo TRINE (1866-1958) excerpted from In Tune with the Infinite
“Orthodox scholars say: ‘In the heathen classics you find no consciousness of sin.’ It is very true – God be thanked for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of ‘enmity against God’ and didn’t sit down and whine and groan against non-existent evil.”
Theodore Parker (August 24, 1810 – May 10, 1860) American transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church.
“There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away.
“If religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that we ought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, this enthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. It ought to mean nothing short of his new reach of freedom for us, with the struggle over, the keynote sounding in our ears, and everlasting possession spread before our eyes.”
WILLIAM JAMES (1842-1910) VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? As everyone is immortal.
I know it is wonderful – but my eyesight is equally wonderful, and how I was conceived in my mother’s womb is equally wonderful.
And passed from a babe, in a creeping trance
of a couple of summers and winters, to articulate and walk –
all this is equally wonderful.
And that my soul embraces you this hour,
and we affect each other without seeing each other,
and never perhaps to see each other, is every bit as wonderful.
And that I can think of such thoughts as these is just as wonderful;
And that I can remind you,
and you think them and know them to be true
is equally wonderful.
WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)
“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 partin its travail and throes of birth.”
-Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), gay philosopher and mystic
These Westerners were breaking through the mental and emotional chains imposed by religions and legal codes to a level of awareness that was very familiar to those people of the world who had not lost their innate connection to spirit…
“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the centre of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this centre is really everywhere, it is within each of us.”
Black Elk, Lakota Medicine Man 1863-1950
Wisdom traditions from every region of planet Earth teach of the integral relationship between humanity and nature, they offer knowledge and techniques to aid us in understanding and experiencing that innate, natural, state of affairs. They reveal to us that human consciousness is itself an intricate, interdependent, manifestation that is intimately connected to nature’s elemental forces. They show us that planet Earth is ailing because humanity is ailing. We have forgotten our place in the grand scheme of things, largely as a result of two forces – monotheistic religion, which separated out humanity from god and divides the world into good and evil, and science, which dissects material reality and discovers miraculous powers but also dissolves any sense of oneness or belonging:
Nearly 2000 years ago the philosopher Plutarch (46-120 CE) observed: “In general, the person who looks for what’s reasonable does away with what’s wonderful.”
The modern mythology underpinning the collective global culture is dominated by the materialist, scientific paradigm – which makes no effort to open our minds to the wonder and mystery of our own consciousness. It literally trains us from the moment we are self-aware to believe our individuality is all we are, that we look out at a hostile world, that life is a competition. This is a complete reversal of the wisdom taught for thousands of years across the planet, and it has resulted in a world where people feel alienated, where more resources are poured into war machines than into solving poverty and hunger, than into dealing with the rapidly mounting issues facing the world.
The deep belief in materiality
has driven humanity to insanity –
we have to gain a sense of conscious unity
in order to realise our innate divinity.
The tale of conflict and woe,
that divides the world into friend and foe,
is the tale that has to go.
Competition keeps us in the head,
co-operation brings us into the heart,
we have to learn to think from the heart instead
to stop ourselves pulling apart.
The mind is there to question and analyse
and if we’re lucky over time become wise,
but in the heart, soul wisdom can always be found,
through the heart we tune into the vibrations around.
It’s through accepting and loving all beings
and letting intuition be our guide,
that humanity will evolve to a new level,
discovering the cosmic senses inside.
We are more than the body, and more than the mind,
everyone benefits, when we choose to be kind.
Transcend the body, transcend the mind –
there’s a multiverse of consciousness waiting for us to find.
From The Return of the Mother by Andrew Harvey (published 1995)
“The essential message of the Divine Mother to us can be summed up… in the following Ten Sacred Suggestions… suggestions, and not commands or commandments, because the Mother does not issue commands. At all moments in our relation to her, we are left free – free to rise through her grace into our own human divinity and take the journey into her love, or free to deny her and her laws and destroy ourselves. Not even the Mother can help us if we do not wish to be saved; not even the Mother can help us if we turn from her help.”
I am the Mother. I am both transcendent and immanent, source and all that streams from it. I am one with all things in creation and one in boundless light within and beyond it. Adore me.
Adore every being and thing, from the whale to the ladybird, as life of my life. I am appearing in everything as everything.
Honour yourself humbly as my divine child, and see, know and celebrate all other beings as my divine children. Whatever you do to or for anyone, you do to or for me.
See through constant practice of adoration that nature is the sacred body of my sacred light, and do everything at al times to honour its laws that are my laws and to protect if from destruction. I and you and nature are are one love, one glory; protecting nature is protecting yourselves.
Dissolve forever all schisms and separations between sects and religions. Whatever you adore is a face of me, and everyone is on his or her own unique path. Know that there are as many paths as there are people.
Dissolve forever through repeated holy inner experience of my unity all barriers between what has been called “sacred” and what has been called “profane.” Know the whole of life as my feast. Realize ordinary life as an unbroken flow of normal miracle.
End all hatred of the body, all guilt and sexual shame, and discover and celebrate my sacred Eros in all its ecstatic connections and revelations. Preserve its purity and power, in my name, with truth and fidelity and mutual honor.
Unlearn all the “religious” propaganda that tries to tell you that you need intermediaries in your relationship with me. I can be contacted by anyone, anywhere, at any time and in any circumstance, simply by saying my name, how- ever you imagine it. No intermediaries-no gurus, priests, “experts”-are ever needed. You and I are always, already, one.
Do not make of my worship another dogma, another mind-prison. Remember always there is no “Mother” without the “Father,” no “Goddess” without “God.” 1 do not want a new religion in my name; I want the whole of experience on the earth to become holy and integrated in love. I want the return of harmony and sacred peace and balance, the union of the sacred marriage at the greatest depth, and in everyone, of “masculine” and “feminine,” “earth” and “heaven,” body and soul, heart and intellect, prayer and action. Men are as much my children as women; the wound of the loss of the Mother is felt by women as well as men. Any separatist or prejudiced or one-sided attempt to worship me worships only a distorted image of me. Dare to know me in my full majesty and all-encompassing humility, and know that there is never any end to the journey into me and that the conditions for that journey are ever-deepening faith, radical trust, and radical humility.
If you trust and love me, put your trust and love into action in every aspect of your life-emotional, sexual, spiritual, social, political – with my passion, my clarity, my unsentimental practicality. Know that my revelation is a revolution, a revolution that demands calmly a transformation of all the terms and conditions of life on earth. Establish justice for all in my world, in my name, and in my spirit of all-embracing, inexhaustible compassion. Let no one be poor, or discriminated against; may all sentient beings everywhere be cherished and safe and protected from harm by law and by love. Turn to me now and I will fill you with all the grace, strength, courage, and pas- sion you need to transform the world at every level into a living mirror of my truth, my love, and my justice. If you truly love me, change everything for me.
Anal sex became the great taboo, the worst sin, the unmentionable sin in the Western world under the influence of Christianity, but in the more mystical lands of the East, where the spiritual potential of bodily pleasure retained the high, sacred status it had once held in pagan times in the Middle East and Europe, the power of this chakra point was celebrated until modern times.
The Indian Chakra system has been eagerly embraced in the New Age West, and in it the base chakra is associated with the perineum, but rarely discussed is the power that can be accessed through stimulation of the chakra -from the inside…
“The anus (guda or payu) is one of the most important chakras (‘centres of psychic energy’) in the human body, its significance repeatedly emphasised in the tantric texts with what might be called homosexual overtones. In fact, anal intercourse or adhorata (literally, ‘under love’), either between males or between males and females, was one of the main expedients for using the potential of the rectal center, whose animation was believed to energize the artistic, poetic and mystical faculties. Some medieval Indian writers regarded the practice as quite common and in no way perverse, but other claimed that men who engaged in it with other men were reborn as men incapable of begetting… concentration on the anus, introduction of wooden plugs into the rectum during mediation, digital insertion in ano during certain rituals, constriction of the rectal sphincter, and stimulation of the region during certain mystical poses all give maximum psychic power. Such beliefs are common yogic disciplines based on the belief in a close correspondence between the anus and certain higher centers of the subtle body. With such beliefs anal intercourse would assume mystical meaning, and male homosexuality, at least under certain conditions, was tolerated if not encouraged. Even when regarded with some hostility, it was usually not considered with as great a hostility as some other sexual activities. Kautilya, who wrote his Arthasatra in the fourth century BC, fined male participants in homosexual activity between 48 and 94 panas, and women who engaged in sexual relations with each other were fined 12 to 24 panas, much less than participants in certain heterosexual activities were fined.” Vern L Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History. 1976.
The great eastern civilisations in India, China and Japan embraced same sex love and gender variance as part of the divine order, in sharp contrast to what developed in the West from the late Roman Empire onwards, where transgender priesthoods were wiped out and homosexual men threatened with death penalties, from the law enacted by the Emperor Justinian in 533 until late 18th century in France and 1861 in England. The death penalty was first legislated into being in England by Henry VIII in 1533, exactly 1000 years after Justinian’s decree.
Several Hindu scriptures explicitly describe people with a homosexual nature. Among these, the Narada-smriti (a first-century B.C. text of religious codes attributed to the sage Narada) states that homosexuality is not curable, that homosexuals are exempted from the duty to procreate. The Sushruta Samhita(a 600 B.C. medical text compiled by the sage Sushruta) says that such tendencies are in-born and the Kama Sutra(a third-century A.D. text on the art of lovemaking by the sage Vatsyayana) also refers to homosexual acts and third-gender people – tritiya–prakriti– and describes the svairini (independent woman) who engages in aggressive lovemaking with other women. Other terms for lesbians and women who are either masculine or impotent with men in the Hindu scriptures includenastriya, stripumsa, shandhi. Similarly, bisexuals (kamior paksha), transgenders (shandha) and intersex types (nisarga, vakri, trnaputrika, etc.) are all present in Hindu scriptures.
The texts go into some detail, for example the Sushruta Samhita lists five types of men who are impotent with women and known as kliba: the asekya(who swallows the semen of other men), the saugandhika(who smells the genitals or pheromones of other men), thekumbhika(who takes the passive role in anal sex), theirshyaka(the voyeur) and the shandha(who has the qualities and behavior of a woman). Sushruta states that the first four types of kliba have semen and male characteristics whereas the fifth (shandha) is completely devoid of these. Furthermore, all of the first four become aroused only by “sucking the genitals and drinking the semen of other men.”
In Indian culture gay/trans/thirdgender people were considered to have supernatural powers, as had been also the case in pagan Europe. Revered astrological texts such as the Brihat Jataka and Brihat Samhita mention planetary alignments at the time of conception that indicate a third-gender birth. Such births are associated with the three napumsa planets (Mercury, Saturn and Ketu) and indicate intelligence, mastery of the arts and sciences, detachment from family life, and clairvoyant abilities.
Carrying a combination of male and female spirit queer people were seen in India in pre-British times as being closer to the divine ideal, as symbolised by the depiction of Shiva Ardhanisvara, whose name means “The Lord whose half is a woman”. This form of Shiva represents the “totality that lies beyond duality”, and is associated with communication between mortals and gods and between men and women. French historian Alain Danielou said that “The hermaphrodite, the homosexual and the transvestite have a symbolic value and are considered privileged beings, images of the Ardhararishvara.”
The British criminalised homosexual behavior, cross-dressing and castration in India in 1860, educating the population to view homosexual behavior as unnatural, perverted, demonic, a mental illness etc, attitudes that have been slow to shift. The British wanted to wipe out the third-gender priesthoods, but the hijra have survived, and with the rise of LGBTQ awareness and human rights in India are even beginning to regain recognition of their holy status. [https://www.sapiens.org/biology/hijra-india-third-gender/]
The iceberg is starting to melt, but there is a long way to go. The sacredness of same sex love and gender variance, even of ANAL SEX itself await our reclamation.
Queer Spirit Festival: RECLAIMING QUEER NATURE 17-21 August 2023 www.queerspirit.net
There was a muchacha who lived near my house, La gente del pueblo talked about her being una de las otras, “of the Others”.
They said that for six months she was a woman who had a vagina that bled once a month, and that for the other six months she was a man, had a penis and she peed standing up. They called her half and half, ‘mita y mita’, neither one nor theother but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted. But there is a magic aspect in abnormality and so-called deformity.
Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures’ magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift. There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender.
What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within…
For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior. She goes against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality. Being lesbian and raised Catholic, indoctrinated as straight, I made the choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent). It is an interesting path, one that continually slips in and out of the white, the Catholic, the Mexican, the indigenous, the instincts. In and out of my head. It makes for loqueria, the crazies. It is a path of knowledge, one of knowing (and of learning) the history of oppression of our raza. It is a way of balancing, of mitigating duality.
“The year 1987 was also a pivotal one for queer Chicanxs, marked by the publication of Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking Borderlands/La Fronterathat gave us an intersectional analysis of the “borders” between cultures, genders, and sexualities. It was against her own Chicano community’s sexism and homophobia that Anzaldúa asserted her determination “to stand and claim my space.” In her “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” she declared: “I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue—my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice.” In doing so she helped to open spaces for other queer Chicanxs. Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, for example, was published in 1991, and in 1995 Galería de la Raza hosted Mi corazón me dió un salto: A Queer Raza Exhibition.“
We are living in a false reality, a fake dream of separation, competition and scarcity. This dream has been imposed and its days are ending. In Britain the accelerating breakdown of the unfair, unequal, manipulative political and economic system is the fake dream breaking down. At the same time, more people are waking up to our “overinvolvement in the material world and a complete lack of understanding of the nonphysical world that exists all around you, so there will be a reprioritising of what comes first in life. People will stand up, once they have lost everything, who had never thought of standing up when they owned everything. People will awaken to the incredible potential of themselves.“
It is time to realise that all the crises affecting us are the result of living in a falseself philosophical belief system. True Self is being born: connected to nature, motivated by love, aware of oneness and interdependence, of eternity found in the here and now.
“Darkness grows in falseself lands. This is not a coincidence. Those of us who live there live in a time-bomb, in a monstrously climaxing karmic behemoth, live in a violent dinosaurian genetic fate. Tyrannosaur Rex is a 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.
“We have been deceived! Caught in a mythological tyranny, in a web of falseself perversions, in a maze of deceptional violence, in a world of twisted words, cut off at the roots by shadows, trapped within spells of the word-masters. We have forgotten. We became thought-slaves.” Visionary Love, by Mitch Walker (1980)
‘The ultimate tyranny in a society is not control by martial law. It is control by the psychological manipulation of consciousness, through which reality is defined so that those who exist within it do not even realise that there is something outside of where they exist………. You have been controlled like sheep by those who think they own you….. You have been deprived of knowledge by frequency control…… Consciousness must change. This is part of the Divine Plan, and this opportunity and setup are not going to be missed. There has been an overinvolvement in the material world and a complete lack of understanding of the nonphysical world that exists all around you, so there will be a reprioritising of what comes first in life. People will stand up, once they have lost everything, who had never thought of standing up when they owned everything. People will awaken to the incredible potential of themselves.’
Barbara Marciniak, Bringers of the Dawn
“You have been controlled like sheep By those who think they own you You have been deprived of knowledge By freakquency control!
“Could you believe in physical immortality? Interdimensional love and truth and simplicity!” Nina Hagen, Frequenzkontrolle
“Gay shamanism is work in such times, work in the mode of death, work with the dying, death of oneself. Delightful communal Self realisation is the instantly real resurrection. Sorcerous faggot fighter is a menace to society, is a dangerous flaming phoenix, a glowingly rounded rebirth function, an extra-ordinary healing tool, a Rainbow-bridging eros-tool. Gay realisation is sorely needed life-light now. Concentrated eros, focussed 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.” Visionary Love, Mitch Walker
ONENESS STARTS WITHIN
AND WHEN ONENESS BECOMES THE GOAL
A NEW AGE OF COMPASSION AND UNDERSTANDING WILL BEGIN
The new British Prime Minister Liz Truss looked pretty scared out of her wits as the message contained in the words she was reading, at St Paul’s Cathedral during the memorial service for Queen Elizabeth II, sank in.
She read from the New Testament, Romans 14, verses 7 to 12.
For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.
You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister? Or why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. It is written:
“‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord, ‘every knee will bow before me; every tongue will acknowledge God.’”
So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.
These are words, translated from their original language, that have been used over the centuries to keep people living in fear, to establish and maintain a collective delusion that God is exclusively a frightening Father who decides our fates and judges our decisions, who demands our obeisance, and who is accessible only through Jesus Christ, as presented by the Churches.
Yet this text could be ‘decolonised’ from its patriarchal agenda into a source of spiritual epiphany. Instead of engendering fear, as surely was intended, this passage, in a mystic’s hands, can become one of joy. On a positive note, the passage asks why people judge each other, and hold each other in contempt – hopefully this struck home to our new Prime Minister, whose Tory party has a long record of doing just that.
To my mystic’s mind the underlying message in these verses is not really about fear and judgement, but points towards ONENESS and INTERDEPENDENCE.
The gender of that Oneness is not exclusively MALE, and instead of the loaded LORD word I would say:
‘we live for the Spirit.. we die for the Spirit… we belong to the Spirit… and for this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that we might all be able to become One with both the dead and the living.
‘Each of us is part of the Oneness, is the Oneness, and there is nothing else to answer to, but ourselves.’
COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS (becoming aware of our Oneness with all life) is a natural stage in humanity’s growth, one that has been honoured in many cultures under various names, but which under Christianity became the exclusive property of Jesus Christ. Churches and doctrines were developed to impose this totalitarian belief that only Jesus could be the Son of God, condemning those who saw things differently as heretics, devil-worshippers or mad.
Cosmic Consciousness – Christ Consciousness – Krishna Consciousness – Nirvana: all refer to the state of coming into Oneness with Life Itself and its deepest nature Love, it is becoming aware of and attuned to the interplay of subtle and causal energies that are seen in Hinduism as the dance of Shiva, to Native Americans as the Great Spirit, and were known in pagan Europe as the Great Mother. A mystic realises that God is not something separate from us, God is what makes us all One – the union of spirit and matter, consciousness and the body is what makes us into Gods, as we grow into the Cosmic, Christ Conscious Self.
The Western World built a Tower of Power, based on the myth of a Big Daddy in charge, bossing us around and condemning us to suffering – and lost touch with the spiritual presence of the Eternal Mother, through whose compassion and comfort humanity feels and knows its Oneness. Queen Elizabeth II was an example of the Mother presence through her power to touch so many people’s hearts and lives around the world. Now that she has returned to spirit, her regal love can still touch, inspire and heal us. She can be a portal to the Divine, and bring us into right relation with the world, the relation based on kindness, compassion, generosity and love.
As the Tower of Power crumbles and collapses, the eternal presence of compassion and love will continue to grow, and long outlast mankind’s destructive greed. Love is the lasting reality of our existence. However, currently we live with the divine irony of a female Prime Minister delivering these patriarchal words of enslavement… symbolising how truly trussed up society is, and struggling to progress forwards.
IF ONLY WE COULD WAKE UP TRUSS, GET HER ON THE COSMIC BUS!
LET’S END THE DOMINATION OF THE PATRIARCHY AND SET HUMANITY FREE!
Chesterton once said that, because they take themselves lightly, angels can fly. One sees so many faces dulled by a seriousness which, if it were born of grief, would be understandable. But the kind of seriousness which drags man down to the earth and kills the life of the spirit is not the child of sorrow but of a sort of playacting in which the player is deceived into identifying himself with his part. There is a seriousness in the play of children, but even this is different, for the child is aware that it is only playing and its seriousness is an indirect form of fun. But this seriousness becomes a vice in the adult, because he makes a religion of the game, so identifying himself with his part of position in life that he fears to lose it. This is especially so when the unenlightened man attains to any degree of responsibility; he develops a heaviness of touch, a lack of abandon, a stiffness which indicates that he is using his dignity as stilts to keep his head above adversity. His trouble is that instead of playing his part, his part plays him and makes him the laughingstock of all who see through his guise.
Alan Watts
The message of the Eastern wisdom is that the forms of life are maya and therefore profoundly lacking in seriousness from the viewpoint of reality. For the world of form and illusion which the majority take to be the real world is none other than the play of the Spirit, or, as the Hindus have called it, the Dance of Shiva. He is enlightened who joins in this play knowing it as play, for man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. Thus man only becomes man when he loses the gods’ sense of levity. For the gods (or buddhas, or what you will) are simply our own innermost essence, and this could shatter the universe to nothingness in a moment if it willed. But it does not, and it keeps the worlds moving for the divine purpose of play, because, like a musician, it is a creator and delights in the fashioning of a shythm and a melody. To play with it is therefore not a duty but a joy, and he who does not see it as a joy can neither do it nor understand it.
Dear Friends and Followers of the Rainbow Messenger blog! Thank you for your interest and support! May I ask you to also check out my new blog page on Medium.com – I noticed that there was a gap in the conversation there when it came to queer spiritual matters, so I hope to in some part fill that!
‘The division of gender and sexuality into neatly defined and labelled boxes by the new scientific kids on the block, psychology and sociology, from the late 19th century onwards has never sat well with some gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. There have always been queer voices in the west who objected to the limitations of an identity based on sexual attraction, and saw the commonality of gay men, lesbians and transgender people as stemming from our spiritual nature and history.
‘Some have viewed all LGBTQ+ people as part of a ‘third-gender’ that stands apart from, sees life from a different perspective to that experienced in the binary world of heterosexual men and women, and that brings about a natural compassion and aptitude for spiritual service to the community. As we gradually decolonise our understanding of gender and sexuality, many examples from around the world confirm this association…’
Queer Spirituality is the movement of LGBTQ+ people taking matters of faith into our own hands, making way for the discovery of the innate, magical flow of the divine gifts of the Soul. It is queer people finding our own ways to commune with and celebrate the Mystery behind all Creation, however we perceive that, and reclaiming our own nature-based, body-positive, spirituality after centuries of suppression.
It is queers opening the doors to freedom of self-expression, learning how we mould our own reality and chart our own path in life through our beliefs and attitudes, opening the heart to unconditional love and compassion, celebrating the the ecstatic and the erotic aspects of life and the divinity to be found in nature, each other and all existence…
Views, comments, shares and blog page followers sought!
“The material world is all feminine. The feminine energy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men are of the feminine energy. We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything is feminine energy. The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.” ― Zeena Schreckhttps://www.zeenaschreck.com/
Mystics of the world throughout time have often declared that the same.
Nipples on men’s bodies are there to remind us that Life emerges from the feminine aspect of God, the Divine Mother.
Life on earth began in the Oceans, the great womb of the Earth Mother, and only evolved the penis once it moved onto land.
Ancient cultures honoured this truth through their mythologies of Mother Goddesses and her lovers and sons, Horned Gods who roamed the land, channelling the sexually charged male aspect of the earth spirit.
DIonysus
Horned God Dionysus/Bacchus visited Cybele, the Mother of the Gods in Anatolia, to learn the Mysteries and went on to teach humanity liberating ecstatic rites, involving intoxication, gender-fluidity, sexuality and dance that removed social constraints and inhibitions, liberated the ego to enjoy the primal, animal self – and also, over time, as the Mysteries of Dionysus developed, the mystical, transcendent Self. Also practised by the wild, frenzied, erotic rituals of Cybele’s priestly class, the Gallae, and other Goddess worshippers, this kind of liberating behaviour attracted the ‘underclasses’, who could forget their life situation for a while, and it really bothered and threatened the elite, who feared disorder in society. Bacchic rites were banned in the Roman Empire in 186 BCE, but continued in secret for centuries, leaving an indelible imprint on the collective consciousness. Roman writer Livy recorded that among the many revellers attracted to bacchanalian orgiastic rites were “men most like women.”
Horned God Pan brought the music to these parties and deepened the connection to both nature and to sexuality. Christian Church Father Augustine said of the flamboyant and loud Gallae priests of the Great Mother of the Roman Empire, Cybele (who castrated themselves to be like Attis, her lover): “They are the sons of the earth. The Earth is their mother.”https://rainbowmessenger.blog/2019/02/07/cybele-attis-and-the-gallae/
HINDUISM honours the feminine nature of the divine, shakti, equally with the masculine, shiva – while he represents the Self, the sense of I Am, shakti is the presence of the divine in all material Creation, including our bodies. An ultimate symbol for the divine in Hinduism is SHIVA ARDHANISHVARA, who is depicted as one side male, one side female.
Zulu Sangoma and High Sanusi Credo Mutwa explains, in the YouTube video below, the African wisdom that we each have inside us a warrior mind (which is the male god, the rational individualised sense of self), and the mother mind (which we all share as the portal to collective consciousness, which reveals our oneness with all life). He expresses in this video the simplicity of how we can know the Mother, saying “We must awaken the mother mind within us. We must feel what is going on in the world. We mustn’t just listen to newspapers. We must ourselves, feel.”
“She [The Goddess] is the body, and the body is sacred … Womb, breast, belly, mouth, vagina, penis, bone, and blood — no part of the body is unclean, no aspect of the life processes is stained by the concept of sin. Birth, death, and decay are equally sacred parts of the cycle. Whether we are eating, sleeping, or making love or eliminating body wastes, we are manifesting the Goddess.” Starhawk, The Spiral Dance 1979
“’Masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are descriptions of experience, not the experience itself…. ‘The map is not the territory’ as philosopher Gregory Bateson said. We end up with a neo-Manichean split if we’re not careful. The basic premise is that we are all, men and women alike, both male and female, biogenetically as well as psychologically.” From Conscious Femininity byMarion Woodman 1993
“…the androgyne may be the archetype that is struggling to emerge in our culture. Androgyny is not unisex, where male and female lose their boundaries and mush together. Magnetic poles must be differentiated if they are to attract each other.” From Conscious Femininity by Marion Woodman 1993
Science essentially, though non-mystically, says the same: “Basically, males and females are all built from the same genetic blueprint, then develop in slightly different directions in utero and particularly after we hit puberty.” Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. https://www.livescience.com/32467-why-do-men-have-nipples.html
Science does not study the role of pleasure in human evolution, for pleasure is a subjective experience that cannot be measured. But another indication that male nipples are an indication of the feminine inside/underlying the masculine is the pleasure that (some) men get from them. Sensuality and pleasure are often regarded superficially in the modern world, but once they were seen as the gifts of the Goddess, full of sacred potential to enliven and awaken our divine souls: https://rainbowmessenger.blog/2021/07/11/pleasure/
Science tends to call male nipples a ‘vestigial’ aspect that evolution has not bothered to remove yet, while accepting they have a (minor) function as an erogenous zone. FROM A MYSTIC’S VIEWPOINT men have nipples to help get them in touch with their inner feminine, with the goddess in all things, the Mother Creatrix, so that men, with all their power and strength, might remember to revere and honour the feminine aspect of life. But men forgot what their nipples were for, lost touch with how to use them to awaken the inner (feminine) senses, forgot that the Goddess gives birth to life and foolishly fell into directly opposite belief – that woman was born from man. This insane and impossible belief has twisted life on earth into a form of suffering and inequality that is leading to the destruction of the physical world we live on.
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.
“Jung recognised soul. He talked the soul in a man, the anima. And he recognised the spiritual dimension of dream images that connects a person to what he called the Self. The Self is the God-image within, like the golden ball in fairy tales. That golden ball takes you where you need to be led in order to find all the parts of yourself. Your goal is not perfection (which is a very one-sided attitude toward life) but your unique totality. During the process you many not know what you’re doing, but as you look back you see that this unknown dream-maker has been taking you through a circuitous route to find your totality.
“I think that the situation of our planet, our Mother Earth – the earthquakes, overpopulation, the destruction of the rain forests – are perils forcing us to a new consciousness of what matter is. It’s not just black nothingness, opaque. There is energy waiting to be released. … I think ordinary human beings are now waking up to see what is in their own matter, their own bodies, in terms of the larger consciousness in all matter. That awareness is coming in physics, mathematics, biology, theology, psychology. I call it the feminine side of God – God in matter. Matter is metaphor of the Goddess.”
ADDICTION IS A DISTORTED RELIGION
“Creativity is divine! To me it is the virgin soul opening to spirit and creating the divine child. You cannot live without it. That’s the meaning of life, that creative fire.”
“We are human beings. And a human being has a divine creative intelligence. One way or another that creative intelligence is going to find an outlet. If it can’t find an outlet through the imagination, which is its natural route, it will find it in a concretized way. That becomes compulsive because there’s no way it can find what it’s looking for in a concrete way. You can’t find the Divine Mother in gobbling food….. If our creative energy is blocked, it will find an outlet in some kind of distorted religion, or addiction. An addiction to me is a distorted religion.
“Jung pointed out that it was no accident that alcohol is also called ‘spirits’ and said that the alcoholic’s thirst for alcohol is equivalent to the soul’s thirst for ‘the union with God.’
“Alcohol in Latin is spiritus, and you use the same word the for the highest religious experience sa well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritus,’ he wrote … in 1961. It’s an alchemical formula. It takes spirit to counter spirit.
“Looking at alcoholism and addiction as a longing for spirit might mean that something very different is going on in our society. One might say that we don’t have a crisis with alcohol and drugs as much as we have a spiritual crisis. Addiction is the perversion of spirit, our spiritual nature turned inside out, devouring itself. The epidemic of addiction can also be seen as spirit trying to reenter our society...
“A longing for alcohol does symbolise a longing for spirit. Think of the Greeks with Dionysus, the god of the vine. Intoxication and the transcendent experience with the god were intimately connected….. Alcoholics are longing for spirit because they are so mired in matter, but they make the mistake of concretizing that longing in alcohol. Maybe if they really understood what they were longing for and could go into the realm of the imaginal, the soul’s realm, then something very different could begin to happen.”
“Addicts are trying to run away from God as fast as they can. Paradoxically, they are running right into her arms. Consciousness makes them realise how the soul is trying to lead them into the presence of the divine if only they can understand the symbolism inherent in the addictive substance or behaviour.”
“All the running is away from the tragic fear that we are not loved. Unless we perform well, we are not lovable. That terror leads to self-destructive behaviour. It can also lead to global self-destruction. Addictions may be the Goddess’s way of opening our hearts to what love is – love of ourselves, love of others, love of the dear planet on which we live.”
“Lots of people are trying to find spirit through sexuality. Through orgasms they think they can be released from matter; for one brief moment they hope to experience this extraordinary union of spirit and matter. But if they can’t bring relationship into sexuality then it’s just a fly-by-night thing. Eventually it just becomes mechanical…. Sexuality without love is matter without spirit. People who are unable to love may be addicted to sexuality and be driven over and over again to try to find love. What they are projecting onto sexuality is the divine union they so desperately lack within themselves.”
“Jung said the opposite of love is not hate but power, and where there is love there is no will to power. I think this I a core issue in working with addictions. Sooner or later, the feminine face of God, Love, looks us straight in the eye, and though her love may manifest as rage at our self-destruction, she’s there. We can accept or reject – live or die.“
rainbow messenger 