“…the mother of the gods … commanding him to restrain his infinity, converted him to herself.”Emperor Julian on Attis in the Discourse on the Mother of the GodsC4
Cybele
The ancient Great ‘Mother of the Gods’, Cybele, was worshipped in Phrygia in the Anatolian region of modern Turkey since way back in pre-history – the oldest terracotta model of her, which shows her with enormous breasts and thighs and is seated between two big cats, dates from 6000 BCE. Her worship reached Greece in the 6th century BCE and Rome in 204 BCE, when she became the official protectress, the Magna Mater, of the growing Roman power. She remained on that throne until the rise of Christianity in the 4th century CE, and her son/lover, Attis, whose story involves an act of self-castration leading to his death then resurrection in spirit, was an immensely popular deity and a principle rival to Jesus in the first centuries of the Christian era.
“She arrived from Asia Minor where, for centuries if not millennia, matronal and nurturing goddesses, often accompanied by wild animals, had been revered and regarded as protectresses of the dead whom the earth reabsorbed into its bosom. They lived in rocks, mountains and woods, had command over the animal and plant world, and were the secret and inexhaustible sources of fecundity. They were sometimes worshipped in the forms of sacred stones…” [Robert Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire 1996]
Cypriot terracotta pieces from the 6th century BCE show Cybele seated with a child in her arms, he wearing the iconic ‘Phrygian cap’ of Attis. The appearance of this cap is associated with the liberty cap, the psilocybin mushroom, that gives psychedelic communion with nature to those who eat it, and Cybele worship included mystery rites where such sacraments revealed the intricacies of the Goddess’ universe to participants. Five centuries later, once Cybele worship was well established in Rome, an Attis cult also emerged, with the Emperor Claudius (10-54 CE) establishing a ‘holy week’ of celebrations commemorating his death and resurrection, that preceded the structured programme of the Christian Easter week by a century.
The Arrival of the Cybele Cult in Rome, by Mantegna, 1505
Cybele and Attis had arrived in Rome in the 3rd century BCE as a result of an appeal by the Senate to the Sibylline Oracles in 205 asking for assistance in the ongoing wars with Carthage. The oracle said the enemy could only be defeated if the ‘Idaean Mother of Pessinus’ was brought to Rome, which was arranged, in the form of a black meteorite that had long been Cybele’s icon. The poet Ovid records the reluctance of King Attalus of Pessinus to yield the stone, but an earth tremor was believed to be Cybele expressing her annoyance, and she was said to prophesy (through her priest) that “Rome is worthy to become the meeting place of all the gods.” She arrived in style on 4 April 204 BCE and was greeted by the great and good of the city – the stone was installed temporarily in the temple of Victory until her own sanctuary was opened on 10 April 191 BCE. The period 4- 10 April became the Megalesian festival from then on, commemorating her arrival.
a medieval imagination of Cybele and a Gallus
Along with Cybele came her loud, colourful, queer eunuch priests, the Gallae. The Senate insisted they be confined to her sanctuary except for during the April festivals, when they were allowed to dance through the streets of Rome “to the sounds of auloi and tambourines, in their exotic ‘get-up’, with their feminine garments, long hair and amulets. At that time they were allowed to make door-to-door collections, for the upkeep of the temple and its emasculated staff. Afterwards they were not seen against until the next year.” [Robert Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire 1996]This mystery around the Gallae excited interest in the Mother cult.
The Gallae priests were eunuchs, in honour of Attis, whose premature death came from his own attempt to self-castrate:
THE ATTIS MYTH
Attis, the youthful consort of Cybele, was linked to Ganymede and often compared to Adonis and Pan. There are striking resemblances to Jesus too in the virgin birth, plus his death and resurrection. It seems that the proud Cybele spurned the amorous advances of Zeus, who in his frustration masturbated his seed onto a rock. The rock gave birth to Agidistis, a being combining both masculine and feminine energy so powerfully and destructively that the Gods decided to castrate them, sending Dionysus to get them intoxicated and sort this. The pomegranate grew from Agidistis’ blood. Nana, a water spirit daughter of the River God, ate the fruit and became pregnant, giving birth to the beautiful Attis. However the River God, Sangarios, would not accept that this was a virgin birth and he sent Attis away to be brought up by goatherders. Attis and Agidistis met in the woods one day and became lovers – a tale full of shock and significance to the ancient Greeks as it involved the reversal of the accepted homosexual relationships of the time. In Greek culture it was considered acceptable for the older male to penetrate the younger in the sexual act. As Agidistis was a eunuch he took the passive role with the young, virile Attis.
Attis, Agidistis and Cybele became a Trinity of lovers. But King Midas wanted Attis to marry his daughter, and had the town walled and locked up to avoid any disturbance to his plan. The Mother of the Gods wanted to rescue her lover, and broke through the town’s ramparts (which is why she is depicted with towers on her head). Agidistis burst in, bringing a collective madness to the guests – the bride cut her breasts, her father castrated himself, and Attis fled into the wilds where he fell at the foot of a pine tree after cutting off his genitals. The castration botched, Attis died and violets bloomed from his blood. Bereft, Cybele took her lover’s testicles, bathed them in holy water, wrapped them in his clothes and buried them in the earth. Agidistis pleaded with Zeus to revive Attis, and in honour of the fallen Attis set up a cultic priesthood of castrated eunuchs. As the theme of death, resurrection and salvation took a more central place in religious thought, of which Christianity is the most famous example, the Attis tales developed to depict him resurrected with a crown of stars, associating him with the Milky Way and calling him ‘the leader of the all the tribes of divine beings’ and the ‘servant and charioteer of the Mother’.
According to Hippolytus of Rome, a third century CE church father, Attis cut off his testicles to “[pass] over from the earthly parts of the nether world to the everlasting substance above, where, he says, there is neither female or male.”
Archaeological work has revealed Attis statuettes from the early days of the Roman temple, when he arrived as Cybele’s child. By the 1st century CE Attis had grown up and been assigned cult practices of his own – the Emperor Claudius instituted public ceremonies which started with a nine day period of penitence, during which people abstained from many foods, leading up to 22 March when a pine tree was cut and processed through the streets to the Goddess sanctuary. The image of Attis, and violets, were attached to the tree and the next day dedicated to mourning and lamentations. The peak came on the 24 March, the Day of Blood, when the gallae led a wild, frenzied dance around the tree, at the height of which new priests would self-castrate. The tree was buried and a vigil undertaken until the next day when the resurrection of Attis was proclaimed and the ‘Hilaria’ festival of rejoicing begun. The 26th was a rest day, and on the 27th the Cybele idol, with the black meteorite as its head, was taken to the river Almo and bathed. A week later the Megalesia festival celebrated her original arrival in the city. Robert Turcan says that “Phrygianism was thus well and truly officialized. It became popular and imperial.”
First century Emperor Claudius may also have instituted the office of the archigallus – the high priest of the Cybele temple, of which role there is no earlier evidence – and the role was taken by a Roman citizen. However, laws forbade Roman citizens from self-castration in order to become Gallae, so the archigallus underwent a taurobolium ceremony: records of these come to us from 4th century Christian writers. The taurobolium was a pit into which a man descended – the pit covered with an openwork platform or floor with many holes in it. A bull was sacrificed above the pit, it’s guts cut open and its insides pouring all over the person beneath. Its testicles were buried beneath the altar, offered to the Goddess instead of those of the archigallus. This was considered enough to purify the blooded man to join the official hierarchy of Roman priests as the pontiff of the Mother Goddess – and this ceremony took place in what is still the home of the Christian pontiff – the Vatican, which site Turcan says was, “the Mecca of Mother-cult consecration.” One Roman emperor underwent the ritual – Heliogabalus (218-222). Taurobolic altars were found buried in front of St Peter’s Basilica in the early 17th century. Note that the name Vatican refers to the ‘vaticinations’ – ie prophesying – of the pagan priests during the ceremonies. The Pope today still wears the white mitre cap that was once on the archigallus’ head.
The taurobolium (Roman ceremony involving blood of a sacrificial bull.)
One early Christian Gnostic group – the Naassenes were a group who eschewed all sexual relations, sang hymns to Attis that that syncretised him with Pan and Dionysus/Bacchus. They taught that the Mother of the Gods castrated Attis for him to break with the material world and gain immortal life: “although she had him for her lover; it was because, on high, the blessed Nature of beings who are above the world and eternal wants to make the masculine virtue of the soul rise towards her.” (Philosophoumena V)
Cybele and Attis worship spread through the Roman Empire, as Gallae took their mission to wherever the army marched. From Britain, Gaul and Spain to the Black Sea, Cybele and her eunuch lover were celebrated and honoured until the end of the 4th century.
In that century Roman Emperor Julian devoted a powerful hymn to Cybele – Discourse on the Mother of the Gods –in which she crowns her beloved Attis, whom Julian calls the “… intellectual god Gallus, i.e. a deity who contains in himself material and sublunary forms, and who associates with the cause presiding over the fluctuating nature of matter,” with a ‘star-spangled tiara‘
“Attis is a certain demigod, (for this is the meaning of the fable) or rather he is in reality a god: for he proceeds from the third demiurgus, and after his castration is again recalled to the mother of the gods; but as he persuaded himself wholly to verge, he appears to incline into matter. Indeed he who considers this deity as the last of the gods, but the head of all the divine genera, will by no means deviate from the truth..
“Attis spreads himself round the heavens, which cover him like a tiara, and tends, as it were, from thence to the earth. And after this manner does the mighty Attis present himself to our view; and from hence the lamentations for his long departure, and concealment, for his vanishings and falling into a cavern, arise. But the time in which his mysteries are performed sufficiently evinces the truth of what I have here advanced: for they say that the sacred tree should be cut down on the very day when the sun arrives at the extremity of the equinoctial arch; that on the following day the sounding of the trumpets should take place; that on the third day the sacred and arcane fertile crop of the god Gallus should be cut down; and that after all this, the hilaria and festive days should succeed.
“The sacred institution, therefore, exhorts us, who are naturally celestial plants, though detained on the earth, that collecting together virtue in conjunction with piety from a terrestrial polity, we should eagerly hasten to the primogenial and vivific mother of the gods. But the recalling signal by the sound of a trumpet, which is given to Attis immediately after his castration, is also a signal to us, who, flying from heaven, have fallen upon earth. But after this symbol kingAttis stops his infinity through the castration; and the gods by this means exhort us also to cut off the infinity of our nature, and hasten back again to that which is bounded and uniform, and, if possible, to the one itself; after which, when perfectly accomplished, it is proper that the hilaria should succeed. For what can be more joyful, what can be the occasion of greater hilarity, than the soul flying from infinity and generation, and the storms in which it is perpetually involved, and by this means returning to the gods themselves? But Attis being among the number of these, the mother of the gods by no means neglected him in his progressions beyond what was proper, but commanding him to restrain his infinity, converted him to herself…
“Attis, then, has been said by us to be a certain cause and divinity who proximately fabricates the material world, and who, descending even to the extremity of things, is at length stopped by the demiurgic motion of the sun, when the solar god arrives at the extreme bounded circumference of the universe, and which, from its effect, is called the equinoctial circle. But we have said that castration is the restraining of infinity, which takes place no otherwise than by a revocation and emersion to a more ancient and primary cause; but we consider the elevation of souls as the ultimate design of lustration.” Quoted from Discourse on the Mother of the Gods
Gay/transgender priesthoods served the ancient pagan gods for thousands of years – and we can see a vestige of their craft in the transgender priestesses of the Indian deity Aravan. Known as the Aravanis, this ‘trans’ sect is similar to the Hijras, who worship the Goddess Bahuchara Mata. The Aravanis celebrate Aravan, the son of the great warrior Arjuna in the epic tale Mahabarata, who offers to sacrifice himself in battle but receives the boon of getting married first. As no woman wishes to marry then become a widow, Krishna changes into his feminine form, Mohini, marries Aravan, then mourns his death. To commemorate this story, the worship of the Aravanis includes ecstatic grief ritual, just as the Gallae of Cybele once mourned for Attis.
Of the Hijra priestesses, Jenny Wade of the California Institute of Integral Studies has written: “Their public behavior—and society’s perception of them—resemble that of the Galli: they are exaggeratedly made-up cross-dressers who dance wildly to loud, percussive music and engage in transgressive bawdy behavior; they beg; and they are paid sex workers in “deviant” sex.”
“The Mother of the Gods also admits effeminates, and the Goddess would not judge so, if by nature unmanliness were a trivial thing.”Sextus Empiricus, 2nd century.
A Gallus
“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 2nd century CE
“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.” Philostratus(end 2nd century CE)
The devotees of Cybele “went . . . forth, shouting and dancing . . . they bent down their necks and spun round so that their hair flew out in a circle; they hit their own flesh; finally, every one took his two-edged weapon and wounded himself in divers places. Meanwhile, there was one . . . who invented . . . a great lie, noisily . . . accusing himself, saying that he had displeased the divine majesty of the goddess . . . wherefore he prayed that vengeance might be done to himself. And therewithal he tools a whip . . . and scourged his own body . . . so that you might see the ground wet and defiled with the womanish blood that issued forth abundantly” Apuleius The Golden Ass, VIII. 2nd century.
Cybele’s temple
“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?” Firmicus Maternus, 4th century
“They are the sons of the earth. The Earth is their mother”, he also called them “castrated perverts….. madmen…. foully unmanned and corrupted.” Augustine, 4th century
Scotland’s government marked International Women’s Day 2022 by issuing a formal apology to the 2000 women and 500 men who were executed between the 16th and 18th centuries in a mania against witchcraft.
“Addressing Scottish lawmakers, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it was “injustice on a colossal scale” that was “driven at least in part by misogyny in its most literal sense – hatred of women.”…
‘Sturgeon noted that some critics had queried the point of an apology centuries later, but said “it might actually be pertinent to ask why it has taken so long.”https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202203/1254411.shtml
THERE IS AN UNADDRESSED LAYER TO THIS STORY … the men! Gay sex was deeply associated with Pagan magical practices and heretical Christian beliefs in ancient and medieval times. Gay men had been on the receiving end of Christian persecutions from the 4th century onwards – in large part because of the prominence of queer deities and gender-bending priesthoods in the ancient pagan culture. 4th century historian Eusebius praised Emperor Constantine for his suppression the effeminate pagan priests of the Goddess temples. Eusebius described a temple:
“where men unworthy of the name forgot the dignity of their sex and propitiated the demon by the their effeminate conduct.”
The Emperor ordered the army sent in, “that this building with its contents should be utterly destroyed.”Eusebius recorded that:
“inasmuch as the Egyptians, especially those of Alexandria, had been accustomed to honour their river through a priesthood composed of effeminate men, a further law was passed commanding the extermination of the whole class as vicious, that no one might thenceforward be found tainted with the like impurity.”
The persecution stepped up under Constantine’s successors. Roman senator Firmicus Maternus wrote a polemic called ‘The Error of the Pagan Religions’ in 346 which firmly associated pagan cults with sexual immorality and especially homosexuality. He was particularly fired up about the effeminate priests or holy men, writing that those of a Carthaginian love goddess:
“can minister to her only when they have feminised their faces, rubbed smooth their skin, and disgraced their manly sex by donning women’s regalia. In their very temples we see scandalous performances, accompanied by the moaning of the throng: men letting themselves be handled as women, and flaunting with boastful ostentatiousness this ignominy of their impure and unchaste bodies…. Next, being thus divorced from the masculine, they get intoxicated with the music of flutes and invoke the goddess with an unholy spirit so they an ostensibly predict the future to fools.”
And from there it all began – the suppression of Goddess priesthoods, of sex-positive versions of Christianity, and eventually homosexuality itself – which of course went hand in hand with the suppression of women’s sexuality and self-hood, of which the witch trials were the ultimate manifestation of using FEAR to keep women subservient, as had been used against gay men since the 4th century.
The tide turned violently against paganism in the 380s when an imperial edict against sacrifices inspired what has been called ‘an orgy of destruction and spoliation’ when bands of monks and Christian fanatics destroyed temples and statues across the Empire. Thousands of years in which queers had served the holy life of the community came to an end, our ecstatic-erotic practices that opened the gateways to spiritual communion were wiped out.
In 390 a law focussed on male brothels attacked “the poison of shameful effeminacy”. In 438 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, issued in 534, sealed the fate, setting a legal climate regarding homosexuality that would influence Europe until the 20th century, and his violent actions in 528 against men who loved men established a climate of fear that still persists in some places. The Justinian Code expanded an old law from the time of Augustus against adultery to include the death penalty for ‘illicit sex with males’ (stuprum cum masculis).
Medieval burning, Prague
Byzantine historian John Malalas (c 491-578) recorded the great persecution of men who loved men in the late 520s in the eastern half of the Empire, after the collapse of Rome itself. Justinian issued laws that could be applied to past crimes, not simply ones that occurred after its creation. Note however that the Church did not support his actions, in fact the first victims were prominent men of the Church itself:
“At that time, bishops of diverse provinces were prosecuted for the lustful act of sleeping with males. Among them were the bishops Isaiah of Rhodes, formerly the Nycteparchus of Constantinople, and Alexander of Diospolis in Thrace. After they were brought to Constantinople by an edict of the Emperor they were examined by the prefect of the city, stripped of their rank and punished. After he had suffered severe torture, Isaiah was sent into exile. Alexander, on the other hand, has his male organ cut off, and was place in a litter and exposed as a spectacle to the people. Shortly after, the emperor passed a law that the crime of sex with males should be punished by castration. And at that time many androkoitai (men who slept with men) were seized and their genitals were cut off. And a great fear ensued among those who suffered from the evil desire for males.” John Malalas
The Emperor’s court historian, Procopius, left us a ‘Secret History’ in which we read that Justinian:
“…prohibited sodomy [paiderastein] by law, not examining closely into offences committed subsequently to the law but concerning himself only with those persons who long before had been caught by this malady. And the prosecution of these cases was carried out in reckless fashion, since the penalty was exacted without an accuser, for the word of a single man or boy, and even if it so happened, of a slave compelled against his will to give evidence against his owner, was considered definite proof. Those who were thus convicted had their privates removed and were paraded through the streets.”
Georgius Cedrenus, wrote later in 1060 about this persecution: “Many citizens and senators and not a few of the high clergy were found guilty, were castrated and exposed naked in the forum and died miserably.”
Aristotle
There is considerable amount of evidence that the Celtic and Germanic peoples of northern Europe were accepting and approving of same sex relationships in ancient and medieval times. Aristotle noted this in the the 4th century BCE, calling the passionate, erotic friendship between Celtic males ‘synousia’, and so did Greco-Roman writers several centuries later. 1st century rhetorician Quintilian wrote a speech in which an imaginary German soldier called Marianus declares that male love is seen as honourable amongst his people. Sextus Empiricus (160-210 CE) wrote that among the Germanic people sodomy was “not looked upon as shameful but as a customary thing.”Eusebius of Caesarea (4th century CE)wrote 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.”
Most medieval law codes, such as from the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England, made no prohibitions against male sexual relations. Visigothic Spain carried forward the late Roman prohibitions, advising castration as the punishment for offenders, but as Spain came under Islamic rule from the 8th century a much more tolerant atmosphere prevailed until the return of Christian rule and the dark days of the Spanish Inquisition.
Medieval church declarations and penitentiaries reveal a growing obsession with regulating the sex lives first of monks and clergy, then eventually the whole population. For example, the Council of Paris in 829 issued a canon associating God’s wrath at gay sex with the devastation of the Great Flood, and endorsed the death penalty for sodomy. Saint Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrah (11th century) attacked homosexuality among the clergy, whom he accuses of “wallowing voluptuously in the pigsty of foul obscenity.” He complained that “Vice against nature creeps in like a cancer and even touches the order of consecrated men. Sometimes it rages like a bloodthirsty beast in the midst of the sheepfold of Christ.” The Pope of the time was not prepared to go as far as Damian proposed in punishing same sex acts, and when the 1102 Council of London wished to issue a decree that sodomy be condemned from every pulpit Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury prohibited its publication, saying that homosexual acts were common and not seen as a sin by the population.
In the 13th century the homophobic stance of the Church hardened – the work of Thomas Aquinas defined ‘unnatural’ sex as masturbation, heterosexual acts in the ‘wrong vessel’, ie wrong orifice, sodomy (meaning any sex relationship with someone of the same gender), and bestiality. This century saw the suppression of the Cathar heresy, which was so associated with gay sex that the German language inherited the word ‘Ketzer’ as slang for a queer person. Similarly, English and French gained ‘bugger’ from the Bogomil heresy from Bulgaria – Bogomil in fact meant ‘beloved of God’. From the start of its reign of Terror, the Inquisition was on the lookout for sodomites, who were assumed to be either pagans or Christian heretics. The Society of the Blessed Mary, pious laymen supporting monastic endeavours, set out to track down gays as well as heretics – in 1242 the Italian city of Perugia appointed 40 men to seek out sodomites, a phenomenon repeated in Renaissance Florence’s Officers of the Night. The suppression of the politically powerful Knights Templar in the 14th century was justified in part by their indulgence in “the execrable outrage of the Sodomites.”
Secular laws in the late Middle Ages set the scene for the Church and State to work together in the suppression of homosexuality. The 13th century law in the Beauvais region north of Paris explicitly combines heresy and homosexuality:
“A person departing from the faith by disbelief so that he will not come back to the way of truth, or who commits sodomy, must be burned and he forfeits all his possessions.”
A 14th century copy of a 1290 English legal treatise, known as Britton, which cites fire as the penalty for sodomy and calls it a ‘mixed’ crime that could be tried by state or church, states:
“The inquirers of the Holy Church shall make their inquests of sorcerers, sodomites, renegades and misbelievers; and if they find any such, they shall deliver him to the king’s court to be put to death.”
Another English law code of the time indicated that the punishment for gay sex, along with bestiality or friendship with Jewish people, should be to be buried alive.
In Spanish Castile Christian King Alfonso X issued a law in 1255 that stated:
“…when a man lusts after another to sin with him against nature, we order that whoever commits such a sin shall both of them, as soon as it has been discovered, be castrated before all the people, and, after 3 days, shall be suspended by the legs until they die, and shall never be taken down.”
Historian Louis Crompton, in his 2005 book Homosexuality and Civilisation, says that “no comprehensive account of executions in earlier periods has been made… Undoubtedly, many men and women suffered whose fates are forever lost to history.” Some examples are known – such as in Basel, Switzerland in 1277 when the annals record that King Rudolph I, founder of the Habsburg dynasty “burned Lord Haspisperch for the vice of sodomy.” All levels of society were at risk – in 1292 Jan de Wettre, a “maker of small knives” was burned to death in Ghent, Flanders.
A remarkable record from the town of Olite, near Pamplona, informs of us of the burning of two Jewish men “because they had committed the sodomitical sin with each other.” First the men were tortured to obtain confessions, then “accompanied to the stake by a cortege of twenty men while a musician played the anafil, a long Moorish trumpet of lugubrious tone.” (Louis Crompton) The record lists the payments to the trumpet player and the man who tied the convicted pair to the tree and “administered the fire.”
Louis Crompton lists burnings of gay men in France (Laon 1317, Dorche in Savoy region 1344, Reims 1372), Antwerp in the 1370s, Augsburg 1409. The first known execution for sodomy in Venice was in 1342; in 1357 a Venetian boatman, Nicoleto Marmagna, and his lover of three years, Giovanni Braganza, were sentenced to be burned alive. Venice was to be a hotbed of gay life, and its repression, in the 15th century, beginning with the trial in 1406 of 15 young noblemen and 18 commoners. Most convicted men were burned alive – until 1446 after which they were decapitated before the burning, perhaps the screams had become too painful to hear. More than 400 men were tried in 15th century Venice for sodomy with other men, and 34 for sodomy with women.
San Bernadino
Preacher Bernadino de Siena (1380-1444) described in a sermon the burning of a sodomite in Venice, whom he saw “tied to a column on high; and a barrel of pitch and brushwood and fire, and a wretch who made it all burn, and I saw many people standing round about to watch.” He also spoke of other executions, including regular burnings in Genoa, and told of a man quartered, his limbs hung from the city gates, in Verona.
Florence in the 15-16th centuries saw even more arrests and prosecutions, but in general imposed less harsh penalties. The city had such a long standing reputation as a gay locale – in 1305 Dominican preacher Giordano da Pisa declared in a sermon: “Oh how many sodomites there are among the citizens! Nearly all are dedicated to the vice, or at least the majority” – that during the Renaissance in German lands sodomites were known as Florenzer. The intensity of persecution varied over time, but Louis Crompton estimates that around 12500 men were prosecuted during a long anti-sodomy campaign in Florence that lasted from 1432 to 1502. At this time this quite small, city had an anti-sodomy police force, the Officers of the Night, which was eventually disbanded due to the amount of publicity its presence gave to the gay subculture of the city.
An even more virulent homophobia took hold in Spain after the unification of the country in the late 15th century under Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. An edict of 1497 summed up the attitude that had developed over 1000 years, that because of male-male sexuality “God… in His indignation sends pestilence and other earthly torments” and declared that “Because the penalties hitherto established are not sufficient to castigate and extirpate totally… such an abominable crime… we order and command that any person of whatever rank, condition, pre-eminence, or dignity who commits the abominable crime against nature, being convicted by that means which according to the law is sufficient to prove the crime of heresy or lese majeste [ie treason] shall be burned in flames of fire.”
From 1570 to 1630 the Spanish Inquisition was particularly active in hunting down gay men – over 1000 men were brought to trial in Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, many punishments were assigned and there were around 100 executions, with a similar number via secular courts. Louis Crompton describes this period as “arguably the worst moment in the history of a mighty institution,” for which “the church must bear the guilt for having inflicted an enormous amount of unwarranted an atrociously cruel suffering.”
The inquisitors cared little about saving the souls of the men they accused – their expressed aim was to strike fear into the multitude – to “terrorise the people [ut alli terreantur]”. (Franscisco Pena, Spanish law scholar, 1578). Executions peaked in the 1620s, after which the appetite for the death penalty waned, though other punishments remained, such as imprisonment, lashings, fines and banishments, or being sent to work in the galleys of the great ships. Spain of course exported its homophobic attitudes to the New World of the Americas, and one of the earliest recorded atrocities there, from 1513, involved releasing hunting dogs to kill a group of 40 effeminate shamans, whom explorer Vasco de Balboa had observed with the king’s brother in Panama.
VASCO NUNEZ de BALBOA
(1475-1519). Spanish explorer. Balboa ordering native Indians to be torn to pieces by dogs. Copper engraving, 16th century.
Crompton estimates that around 150 men and women were executed for sodomy in France in the 16-17th centuries. The Netherlands experienced a horrific gay persecution in the 1730s, called by Louis Crompton “the most deadly persecution of homosexuals known to us before Hitler.”A trial of two men in Utrecht led to the implication of many more and a ‘witch-hunt’ against gay men across the whole country. Around 250 trials took place and at least 75 men executed. Mass arrests also happened in Dutch cities later in the century, such as Amsterdam in 1764. The last execution for sodomy on the European mainland took place in the Netherlands in 1803. The last in England, of James Pratt and John Smith, took place on 27 November 1835.
England had been a late comer to the persecution game – it did not suffer the extremes of the Inquisition and Henry VIII’s Buggery Act of 1533 set a harsh tone but was not much used against gay men until the 18-19th centuries, when it did lead to many hangings. England abolished the death penalty for sodomy in 1861, but of course other punishments remained. Scotland was the last country in Europe to abolish the death penalty for gay sex, in 1889. The homophobic tone of the Buggery law was of course also to spread around the worldwide British empire and still darkens the lives of many queers in former British colonies, especially in Africa, today.
Christianity adopted its homophobic stance from the Jewish prohibitions of the Old Testament, in stark contrast to the many other faiths of the ancient world, which not only accepted gay love but gave spiritual roles to queer people. The Levitical prohibition on gay sex was a reaction against the cross-dressing, gender-bending priests of the pagan temples, and the first homophobic actions of the Christian emperors of Rome was also against these priesthoods. From that point began the long, dark 14 centuries where the extermination of gay people became the official policy of European countries. During the Middle Ages the darkness deepened as “heresy of the flesh” became equated with “heresy of the spirit.” Stoked by religious preachers of both Catholic and Protestant faiths, the fire of homophobia burnt strongly first in the Catholic south and later in the Protestant north of Europe, with executions in England reaching their peak in the early 19th century.
Monks in Bruges being burnt for sodomy, 1558
The many centuries of homophobic persecution inspired by the Christian faith sit alongside the intolerance also meted out to heretics, Jews, Muslims and of course witches. Add to this the endorsement of the African slave trade for several centuries and the suppression of native faiths the world over and it is clear the Christian Church has been responsible for a lot of suffering.
Nowadays Christianity no longer supports the suppression of pagans, Jews, Muslims or witches – but homosexuality remains either a huge taboo or a grey area in certain Christian circles. The climate of religiously based fear that queers have had to live with for so long began the 4th century, worsened in the 13th and persists in some parts of the world to this day. An apology from the Christian churches would be a catalyst to expose the dark history of persecution and reveal the religious roots of Christian homophobia – queers were pagan Goddess worshippers, who revelled in holiness through the body, in sexuality, in ecstatic intoxication. And throughout the dark centuries, maybe some of us remembered this fact, and for sure some of us are remembering and reclaiming it today.
“We have been a SEPARATE PEOPLE…. Drifting together in a parallel existence, not always conscious of each other.. yet recognising one another by eyelock when we did meet… here and there as outcasts… Spirit people… in service to the Great Mother.. Shamans.. mimes and rhapsodes, poets and playwrights, healers and nurturers… VISIONARIES… REBELS”Harry Hay, Radical Faerie
an optical illusion designed to facilitate the play
of the multidimensional magician
who illuminates the way
for us to rediscover that we are he,
it’s just our minds got led astray.
Stop fighting, start forgivingl
Stop fearing, start living –
there’s one core cosmic truth
the world seems to have forgotten,
that without divine love
we would not be here.
For thousands of years humanity called the Love ‘Mother’
and knew the Goddess through the heart,
until the followers of a warrior god placed in the sky
ripped Her world apart.
The world betrayed, destroyed by human greed –
to return to her Oneness is our urgent need.
For this task, it’s been foretold, a rainbow nation would emerge
to lead the return to love, to nature, to ancient lore:
revealing the fifth dimensional door,
opened through Dionysian joy,
opened by those who are both girl and boy
who are human and fae, free radicals on the way
to Oneness.
Emergence of a Cosmic Tribe beating drums and waking the land, resurrecting the mystery in life – reborn worshippers of Pan.
Emergence of transcendent transsexuality, horn-ed pagan questing queers when the lost tribes of the Goddess arise, the Age of Aquarius will be here.
Emergence of a calling to explore, know more and go to the core. Emergence in emergency, cosmic warriors will find the way.
Rituals of fire, water, earth and air
unite us and reveal
the sacred gates long waiting:
the goddess returns to seal the fate –
humanity’s resurrection as the divine race.
100 YEARS AGO in the early 20th century there were visionaries who saw humanity coming close to a leap in consciousness – but it didn’t happen. Instead we had world wars and mass propaganda keeping the world deeply asleep. In the early 21st century we get to try again, and the forces are once more lined up to try to prevent it. But the inspiration is there, the light is shining, and the leap can happen. We each have the power to make it so.
“You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart. And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth; And I know that the hand of God is the elder hand of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, . . . and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of creation is love.”Walt Whitman
“I am conscious.. that behind all this artistic beauty.. there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony…. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and the earth is Mother to us all… I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence…”Oscar Wilde
“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,Cosmic Consciousness, published 1905
“We are arriving at one of the most fruitful and important turning points in the history of the race. the Self is entering into relation with the Body. for, that the individual should conceive and know himself, not a toy and a chance-product of his own bodily heredity, but as identified and continuous with the Eternal Self of which his body is a manifestation, is indeed to begin a new life and to enter a hitherto undreamed world of possibilities….this transformation, whilst the greatest and most wonderful, is also of course the most difficult in Man’s evolution, for him to effect. it may roughly be said that the whole of the civilisation-period in Man’s history is the preparation for it.”Edward Carpenter
“I feel on the margin of a life unknown, very near, almost touching it–on the verge of powers which, if I could grasp, would give me an immense breadth of existence. Sometimes a very ecstasy of exquisite enjoyment of the entire universe filled me. I want more ideas of soul-life. I am certain that there are more yet to be found. A great life–an entire civilization–lies just outside the pale of common thought.”Richard Jeffries quoted in Richard Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness (1905)
Into the fallen human sphere they came, Faces that wore the Immortal’s glory still, Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God, Bodies made beautiful by the spirit’s light, Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy, Approaching eyes of a diviner man, Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul, Feet echoing in the corridors of Time. High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss, Discoverers of beauty’s sunlit ways And swimmers of Love’s laughing fiery floods And dancers within rapture’s golden doors, Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth And justify the light on Nature’s face. AUROBINDO
QUEER PRIESTS SERVED THE GODDESS, THE SUPREME DEITY.
THE ANGRY MEN FOLLOWING THEIR SUFFERING GOD
BROUGHT SWORDS TO OUR GROVES AND TEMPLES:
THEY STRUCK DOWN OUR TREES AND BURIED OUR DREAMS,
SUPPRESSED OUR MAGIC TO PURSUE DIABOLICAL SCHEMES:
STRUCK DOWN WERE THE GOOD GAYS OF GAIA,
THE PRIESTS AND PRIESTESS OF THE MOON, THE SONS OF BACCHUS.
THEY DID THIS IN EUROPE, THEN AMERICA, AFRICA, EVERYWHERE
FOR WHEREVER EXPLORERS WENT, WE WERE THERE
SERVING THE SPIRIT, SERVING THE TRIBE
GENDERBENDING LOVERS FEELING NO SHAME –
UNTIL UPON US WAS HEAPED THE BLAME
FOR CLIMATE DISASTERS, PLAGUES AND PERVERSIONS
BUT OUR LOVE CAN NEVER BE STOPPED BY COERCION.
GAYS ARE BORN TO EVERY GENERATION
WE ARE THE HEALERS, THE TEACHERS, THE WITCHES
WE ARE PROPHETS, MEDIUMS, PRIESTESSES AND PROUDLY
PROCLAIMING OUR RIGHT TO BE FREE,
AND WHEN WE RECLAIM OUR QUEER SPIRIT
IN ALL ITS DIVINE POWER AND GLORY
WE WILL UNLOCK THE GATES TO HUMAN DESTINY.
In tribal times we were Gatekeepers, opening the pathways
which connect the subtle dimensions of nature and spirit,
and this is what we are here to do today.
Gatekeepers we have an essential role to play.
Malidoma Some from 1993 MenWeb interview:
“Among the Dagara people, gender has very little to do with anatomy. It is purely energetic. In that context, a male who is physically male can vibrate female energy, and vice versa. That is where the real gender is. Anatomic differences are simply there to determine who contributes what for the continuity of the tribe. It does not mean, necessarily, that there is a kind of line that divides people on that basis. And this is something that also touches on what has become known here as the “gay” or “homosexual” issue. Again, in the culture that I come from, this is not the issue. These people are looked on, essentially, as people. The whole notion of “gay” does not exist in the indigenous world. That does not mean that there are not people there who feel the way that certain people feel in this culture, that has led to them being referred to as “gay.”
“The reason why I’m saying there are no such people is because the gay person is very well integrated into the community, with the functions that delete this whole sexual differentiation of him or her. 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. 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. You decide that you will be a gatekeeper before you are born. And it is that decision that provides you with the equipment (Malidoma gestures by circling waist area with hands) that you bring into this world. So when you arrive here you begin to vibrate in a way that Elders can detect as meaning that you are connected with a gateway somewhere. Then they watch you grow, and they watch you act and react, and sooner or later they will follow you to the gateway that you are connected with.
“So to then limit gay people to simple sexual orientation is really the worst harm that can be done to a person.”
Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) was a Greek king of the Seleucid Empire (Syria), who reigned 175-164 BCE. He captured Jerusalem in 167 BC and desecrated the Temple by offering the sacrifice of a pig on an altar to Zeus (an act known as the Abomination of Desolation). At that time of history there were two factions within Judaism: the Hellenists, who accepted pagan practices and the Greek culture; and the Traditionalists, who were faithful to the Mosaic Law. In seeking to prohibit Judaism and Hellenize the Jews, Antiochus forbade their religious practices and commanded that copies of the Law be burned, all of which is related by Josephus in the Antiquities of the Jews (XII.5.4):
“…when the king had built an idol altar upon God’s altar, he slew swine upon it, and so offered a sacrifice neither according to the law, nor the Jewish religious worship in that country. He also compelled them to forsake the worship which they paid their own God, and to adore those whom he took to be gods; and made them build temples, and raise idol altars in every city and village, and offer swine upon them every day. He also commanded them not to circumcise their sons, and threatened to punish any that should be found to have transgressed his injunction. He also appointed overseers, who should compel them to do what he commanded. And indeed many Jews there were who complied with the king’s commands, either voluntarily, or out of fear of the penalty that was denounced.”
The Biblical Book of Maccabees, which tells the story of the Jewish revolt against this tyranny, informs us that :
“…when the feast of Bacchus was kept, they were compelled to go about crowned with ivy in honour of Bacchus. And there went out a decree into the neighbouring cities of the Gentiles, by the suggestion of the Ptolemeans, that they also should act in like manner against the Jews, to oblige them to sacrifice: And whosoever would not conform themselves to the ways of the Gentiles, should be put to death: then was misery to be seen.” (2 Maccabees 7-9)
The Maccabee rebellion succeeded in regaining control of Jerusalem and the Temple was cleansed and rededicated in 165 BCE. The Seleucid kings remained the region’s overlords, but the ban on Judaism was lifted.
Jewishexpert.com states: “It is claimed that Antiochus also introduced the orgiastic Bacchic rites, but this story may serve as a cover for practices that had already been occurring for centuries, such as the temple cult prostitutes mentioned in the Bible.” These queer cultic practices going on in the pagan temples are documented in the Old Testament book of Kings, some 6-800 years prior to the Maccabee revolt, and were still going strong at the time of Christ’s birth.
Hellenistic Judaism, which honoured/embraced pagan deities and beliefs alongside Jewish was around from the time of the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE until its decline from the 2nd century CE. It’s quite certain some Jews were very happy to parade in celebration of the God of Ecstasy. Plutarch (1st century CE) informs us of Jewish worship he considered Dionysian, and that the ancients considered Bacchus “good counsellor,” as the wisest god, similar to Jewish notions about Yahweh.
“The non-Jews of Alexandria and Rome alleged that the cult of Dionysus was widespread among Jews. Plutarch gives a Bacchanalian interpretation to the Feast of Tabernacles:
‘After the festival called ‘the fast’ [the Day of Atonement], during the vintage, the Jews place tables laden with different fruits in booths of thickets woven from vines and ivy. Their first festival is called by them Sukkah (σκηνή). A few days later, the Jews celebrate another festival, which one may simply call a Bacchanalian festival. For this is a festival on which the Jews carry fig branches and sticks adorned with ivy and carry them into the Temple. One does not know” – adds Plutarch – “what they do in the Temple. It seems reasonable to suppose that they practice rites in honor of Bacchus. For they blow small horns as the people of Argos do during the festival of Dionysus, and call upon their god. Others, who are called Levites, walk in front, either in allusion to Lysios (λύσιος) – perhaps ‘the god who attenuatescurses’ – or because they call out ‘Euius,’ i.e., Bacchus.‘
“According to Plutarch the subject of the connection between the Dionysian and Jewish cults was raised during a symposium held at Aidepsos in Euboea, with a certain Moiragenes linking the Jewish Sabbath with the cult of Bacchus, because “even now many people call the Bacchi ‘Sabboi’ and call out that word when they perform the orgies of Bacchus.” Tacitus too thought that Jews served the god Liber, i.e., Bacchus-Dionysus, but “whereas the festival of Liber is joyful, the Jewish festival of Liber is sordid and absurd.” ‘
“…the presence of Dionysus on mosaics from the third to fourth centuries AD/CE in the finely appointed home of the apparent Jewish patriarch at Sepphoris or Tzippori, a village in Galilee, lends weight to Plutarch’s commentary. Significantly, this imagery depicts Bacchus and Herakles in a wine-drinking contest, which Dionysus wins, a theme flagrantly featured in the prominent Jewish citizen’s home. Since Herakles was a favorite of the Phoenicians, this symbolism could reflect the defeat of that faction commercially, in the wine trade. This central place for Bacchus indicates the wealth of the community depended significantly on the blessings of the grape.
“If these later Jews were aware of Dionysus and unflinchingly revered him, it is reasonable to suggest that Israelites knew about his worship and myth in more remote antiquity, particularly as they became wine connoisseurs, a trade that dates back 3,000 years in the hill country where they emerged.
“It is very significant that this site of Bacchus worship, Sepphoris, was deemed the Cana of the New Testament, where Jesus was said to have produced his water-to-wine miracle. It is clear that the gospel writers were imitating the popular Dionysus worship with the newly created Christ character.”
In his 1902 book Love’s Coming of Age, Edward Carpenter described his vision of how a shift in attitudes towards sex, sexuality and love would push forward human evolution. Carpenter described his belief in a letter to Richard Bucke, author of 1905 book Cosmic Consciousness:
“…that there is in man a divine consciousness as well as a foot consciousness. For as we saw that the sense of taste may pass from being a mere local thing on the tip of the tongue to pervading and becoming synonymous with the health of the whole body; or as the blue of the sky may be to one person a mere superficial impression of color, and to another the inspiration of a poem or picture, and to a third, as to the “God-intoxicated” Arab of the desert, a living presence like the ancient Dyaus or Zeus–so may not the whole of human consciousness gradually lift itself from a mere local and temporary consciousness to a divine and universal? There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his quite external body; that we know. Are there not also in every man the making of a universal consciousness?”
Love’s Coming of Age
Sex is the allegory of Love in the physical world. It is from this fact that it derives its immense power. The aim of Love is non-differentiation–absolute union of being; but absolute union can only be found at the centre of existence. Therefore whoever has truly found another has found not only that other, and with that other himself, but has found also a third–who dwells at the centre and holds the plastic material of the universe in the palm of his hand, and is a creator of sensible forms.
Similarly the aim of sex is union and non-differentiation–but on the physical plane–and in the moment when this union is accomplished creation takes place, and the generation (in the plastic material of the sex-elements) of sensible forms.
There is a kind of illusion about physical desire similar to that which a child suffers from when, seeing a beautiful flower, it instantly snatches the .same, and destroys in a few moments the form and fragrance which attracted it. He only gets the full glory who holds himself back a little, and truly possesses who is willing if need be not to possess.
On the other hand it must not be pretended that the physical passions are by their nature unclean, or otherwise than admirable and desirable in their place. Any attempt to absolutely disown or despite them, carried out over long periods either by individuals or bodies of people, only ends in the thinning out of the human nature–by the very consequent stinting of the supply of its growth-material, and is liable to stultify itself in time by leading to reactionary excesses.
…it must be remembered that in order for a perfect intimacy between two people their bodies must by the nature of the case be free to each other. The bodily intimacy or endearment may not be the object for which they come together; but if it is denied, its denial will bar any real sense of repose and affiance, and make the relation restless, vague, tentative and unsatisfied.
Sex-pleasures afford a kind of type of all pleasure. The dissatisfaction which at times follows on them is the same as follows on all pleasure which is sought, and which does not come unsought. The dissatisfaction is not in the nature of pleasure itself but in the nature of seeking. In going off in pursuit of things external, the “I” (since it really has everything and needs nothing) deceives itself, goes out from its true home, tears itself asunder, and admits a gap or rent in its own being. This, it must be supposed, is what is meant by sin–the separation or sundering of one’s being-and all the pain that goes therewith. It all consists in seeking those external things and pleasures; not (a thousand times be it said) in the external things or pleasures themselves. They are all fair and gracious enough; their place is to stand round the throne and offer their homage-rank behind rank in their multitudes-if so be we will accept it. But for us to go out of ourselves to run after them, to allow ourselves to be divided and rent in twain by their attraction, that is an inversion of the order of heaven.
To this desertion of one’s true self sex tempts most strongly, and stands as the type of Maya and the world-illusion; yet the beauty of the loved one and the delight of corporeal union all turn to dust and ashes if bought at the price of disunion and disloyalty in the higher spheres–disloyalty even to the person whose mortal love is sought. The higher and more durable part of man, whirled along in the rapids and whirlpools of desire, experiences tortures the moment it comes to recognise that It is something other than physical. Then comes the struggle to regain its lost Paradise, and the frightful effort of co-ordination between the two natures, by which the centre of consciousness is gradually transferred from the fugitive to the more permanent part, and the mortal and changeable is assigned its due place in the outer chambers and forecourts of the temple.
Pleasure should come as the natural (and indeed inevitable) accompaniment of life, believed in with a kind of free faith, but never sought as the object of life. It is in the inversion of this order that the uncleanness of the senses arises. Sex to-day throughout the domains of civilisation is thoroughly unclean. Everywhere it is slimed over with the thought of pleasure. Not for joy, not for mere delight in and excess of life, not for pride in the generation of children, not for a symbol and expression of ‘ deepest soul-union, does it exist-but for our own gratification. Hence we disown it in our thoughts, and cover it up with false shame and unbelief-knowing well that to seek a social act for a private end is a falsehood. The body itself is kept religiously covered, smothered away from the rush of the great purifying life of Nature, infected with dirt and disease, and a subject for prurient thought and exaggerated lust such as in its naked state it would never provoke. The skin becomes sickly and corrupt, and of a dead leaden white hue, which strangely enough is supposed to be more beautiful than the rich rose-brown, delicately shaded into lighter tints in the less exposed parts, which it would wear if tanned by daily welcome of sun and wind. Sexual embraces themselves seldom receive the benison of Dame Nature, in whose presence alone, under the burning sun or the high canopy of the stars and surrounded by the fragrant atmosphere, their meaning can be fully understood: but take place in stuffy dens of dirty upholstery and are associated with all unbeautiful things.
Our public opinion, our literature, our customs, our laws, are saturated with the notion of the uncleanness of Sex, and are so making the conditions of its cleanness more and more difficult. Our children, as said, have to pick up their intelligence on the subject in the gutter. Little boys bathing on the outskirts of our towns are hunted down by idiotic policemen, apparently infuriated by the sight of the naked body, even of childhood. Lately in one of our northern towns, the boys and men bathing in a public pool set apart by the corporation for the purpose, were-though forced to wear some kind of covering–kept till nine o’clock at night before they were allowed to go into the water–lest in the full daylight Mrs. Grundy should behold any portion of their bodies! and as for women and girls their disabilities in the matter are most serious.
Till this dirty and dismal sentiment with regard to the human body is removed there can be little hope of anything like a free and gracious public life. With the regeneration of our social ideas the whole conception of Sex as a thing covert and to be ashamed of, marketable and unclean, will have to be regenerated. That inestimable freedom and pride which is the basis of all true manhood and womanhood will have to enter into this most intimate relation to preserve it frank and pure–pure from the damnable commercialism which buys and sells all human things, and from the religious hypocrisy which covers and conceals; and a healthy delight in and cultivation of the body and all its natural functions, and a determination to keep them pure and beautiful, open and sane and free, will have to become a recognised part of national life.
Taking all together I think it may fairly be said that the prime object of Sex is union, the physical union as the allegory and expression of the real union, and that generation is a secondary object or result of this union. If we go to the lowest material expressions of Sex–as among the protozoic cells–we find that they, the cells, unite together, two into one; and that, as a result of the nutrition that ensues, this joint cell after a time (but not always) breaks up by fission into a number of progeny cells; or if on the other hand we go to the very highest expression of Sex, in the sentiment of Love, we find the latter takes the form chiefly and before all else of a desire for union, and only in lesser degree of a desire for race-propagation.
A description of the White Swan in Vere Street, London by Robert Holloway can be found in ‘The Phoenix of Sodom or the Vere Street Coterie’, published 1813, which relates the story of the conviction of James Cook for permitting his pub to become a queer rendezvous, of the Molly House kind documented since the early 18th century. In 1810 a police raid led to twenty-seven men being arrested at the pub. Most were released – probably they were able to pay bribes to the police. Eight men were convicted, of whom two were hanged as punishment for sodomy, and six were pilloried as punishment for attempted sodomy. Without focusing on these gory details, however, here’s a little glimpse into the gay subculture of the early 19th century…
‘Four beds were provided in one room:—another was fitted up for a ladies’ dressing-room, with a toilette, and every appendage of rouge, &c. &c.:—a third room was called the Chaple, where marriages took place, sometimes between a female grenadier, six feet high, and a petit maitre not more than half the altitude of his beloved wife! These marriages were solemnized with all the mockery of bride maids and bride men; and the nuptials were frequently consumated by two, three, or four couple, in the same room, and in the sight of each other! incredible as this circumstance may appear, the reader may depend it is all provable:—the upper part of the house was appropriated to wretches who were constantly in waiting for casual customers; who practised all the allurements that are found in a brothel, by the more natural description of prostitutes; and the only difference consisting in that want of decency that subsists between the most profligate men and depraved women.—Men of rank, and respectable situations in life, might be seen wallowing either in or on the beds with wretches of the lowest description: but the perpetration of the abominable act, however offensive, was infinitely more tolerable than the shocking conversation that accompanied the perpetration; some of which, Cook has solemnly declared to me, was so odious, that he could not either write, or verbally relate. It seems many of these wretches are married; and frequently, when they are together, make their wives, who they call Tommies, topics of ridicule; and boast of having compelled them to act parts too shocking to think of;—an instance of which I must relate, because the history of the country furnished a precedent, that consigned a Peer of the realm, and his infamous associate, to the gallows: I allude to Lord Audley’s case, who was convicted of rape and sodomy at one time with his own wife.—The instance I shall relate was told at Vere-street by the husband, to many of the wretches, and the partner of his guilt, then present, who joined in the relation, as if it had been a meritorious act:—this ill-fated woman had been brought to that pitch of infamy, that she frequently endured it, as if it was no offence even to modesty! the dreadful fellow, who is the subject of the narration, is one of three miscreants living together in the same public office in the city, one of whom is known by the appellation of Venus.
‘It seems the greater part of these reptiles assume feigned names, though not very appropriate to their calling in life: for instance, Kitty Cambric is a Coal Merchant; Miss Selina, a Runner at a Police office; Black-eyed Leonora, a Drummer; Pretty Harriet, a Butcher; Lady Godina, a Waiter; the Duchess of Gloucester, a gentleman’s servant; Duchess of Devonshire, a Blacksmith; and Miss Sweet Lips, a Country Grocer. It is a generally received opinion, and a very natural one, that the prevalence of this passion has for its object effeminate delicate beings only: but this seems to be, by Cook’s account, a mistaken, notion; and the reverse is so palpable in many instances, that the Fanny Murry, Lucy Cooper, and Kitty Fisher, are now personified by an athletic Bargeman, an Herculean Coal-heaver, and a deaf tyre Smith: the latter of these monsters has two sons, both very handsome young men, whom he boasts are full as depraved as himself.
‘It seems that these odious practices are not confined to one, two, or three houses, either public or private; for there are many about town: one in the vicinity of the Strand; one in Blackman-street in the Borough; one near the Obelisk, St. George’s-fields; one in the neighbourhood of Bishopsgate-street, kept by a fellow known by the title of the Countess of Camomile; perhaps the title was derived from his ancient place of residence!—This wretch was sent to the cold bath of Newgate for two years, by way of quenching a flame that had been raised by the charms of an uncomplying boy. The old worn-out catamites are stationed in different lodgings, and maintained, for the purpose of entrapping servants out of place, and other distressed characters; and as distress is the most potent enemy to virtue, they too frequently succeed in the objects of their employers:—no expence is spared for clothes, public places, or pocket money, till the ends are obtained. Many of these breeches-clad bawds have chambers in the different Inns of Court, the Temple not excepted, where they carry on their practices with greater security from detection; which is somewhat extraordinary, when we consider that lawyers are not very partial to any description of monsters but their own!’
This passage from Two Flutes Playing by Andrew Ramer is central to and reflective of my personal experience and understanding of AIDS. I’d like to suggest, however, that you read COVID-19 wherever it says AIDS below and see the parallel, hear the lessons.
AIDS (and COVID-19) is a planetary experiment, an experiment in consciousness. All human beings are involved in it, in and out of bodies. All human beings are involved in this experiment, some directly and others less directly. Those at the front line are actively working in their own ways to further planetary transformation. Some will do it through their work, others will do it through the work they inspire in others. But no one is immune, no one is not a part of this experiment. It is an experiment in love and in compassion. It is an experiment in shifting consciousness. Many out of bodies support you in your research. Together, we can all evolve in consciousness.
The gay community in this land is participating directly in this experiment for a combination of reasons. On a body consciousness level, self-internalized rage and shame have weakened certain individuals’ immune systems to the point where microscopic entities have attacked them. But those same individuals, paradoxically, have responded to something deeper in themselves, to an ancient tribal knowledge that goes back to the beginning of this era of human history.
Gay people have specific functions that grow out of our vibratory essence. The vibratory essence of male and female are not the same. The vibratory essence of those who are drawn to their own gender in love are not the same as those who are drawn to the other gender. Gay people are healers and creators, using our energy to serve humanity. We do not have to list the great gay artists. We may have to remind you that shamans in many places were gay. But few if any will remember that for much of the Ice Ages, gay people often served as tribal midwives. Not midwives for those being born, but midwives for those who were dying. Some of the fear of gay people to this day is the lingering whiff of death and transformation unconsciously detected.
Death is a shift in focus. When you are dreaming, you are already a little bit dead—you are conscious without a body. Death is a shift in focus, as birth is. One takes you into physicality, the other leads you out. But to be human, fully human, is to know both. As it is equally a part of being human to have male and female lives, straight and gay lives. All those whose intrinsic capacity for love turns toward members of their own gender are consciousness scouts. They explore the terrain of what it means to be a woman or a man, or both. But they also have other skills as a people, as a sub-tribe, that need to be remembered and honored, by themselves and by the world.
AIDS (and COVID-19) is a planetary experiment designed to see whether or not human beings can shift their consciousness from a divisive mode to an all-embracing one. Every human being on the planet is a participant. Not just the individuals who “have” AIDS. We in subtle bodies are as much participants as you in physical form. This experiment is our chance to change human life upon this world. It’s Phase One Intensified of the last chance. If you love your body, if you love the body of the being you call Earth, then there can be only one outcome—Transformation.
AIDS (and COVID-19)is a planetary experiment. It is an experiment in love and compassion. It is an experiment to see whether the mass of human beings can change their consciousness levels to a point of love and understanding that embraces all human beings. Those who play host to this experiment may be female or male, black, brown, red, yellow or white, rich or poor—but they all have one thing in common—which may not be readily apparent on the outside—they feel that they do not belong here. As if that could be true of anyone who is born here. But they feel it. And in surrendering their bodies to what is often a fatal illness, they offer themselves up to this experiment, and must be applauded
In this poem, published in the collection ‘Toward Democracy’, English philosopher and writer Carpenter predicts a glorious future for transgendered people, and speculates on the trans nature of Adam before Eve was created.
0 child of Uranus, wanderer down all times, Darkling, from farthest ages of the Earth the same Strange tender figure, full of grace and pity, Yet outcast and misunderstood of men-
Thy Woman-soul within a Man’s form dwelling, [Was Adam perchance like this, ere Eve from his side was drawn?] So gentle, gracious, dignified, complete, With man’s strength to perform, and pride to suffer without sign, And feminine sensitiveness to the last fibre of being; Strange twice-born, having entrance to both worlds- Loved, loved by either sex, And free of all their lore!
I see thee where down all of Time thou comest; And women break their alabaster caskets, kiss and anoint thy feet, and bless the womb that bare thee, While in thy bosom with thee, lip to lip, Thy younger comrade lies.
Lord of the love which rules this changing world, Passing all partial loves, this one complete – the Mother love and sex emotion blended- I see thee where for centuries thou hast walked, Lonely, the world of men Saving, redeeming, drawing all to thee, Yet outcast, slandered, pointed of the mob, Misjudged and crucified.
Dear Son of heaven – long suffering wanderer through the wilderness of civilisation- The day draws nigh when from these mists of ages Thy form in glory clad shall reappear.
THE LEGEND OF INANNA
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 Asushunamir, a specially created being who was neither male nor female. In her rage Ereshkigel cursed all such queer beings but Inanna in response appointed them to be her eternal servants, promising that one day their holiness would be restored:
“For many ages you will suffer… you shall be strangers in your own homes, your families will keep you as secrets in the shadows and they will cast you out and they will leave you with nothing. The drunken shall smite your faces and the mighty shall imprison you, but if you will remember me, how you were born from the light of the stars, remember how beautiful you are, and how it was you, and only you, who could save me from the final death and rid the earth of winter, I shall harbour you and your kind. You shall be my special children and I shall make you my priests. I shall grant you the gift of prophecy, the wisdom of the earth and the moon. You shall banish illness from my children, just as you have stolen me from Ereshkigel and the land of no return and when you shall adorn yourself in my robes, i shall dance in your feet and sing in your throats, and no-one shall be able to resist your enchantments. When the earthen jug is brought forth from the seven gates you shall be free from the spell of Ereshkigel. Once more you shall be called Asushunamir, Being Clothed In Light. Your kind shall be calle Asushunamir, those whose faces are brilliant, those who have come to renew the light, the Blessed Ones, of Inanna.”
Listen to the story of Ishtar/Inanna and her queer priests on this podcast:
This ancient legend speaks to us today – the Goddess is once more trapped in the Underworld of human consciousness; disconnection dominates our world and planetary ecology is way out of balance.Queer people are more accepted and freer to be ourselves in some parts of the world now, but our ancient connection to the Goddess is still hidden from sight. Yet we meet her in our games, our celebrations, our love affairs – and our task is to bring her love back into the world, to restore the holy whole by putting love and pleasure on the throne of human civilisation. Many ancient myths from around the world tell of a crucial connection between gender fluidity, same sex love and the sacred realms. Queers served as priests and shamans in traditional cultures the world over. It is time for the modern LGBTQ movement to embrace and engage with spiritual as well as social/political liberation. For we are a people with many gifts of the spirit, that are designed for the benefit of all.
Gay/queer/trans priests served in ancient pagan temples for thousands of years. The Hijra in India today are a remnant of a once common phenomenon of queer spiritual priest classes. In the Old Testament there are references to the presence of Qedesha – male priests who engaged in sexual ritual with temple visitors (translated as sodomites in the King James Bible) – and, in Deuteronomy, a ban on Jewish men becoming Qedesha. Yet in the Bible we also find two references to the long term, spiritual role of ‘eunuchs’:
Isaiah 56:4-5
For this is what the LORD says: “To the eunuchs who keep My Sabbaths, who choose what pleases Me and hold fast to My covenant, I will give them, in My house and within My walls, a memorial and a name better than that of sons and daughters. I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off.”
Jesus quoted in Matthew 19:11-12
“Not everyone can accept this word,” He replied, “but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way; others were made that way by men; and some who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
THE LEGEND OF RAMA AND THE THIRD-GENDERED ONES
A myth concerns Lord Rāma and is told by hijras of India to justify their position in society and allude to possible rewards for their suffering. Hijras in Madhya Pradesh particularly referenced this narrative, which was said by many (hijras and non-hijras) to be associated with the Rāmāyana, although it does not appear in the text. In the myth, Lord Rāma returns from exile and finds those who are ‘neither man nor woman’ waiting on the banks of the river, from which he had left the city of Ayodhya to go into exile, fourteen years previously. When he left the city, he told the ‘men and women’ to go home, but these individuals, being neither, remained there. As a result, Rāma is touched by their devotion and he blesses them, saying they will rule the world in the ‘future’
Malidoma Some 1956-2021
Some African wisdom on the matter… it could also be said of this The one who can accept this should accept it:
Malidoma Some of the Dagara Tribe of Burkino Faso:
“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…
“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!
“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.”
‘Don’t look for a lover, BE one.’ Radical Faerie poet James Broughton
Love is what we are, the nature of our consciousness. If we understand this and live in this awareness, love will manifest in our lives.
‘Love of self for self is the creative force of the universe. Desire is the primal energy, and that energy is erotic: the attraction of love to beloved, of planet to star, the lust of electron for proton. Love is the glue that holds the world together.’ Starhawk
The way to find a lover? Attract Love by Being Loving. Be loving by meeting the world with compassion.
And be visible, show yourself, be findable.
Love attracts.
Seeking a lover is like hunting. Love doesn’t hunt. Desire hunts. Hunting is hot, hunting is horny, hunting is nature seeking pleasure, joy, experience, transcendence. Love is a Goddess offering us a way home, to ourselves.
If we feel we are lacking love we probably actually need to find what brings us joy. To focus on lack of love is to carry a low vibration which attracts experiences that likely affirm the negative feeling. So turn the mind to joy, remember that love is what we are, what gives us life, and that although currently not experiencing it, it is still there. Then turn to joy.
Love is the way home, and it is a tricky path that brings up shadow and pain, for love insists on transformation of everything within us that is not love.
Joy is the key to happiness. Follow your joy, what makes the heart sing, the body tingle, the emotions soar. Joy will make you radiant, joy will empower your ability to love. Joy makes us radiant. Joy casts no shadow of fear, joy will not stoke up old hurts. Joy is the feeling of being at home.
Finding joy in ourselves and meeting the world with love makes us eminently attractive.
Love attracts.
The Lake of Beauty by Edward Carpenter
Let your mind be quiet, realising the beauty of the world, and the immense, the boundless treasures that it holds in store.
All that you have within you, all that your heart desires, all that your Nature so specially fits you for – that or the counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for you. It will surely come to you.
Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time will it come. All your crying and fever and reaching out of hands will make no difference.
Therefore do not begin that game at all.
Do not recklessly spin the waters of your mind in this direction and in that, lest you become like a spring lost and dissipated in the desert.
But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them still, so still;
And let them become clear, so clear – so limpid, so mirror-like;
At last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in peaceful beauty,
And the antelope shall descend to drink, and to gaze at his reflected image, and the lion to quench his thirst,
And Love himself shall come and bend over, and catch his own likeness in you.
{dedicated to the spirit of DAVID STUART, much loved and respected campaigner promoting well-being and health in the LGBTQ+ community, who parted from his body, January 2022}
When I came out fucking could kill you
so condoms became our tool of protection,
though you often heard guys complaining
that the rubber ruined their erection.
When I came out AIDS stalked the land,
fear was written on the face of each gay man
that I saw out cruising, reflecting back to me
that yes we were scared, but we were happy to be free.
When I came out gay men were dying
from a big disease with a little name
and nowadays gay boys are still falling victim
to the after effects of centuries of imposed guilt and shame.
Guys seeking pleasure, love, connections
through crystal meth and viagra erections:
it can wear out the soul, leave a big gaping hole
in our happiness, our wholeness, our health…
For although we may think we are free,
gay men have not healed our history.
What we do was never an abomination
it was a pagan form of salvation.
In ancient temples queers were the holy ones,
people came for our erotic blessing
but religion limited us to sodomites
and psychology sees us simply as sexual.
The Christian Fathers hated all sexual acts
that did not lead to childbirth
they railed against the pagan orgies
I think they were jealous old men.
Gay love, once honoured in the ancient world
took to the shadows, hid in the monasteries,
became riddled with guilt, burdened by shame
but never went away, the eternal spirit of gay
is here to connect the worlds.
Nowadays proud bottoms galore
come knocking at my cyber door
so much booty in my inbox
no more afraid of a deadly pox.
Positive guys undetectable, negative guys on prep
the feast of homosexuality is underway once more
and all the lessons of the 80s-90s
pretty much being ignored.
Men go from house to house, from arse to arse, dick to dick
no time to check if any of those men made them sick,
When I came out fucking could kill you.
So I came to see the fuck as the prize,
now there are so many butts to behold:
how can I satisfy all these guys?
I certainly can’t give them all my healing touch,
don’t like to tell them I find it a bit much
that they want to be fucked by a stranger and receive his essence
directly inside them, I feel there’s a deeper agenda to be reached.
I think the gay scene needs to find a way for us to teach
each other that gay love can connect body, mind and heart
to the flow of eternity and the presence of the old gods,
that gay sex is a spiritual art.
Two men can unite and fill the world with light.
The longing to be filled is a longing for something more
than a penis can ever provide,
it’s a longing for union, with another, within ourselves,
to unlock the power that can take us to heaven
and lift the whole world out of the many hells
that people have driven themselves into.
Heaven and hell both are found in the mind;
we are the gatekeepers with keys to find
that unlock the door to the higher levels
of life, of mind, of love:
but to access the gates we need to claim our own worth,
then the memory will come:
it seems we know instinctively
the gates are somehow accessed through the bum,
but we don’t know what we’re looking for
in this consumer age so full of rage,
we were lied to by religion and blinded by science:
it’s left to us to find out and remember
where in the world we belong.
When I came out fucking could kill you
but I believe it could wake us up to who we have always been
if we do it with love and awareness,
if we heal from the hatred thrown at us
and learn our own history.
This poem is dedicated to the spirit of DAVID STUART, much loved and respected campaigner promoting well-being and health in the LGBTQ+ community, who parted from his body, January 2022:
“His empathy and kindness saved lives and inspired so many. He changed for the better, the landscape of sexual health, addiction and recovery for gay, bi and queer men in London. He spoke out to acknowledge and address chemsex addiction in the community, at a time when many others would not. He fought and campaigned for the community, championing PrEP, U=U and trans rights. He called out racism and stigma against HIV within the community. He encouraged gay men to be kinder to each other.” Simon Marks.
‘TOEVAH’, the word from the ancient old testament that gets translated as ‘abomination’ and that has been used to condemn (sometimes to death) gay men around the world for centuries, actually refers to the PAGAN PRACTICES of the many tribal peoples that surrounded the Hebrews 3000 years ago.
This is explained very clearly on the website religiondespatches.org
Written in 2010 by Jay Michaelson this article calls abomination “a mistranslation and a misconception, doing harm to LGBT people and religious people alike… a close reading of the term toevah suggests an entirely different meaning: something permitted to one group, and forbidden to another. Though there is (probably) no etymological relationship, toevah means taboo.”
Toevah appears 103 times in the Hebrew Bible and always implies a foreign cultic practice.
“When you come into the land that YHVH your God gives you, do not learn to do the toevot of those nations. Do not find among you one who passes his son or daughter through the fire; or a magician; or a fortune teller, charmer, or witch… because all who do these things are toevah to YHVH and because of these toevot YHVH your God is driving them out before you.” Deuteronomy 18:9-12
Deuteronomy 12:31, 13:14, 17:4, 22:5, 27:15, and 32:16 identify idolatry, child sacrifice, cross-dressing, witchcraft, and other “foreign” practices as toevah. Leviticus, with its infamous declaration that a man having sex with another man is toevah, also reveals that the word refers to the practices of other tribes:
“You shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit these toevot… because the people who were in the land before you did these toevot and made the land impure (tameh)” Leviticus 18:26-27
The Book of Kings refers to toevah nine times, while the prophet Ezekiel brings it up 39 times. In these references we learn again that gay sex is regarded the same way as idolatry, child sacrifice and prostitution – all cult practices among the pagan tribes.
The King James Version in of the Bible in English has 150 appearances of the word ‘abomination’, only 103 of which are translations of ‘toevah’. ‘Sheketz’ is a word that often also becomes abomination in the KJV, it is a word that similarly implies taboo or idolatrous practices.
To understand the context of the Biblical stance about homosexuality it is important to know some history: The Jewish people were a small group determined to carve out a distinct identity from the other tribes around, all of whom worshipped Goddesses with erotic rituals led by same sex loving and genderfluid priests, and this had been the case in the region for many thousands of years.
Historian Will Roscoe wrote in 1996: “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.” (quoted from Priests of the Goddess: Gender Transgression in Ancient Religion History of Religions, Vol. 35, No. 3)
This helps us to understand why Christianity ended up adopting this fierce Old Testament attitude – like Judaism it wished to break with the erotic religions of the past. It succeeded into turning toevah into something much more evil by twisting the original meaning into one that condemned outright a sexual act, and by implication all those whose preference it was to enjoy that kind of sex. This twist was to lead to the persecution and execution of vast numbers of gay men for many centuries to come, and still blights our lives today, especially in some African countries where Christian homophobia still reigns.
Religiously justified homophobia will not be gone until gay people remember for ourselves that we are nature’s priests, that our ancestors served as shamans in tribes and priests in temples, they led ecstatic rituals that kept people attuned to nature’s seasons and spiritual mysteries, they were healers, often using sex to bring people into their bodies and into communion with the gods. They brought people into direct contact with their souls, with the Goddess and the ancestors, whereas the Father religions set out to separate heaven and earth, and put their priestly intermediaries in between the two. This was a patriarchal power grab.
In order for the people to accept these new Christian priests it was necessary for the church to insist they not marry and remain celibate. The people were not going to accept married priests, they knew they were supposed to be gay! However, celibacy was hard to enforce in single sex monasteries, as evidenced by the number of penitentials issued during the first millennium attempting to control the behaviour of the clergy and monastic communities. This is not really surprising if we know that the pagan past in Europe was a very gay-positive one.
In the 4th century BCE Aristotle recorded that the Celtic peoples “openly approved” of gay relationships, and this was still the case into the Christian era: in the 2nd century CE, Sextus Empiricus wrote that among the Germanic people sodomy was“not looked upon as shameful but as a customary thing” and Bardaisan of Edessa wrote 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.” In the 4th centuryEusebius of Caesarea, wrote 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.”
Now we are well into the first century of a new millennium, but still carrying many terrible wounds of the past ones – and the terrible lies about gay people. The actual abominations are those carried out by some Christian, and, in more recent times, some Islamic states against gay people, done in the name of their holy books. These people are stuck in the Dark Ages of the Mind and have not even understood the teachings of their own prophets.
Gay sex is a pagan rite because it connects the body (earth), mind (air), heart (water) and spirit (fire) of the participants to the erotic flow of life energy pulsating in all creation, from the atom to the elephant, tunes us into the conscious lifeforce and brings energy, empowerment, ecstasy and enlightenment. Gay sex is a spiritual act because it connects the lifeforce of two people, with no possibility of creating physical life. It instead creates powerful spiritual, psychic energy that can open consciousness and embolden and empower the heart. By covering sexuality and the body with sin, Christianity, the most effective and efficient totalitarian system yet devised by men (which it was), cut humanity off from the source creator energy, left us stumbling alone in a cold, heartless universe, at the mercy of a jealous, angry god. The question is, how did people fall for this for so long?
Some didn’t! The medieval period saw several rival groupings to institutional Christianity, heretical faiths and free spirits who had no issue with sexuality, including homosexuality. Other religions around the world did not develop the homophobic taboo, in fact in the Buddhist monasteries of China and Japan gay sex was considered utterly normal, even a privilege enjoyed by the monks. When the Jesuit Christian missionaries took offence at this, they were laughed at and even thrown out of temples for their rudeness.
Why has it taken so long for the lie of the ‘abomination’ to be revealed? One issue is that lesbian and gay Christians just don’t go into the realms of sex rituals dedicated to Goddesses and Horned Gods… but pagans today still do and it is only by doing that we discover… gay sex connects us to the otherworlds, if we do it right! And by right, I mean RITE!
GAY SEX IS TOEVAH… ie CULTIC WITCHCRAFT!!!!… Witchcraft and all pagan ritual is about shifting consciousness, altering perception, seeing deeper into life’s subtleties and working with invisible, subtle energies.. That’s what gay sex does too, and i believe it is true, from my experience during 35 years out on the gay scene, that, as Andrew Ramer records in Two Flutes Playing (1997): “All of our addictions, to chemicals and to behaviours, mask our ancient shaman powers.”
The world lost two great African men in December, both spiritual leaders but from different traditions – one a Christian, the other an elder teaching traditional African wisdom – and both vocal supporters of LGBTQ people.
Homosexual activity remains illegal in more than 30 of Africa’s 54 countries; in a few, it is punishable by death. Many LGBTQ Africans are subject to stigma and abuse, facing unemployment, homelessness and estrangement from their families.
Some newspaper reports that were printed after the death of Desmond Tutu chose to focus on the fact that his ground-breaking work, which secured equal rights for South African queers in the 1996 constitution of the new republic and equal marriage a decade later, was not appreciated by other African Church leaders, nor governments. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe told a political rally in 2013: “Tutu should just step down because he supports gays, something that is evil.” It is a pity that African leaders do not seem to be aware of the work of Malidoma Some. He did not try to tell other Africans to simply accept gay people, he reminded us all that Africans would never have reduced a person to their sexuality, and that people who are now called gay were once respected in Africa for the essential qualities in their spirit, which they embody, bring and use for the benefit of the tribe. He called for ‘radical healing’ of queer people on a global level.
The wisdom of these two men can change the world’s understanding of being queer.
DESMOND TUTU October 7th, 1931 – December 26th, 2021
CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA – NOVEMBER 30: The Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu at the offices of The Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation during a visit with Prince Harry on the first day of his visit to South Africa on November 30, 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa. (Chris Radburn – WPA Pool /Getty Images)
Tutu was by far the most high-profile African, if not global, religious leader to support lesbian and gay rights. This added to his international reputation as a progressive thinker and activist, especially in the western world but meant that he was met with suspicion on the African continent itself. Theologically, he operated with from the conviction that every human being is created in the image of God and therefore is worthy of respect, which gave him a strong moral and political commitment to defending the human dignity and rights of all people.
He was outspoken in this, using strong religious language to express how he felt about how queers were treated under the South African regime:
“Apartheid’s most blasphemous aspect is … that it can make a child of God doubt that he is a child of God. For that reason alone, it deserves to be condemned as a heresy.”
Shortly after the end of apartheid in 1994, Tutu wrote that
If the church, after the victory over apartheid, is looking for a worthy moral crusade, then this is it: the fight against homophobia and heterosexism.
In 2013 he said:
“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.”
In response to the taunt from Robert Mugabe, Tutu said:
“I would refuse to go to a homophobic Heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place…
“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.”
MALIDOMA SOME January 30th 1956 – 9th December 2021
Malidoma Patrice Somé Phd., West African Elder, author and teacher from the Dagara people of Burkino Faso, came to the west to share the ancient wisdom and practices which have supported his people for thousands of years, travelling and teaching for 3 decades. His name means ‘to make friends with the stranger’.
Malidoma spoke and wrote about lesbians as witches and gay men as gatekeepers, whose role is to keep open the ecstatic gates to the Otherworlds – through the way we connect our sexual energy to spirit and the Earth itself. We once did this in the ancient pagan temples and rituals of Europe and the Middle East as well – the suppression of ritual and the ritual makers of indigenous, earth based, sex loving, religions has always been the Christian way of taking over control of society.
For more than thirty years, Elder Malidoma shared the Wisdom of his Ancestors and tribal Elders, the Dagara Cosmology, inviting the renewal of a deep and abiding relationship with all beings on Earth. Vital in this process, he taught that:
“There must be radical healing of the gatekeepers if our globe is to truly be healed.”
In 1993 Malidoma Some was interviewed by MenWeb, where he delivered a radical African understanding of gender and sexuality, a wisdom that can be found in other parts of the world also, but which was stamped out in the west many centuries ago.
In the interview he explained that:
“Among the Dagara people, gender has very little to do with anatomy. It is purely energetic. In that context, a male who is physically male can vibrate female energy, and vice versa. That is where the real gender is. Anatomic differences are simply there to determine who contributes what for the continuity of the tribe. It does not mean, necessarily, that there is a kind of line that divides people on that basis. And this is something that also touches on what has become known here as the “gay” or “homosexual” issue. Again, in the culture that I come from, this is not the issue. These people are looked on, essentially, as people. The whole notion of “gay” does not exist in the indigenous world. That does not mean that there are not people there who feel the way that certain people feel in this culture, that has led to them being referred to as “gay.”
“The reason why I’m saying there are no such people is because the gay person is very well integrated into the community, with the functions that delete this whole sexual differentiation of him or her. 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. 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. You decide that you will be a gatekeeper before you are born. And it is that decision that provides you with the equipment (Malidoma gestures by circling waist area with hands) that you bring into this world. So when you arrive here you begin to vibrate in a way that Elders can detect as meaning that you are connected with a gateway somewhere. Then they watch you grow, and they watch you act and react, and sooner or later they will follow you to the gateway that you are connected with.
“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!
“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.”
Spirituality is about the search for the Self (while religion tends to put the emphasis on relationship with a God figure, spirituality honours the divine within us and all beings). Science gives us tools to explore and examine the outer universe, and spirituality offers tools to discover the riches and mysteries of the inner planes.
Coming Out is a profoundly spiritual statement. Going against the grain of society’s expectations is an extremely courageous thing to do. It may be getting easier to come out in certain parts of the world, but even in western societies coming out – becoming identifiable as one of the queer minority – is still fraught with stress and even danger. Coming out is a spiritual act because it is a statement of ‘I AM THAT’ – we look inside ourselves and eventually decide the feelings and desires we find there must be allowed freedom to be expressed.
This is just the start of our spiritual journey. Coming out is the result of deep inner questioning, a search within ourselves to find and accept who we are, usually in the face of huge pressure to conform to the hetero standards around us. The potential is in us to continue that questioning all the way through to the spiritual. We live at a time now when all the world’s spiritual systems are available to us – spirituality is no longer controlled by a religious elite, it is in the hands of the masses. To reject god and all spirituality because of the ignorance and hatred of certain Christian faiths is too simplistic. Spirituality is about exploring who we are, what it means to be alive, and how we interconnect with other people and all of creation. We are more than the body – we are beings of thought, of emotion and energy. Spirituality is about understanding how these parts of us affect each other, and learning to create the life that we wish to live.
COULD BEING GAY OPEN THE WAY TO A DIRECT AND INTIMATE EXPERIENCE OF SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS?
Many ancient cultures certainly thought so – the queer beings who stood somewhere between the gender polarities were often considered to have a sacred function – they were viewed as also standing between the worlds of spirit and matter, there to communicate the healing and wisdom of the spirit to the people. The ‘berdache’ two-spirits of the Native American tribes, the ‘galli’ priests of Cybele in ancient Europe, and the shaman gatekeepers of the Dagara tribe in Africa are examples.
Outcasts of religion, gay people have the choice to find our own answers to questions of life, spirit and mystery. Many – most – of us refuse the questions, and a large number of gay men prefer instead to indulge deeply the sensual passions of life, even until they kill us, or seriously fuck us up. The Christian inheritance of the separation of the sexual from the spiritual, plus the growth of a spirit-denying atheistic culture, makes this possible. But the drive in us for passionate, expansive, ecstatic experience could be understood as the spirit in us reaching, pushing, demanding to be known and felt. Sexual exploration and drug taking are routes to connect and discover energy connection with others and within ourselves – whether approached as spiritual acts or indulgent pleasure, they are likely to teach us things.
The modern gay movement has grown with few of us aware that our queer ancestors were often spiritual functionaries for tribal peoples around the world. Gradually this knowledge is becoming more available – eg there are active Two-Spirit groups in the United States, and at gay retreats and radical faerie gatherings around the world queers explore conscious community, connection to nature and the power of living a heart centred life. Modern gay life can seem very anti-spirit, anti-god, secular and hedonistic – but to sum it up this way is to miss the point. Religion was used to separate pleasure from God, but in ancient pagan, and all earth-based faiths, sexual pleasure was a holy rite in itself, it was through joy and bliss that people got to know the divine. The priests in those days who led these rites were queer, leading ceremonies in which the revellers would unite their souls with the deity – often Dionysus, or the Mother Goddess. Through pleasure, through sexual connection, through transcendent trips into ecstasy, we can find out who we are. The force of desire and need for pleasure are abundant evolutionary impulses. Within the framework of loving community and an open mind they can lead to awareness of mystical truths, revelations of divine grace and experience of tantric bliss.
We are a people born to love, born to create beauty and harmony, born to celebrate life itself. The limitations of religions are clear to us – although we may not realise it, we are here creating a new world that appreciates how love, joy and light can be its guiding lights. We are, if we free our minds and let our spirits soar, natural mystics – attuned to the dance of life itself, loving that dance, being that dance.
Walt Whitman’s love of men inspired him to mystical poetic heights, which spoke loudly to some gay men at the end of the 19th century. Richard Bucke praises the nature mysticism of Whitman in his study of Cosmic Consciousness, published 1905, and describes his own awakening moment of spiritual merging with nature around him, inspired by an evening of reading poetry with male friends. The classic work on mysticism from that period, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, regards Whitman as equal to Hindu sages in his visionary wisdom.
Walt Whitman
If a gay person is sensing the call of the spiritual I would encourage them to explore it through any means that appeals to them, follow the heart on this as anything else. I would advise to remember we come to earth to follow our spirit, not a spiritual path, and tell the story of how uptight men used religion to turn the sexual urge from a holy rite to a filthy, functional act, and that it is only us queers can bring it back to what it really is, a truly sinless celebration of being alive! In general, I would say don’t bother with religion, they care little for us – even if they accept us they are unlikely to encourage us to release the full power of our queer spirit, which for most of us includes an embrace of the body and sexuality, not its rejection. I would direct a queer seeker to pagan principles and shamanism.
Shamanism offers ways to connect the body, open the heart, clear the mind and raise the spirit. It offers healing and discovery – through the very things gay boys love to do so much: dancing, dressing up, undressing, taking substances, sex. All our chasing after bliss, after extremes of experience, or just the next fuck, then becomes part of bringing joyful, light vibrations to the planet (to replace the centuries of darkness and fear around sex) if we let in some understanding of the Source consciousness, perhaps even coming to see ourselves as the priests of the Goddess and the Horned God, banished for centuries in a world where straight men rule by force. Gay liberation has achieved masses on the social and political levels in a few decades, but spiritually we are a very confused people. Shamanism could provide the tools and understanding for a rapid spiritual awakening, happening like a wave of light illuminating the increasingly dark shadows lurking in parts of our queer utopia, sending out the message to gay people and to all people everywhere that SEX and LOVE and AWARENESS are three sexy, BEAUTIFUL things that all belong together.
“‘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.”
“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.”
Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture (1978)
the party over
The orgies of the ancient Mediterranean world were sacred cermonies run by queers! They were ritual occasions of ecstatic worship held in honour of the Great Goddess and the dying God, aiming to bring connection with deities such as Cybele and Attis, Dionysus, Astarte, Orpheus, Pan, Aphrodite and Adonis. The orgia aimed to break down barriers between the celebrants and the divinity through a state of mystic exaltation, which was achieved through music, dance, song, intoxication and sex.These deities all had gay oriented and transgender priesthoods, whose special duties included putting on these rituals, plus divination, chanting, holding ceremonies for the dead and sex rites with temple pilgrims:
Philostratus (end 2nd century CE), described rituals where the queer Gallae priests of Cybele 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.”
“Throughout the ancient world, both male and female prostitution was associated with religion. Such was the case in the worship of Baal-Peor, Moloch and Astarte (Syria); Osiris and Isis (Egypt); Venus (Greece and Rome); Mithra (Persia); Myllita (Assyria); Alitta (Arabia); Dilephat (Chaldea); Salambo (Babylonia); and Diana Anaitis (Armenia)…
“The religious prostitute seems simply to be a historical extension of the practice of having ritual sex with the shaman, either male or female. In tribal societies (where cities, temples, and money are unknown), we have seen the common practice of ritual sex with the shaman, individually or in orgies. As early Mediterranean societies fell victim to urbanism and a money economy, the function of shaman in the countryside was transformed into that of priest in the temple, and money then entered in as a form of religious donation.” Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture (1978)
Cybele
Paul of the New Testament railed against the orgies of the Cybele cult:“For even their females exchanged the natural use for that which is contrary to nature, and likewise also the males, having left the natural use of the female, were inflamed by their lust for one another, males with males…”
Roman senator Firmicus Maternus wrote a polemic called ‘The Error of the Pagan Religions’ in 346, firmly associating pagan cults with sexual immorality and especially homosexuality. He complains that the effeminate priests or holy men: “can minister to her only when they have feminised their faces, rubbed smooth their skin, and disgraced their manly sex by donning women’s regalia. In their very temples we see scandalous performances, accompanied by the moaning of the throng: men letting themselves be handled as women, and flaunting with boastful ostentatiousness this ignominy of their impure and unchaste bodies…. Next, being thus divorced from the masculine, they get intoxicated with the music of flutes and invoke the goddess with an unholy spirit so they an ostensibly predict the future to fools.”
Dionysus
Dionysus, beloved across the ancient world as the bringer of ecstasy was also known as Bacchus among the Romans, who attempted to ban his orgiastic cult as early as 186 BCE because of the scandalous sexual stories about it and its potential as a place to hatch subversive political plots. This drove Dionysian rites underground, and made them very appealing to outcasts, slaves and queers. The authorities were always nervous of the popularity of the worship of Bacchus and the Goddess among the unruly masses, and these orgies could get very out of hand, some Gallae rites featuring plenty of sado-masochistic, blood letting transcendence alongside the shameless eroticism.
Christianity proved an effective weapon for the governing classes to bring the population under control from the 4th century onwards. Until then, Christianity was just one of many exotic new religious ideas competing with ancient pagan beliefs, and had no set formula – some forms of early Christianity embraced sexuality, even promoted gay sex over straight because sex between men and women traps more souls in the painful suffering of physical life! Once established as an official religion in the Roman Empire, the Church soon moved to get pagan worship banned – and gay sex made punishable by death. The queer priests of the Goddess were murdered and the temples destroyed. The state religion was used to change the minds of the people, who since ages past had considered sexuality, considered orgies, to be a natural part of the divine dance of creation. Gradually, over the centuries, the Church spread its dark view of sexuality, and the holy power of sexual magic – and of erotic queer priestcraft – was lost.
In 7th century Spain, Archbishop Isidore of Seville, who is praised as ‘the last scholar of the ancient world‘, recorded that the Latin equivalent of the orgy was the caerimoniae run by the colleges of male priests. So in fact our all our modern religious ‘ceremonies’ are the descendants of queer led orgiastic rites of the Great Mother. Drop that into your next chat with a proselytizing Christian!
The Triumph of Pan
It was through pleasure that people had always met the God and Goddess. The Christian Church set out to put a stop to this, but it had a fight on its hands as rival Christian formulations found immense and widespread popularity in the Middle Ages. ‘Heresies’ such as those of the Cathars, the Bogomils, the Knights Templar and the Free Spirits, considered sexuality to be natural and acceptable, including between men. This would be one of the levers the Church, working with the political state which envied the wealth of these groups, would pull to turn the populace against the heretics – leading to an explosion in anti-gay invective from Church writers from the 13th century onwards, such as Thomas Aquinas with his insistence that gay sex is ‘against nature’.
Not everyone was convinced by the Church’s attitude however. Some remembered that pleasure itself was once considered a way to the divine, and continued to practice that. In late December 1367 at his trial for holding heretical beliefs Free Spirit John Hartmann of Ossmanstedt said that a game of chess could reveal God equally as well as receiving the Eucharist sacrament from a priest, if one took more delight in it – because, he said, God is found in pleasure.
Over the centuries there were always men who accessed the memory of our sacred queer pagan past, and left traces in the culture for others to find. Men such as Michelangelo, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Shelley, Byron…
Edward Carpenter
The gay poets, writers and philosophers of the 19th century also made the connection.Edward Carpenter, English champion of gay people from that period, had a vision of the future of mankind:
“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
In the late 20th century gay run orgies returned – sex clubs and saunas opened, a big gay party began, and despite the setback and ravages of HIV, burns on strong. In ancient times orgies were often public occasion steeped in mysticism and magic, in the early 21st century the orgies often take place in guy’s homes, where the choice of sacrament taken to ease the flow of the occasion is not under the scrutiny of the prying eyes of the law. These modern orgies may (or may not) be lacking a sense of divine embrace, but they definitely have a powerful air of ritual about them, much pleasure is pursued and shifting of consciousness occurs.
We all know there’s plenty of tragedy in our gay sex underworld (disease, abuse, addiction, breakdowns, deaths…)… we have brought HIV under control, but to bring more light, love and simply JOY to this scene we gay men need to take care of our souls, and the time is key for us to remember and honour our spirit power and its purpose. The sex scene is important – it’s where we explore this vital part of our nature, a place we can liberate the entirely natural and even somewhat holy nature of gay sexuality from centuries of repression and imposed shame. Our gay sex games can be just as fuelled, filthy and fun when done with love and consciousness, it’s not doing it in the shadows that makes it good! Sexual energy is spiritual power, this the ancient pagans knew and this knowledge is ours to reclaim.
Gay writer and visionary Arthur Evans wrote in Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture (1978): “We look forward to the revival of personal and sexual learning, as it was once practiced by Sappho and Socrates and the Native American Indians… We look forward to re-establishing our communication with nature and the Great Mother, to feeling the essential link between sex and the forces that hold the universe together…”
At Queer Spirit Festival, a 5 day outdoor festival in the UK attended by 500 people at its 2019 manifestation, the Sacred Sexuality Temple was a massive hit. The temple workshops, sex rites and play parties were all full to the brim. You wouldn’t know it by looking at most gay porn, apps or media, but many gays get that sex is a spiritual action as much as a physical one, and therefore worth doing with skill, openess and attention. Good sex takes you to God/Goddess. The gays of the 70s knew this, that’s why they named our big London temple of dance and cruising ‘Heaven’.
Festival attendee Naked Angel wrote about his experience of the festival and the Sacred Sexuality Temple:“I refer to it as my metamorphosis, because I changed from a dull caterpillar into a beautiful sexual butterfly. The festival completely changed my outlook on sex and sexuality and liberated me from the mindset that had held me back and repressed me for far too long. I suddenly saw that sex was not something to be hidden away but something sacred and joyful, something to be celebrated. illuminated – floodlit, even! I embraced my new-found sexual freedom wholeheartedly. I surprised myself by entering the Sacred Sexuality Temple, naked yet totally unconcerned, and happily accepted the invitation of two guys to engage in sexual intimacy with them. And I was unconcerned too when a group of guys entered the marquee, sat close by, and began to watch. Since then, my sex life has blossomed, I have enjoyed taking part in sex parties/orgies and I’ve explored many aspects of sex that I would have been afraid to try before; and I am keen to extend and deepen my experience in every way I can… Oh, and I fell in love at Queer Spirit too. The affair was hot and passionate, albeit all too brief, and it gave a huge boost to my self-confidence as a sexual being.“
Flyer from the first Festival
In ecstatic pagan rituals the world over, genderbending queer shamanic souls have always led groups of people into shared communion with the spirit realms, facilitating a touch of bliss to help people remember their connection to the cosmic realm from which we come. In good gay clubs we do the same, but we have to remember that this power is not for us alone, it’s designed for the whole world, for to keep it to ourselves will surely bring more disease and destruction. Pleasure is holy and Love is an ever-expanding force, and despite the centuries of lies from religious sources, queers know that pleasure and love are the tickets that take us to heaven. When we rediscover the queer art of the sacred orgy, we develop also the ability to take others along on the ride!
‘What is time? Is it eternity In heaven Or just a hope for peace on earth?’
Billy Porter sings out from the heart, as a liberated queer elder who has “been there, done that, worn that dress” to the young people of today to let their hearts open and their soul’s joyful spirit emerge.
In his song ‘Time’ he shares this deep truth…
‘Time for change Its time to care It’s not too late Don’t despair Reach inside your heart
To find the joy and love To share with all mankind For all we know
All we have Is time’
Since the 1960s the Generations of Love have been waking up to the spiritual reality of life on this planet. But during the past 5 decades the reactionary conservative forces in society have been fighting hard to hold onto the old structures of control, competition and capitalist greed. A science based, materialist, patriarchal culture has maintained dominance over the spiritual aspect of human nature – the urge for peace, for harmony, for love.
During those decades each generation has brought a new wave of awakeners to the divine power of love and the deeper energies moving through human consciousness. I was partially awoken during the early days of house music, when lsd and the inspirational lyrics of those inspired songs led me to open up my mystical inner vision. Then the prospect of dying with AIDS motivated me to search for answers and understanding of those visions, and of the reason for being alive in the first place. Now as the future of life on earth starts to look uncertain, it’s high time the awakeners to love took centre stage in the world’s affairs.
We are alive in the 21st century to create a heart -centred civilisation. The entire 20th century has been a battle on this planet: the forces of love and compassion versus the forces of hate and fear.
The KLF sang “What Time Is Love?” on the early 90s dance floors, now Billy Porter sings “Gotta let these children know what time it is” in his new song:
‘Some people criticize the way you live But don’t you apologize, or dare submit Baby, the children’s where the future is See a change starts today, better wipe those tears away.
I lived a whole lotta life, I ain’t new to this Lotta lows, lotta highs, I stay true to this Take my hand, join the ride You know you’ll have it figured out in time (Yeah)
See, I know times are hard (You’ll get through it, baby) I mean it from the heart You’re not losing the fight Love will make it alright ‘Cause I’ve been there, done that Worn that dress, so you know mama knows it best, I Gotta let these children know what time it is Gotta let these children know what time it is.’
Billy Porter is a RAINBOW MESSENGER, bringing joy, colour, love and HOPE to the world. It’s what queer people do.
At the close of the 1970s, a decade into the journey of Gay Liberation, some queers were probing deep into the roots of gay nature, seeking to uncover forgotten truths about who we are and the roles we fulfil in the human family. Dissatisfied with the conventional, assimilationist direction of the liberation movement, these queers pushed for a spiritual vision that could encompass the fullness, the magnificence, the spirit of queerness. This vision took solid form as the now global Radical Faerie movement, which stands as an example of queers gathering together in non-commercial spaces to build and explore heart-centred, love and compassion focussed community living that embraces caring for the earth, reaching for the stars and communes with the invisible realms of ancestors and spirit.
The vision also appears in some books written in the 1970s – that brief, glorious gay decade when, for those brave enough to face the virulent homophobia of the time and come out, gay men could party without fear of a deadly sexually transmitted disease. These books form a canon of queer sacred texts, that are very different from those produced by religions! Witchcraft and the Gay Counter Culture by Arthur Evans, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Kramer, Men Loving Men: A Gay Sex and Consciousness Book and Visionary Love by Mitch Walker could be said to be our four gospels.
In Visionary LoveGay shamanism is called “work in the mode of death, work with the dying, death of oneself.” Written in the 1970s as the HIV pandemic was brewing in the gay male community, this prescient vision was not really part of the conversation of the 1980s, when fighting for survival became the priority. HIV/AIDS kept the gay community focussed on the exterior struggle, but many of us who lived with AIDS and survived did so because we also took on the inner battle to liberate the Self. My own transformational journey took me over the Rainbow Bridge to a place of vision that completely changed my understanding of life. I died to my false sense of self, and my body survived, so that I might tell the tale. We are not who they say we are. It’s time we all knew it.
“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.”
Mitch felt motivated to write Visionary Love because:
“We gay men are at a key time in the evolution of our gay consciousness. We’ve been struggling to reach a great vision buried in us, which we first sensed only in the vaguest ways. … In the modern Gay Liberation Movement, the history of men’s struggles has been the history of groping towards our vision, sensing it in the values of androgyny, in revolution, in free sexuality. It has led us to Stonewall, to genderfuck, to the birth of a new gay culture.
“But during the past few years, it appeared that our movement ran out of steam; many militant groups faded, as did the brassy colourful rebels and our flagrant joyous celebrations. The seemed to be replaced by a new movement, the vocal gay Normals: fighting in the courts, the churches, the mental health professions, gaining advocate after advocate, victory after victory. It was as if the Homophile Movement for Equal Rights, taking new freedom from our radical flowering, thrust towards its goal of mainstream assimilation leading the mass of gays with them and deflowering our movement, the movement toward our vision.
“The Homophile Movement is a dead thing: dead to the gay vision, anti-magickal, counter-revolutionary. Its spokespeople and theorists shun the roots (the radical, source of nurturance and understanding) in favour of surface values: the social norm, success, integration, acceptance, assimilation. Its shallow reality suffocates the vision in us, co-opting gay people and vitiating the creativity and potential of the Gay Movement.”
Four decades later, in the West at least, gay people have achieved a degree of acceptance and equality that the activists probably never imagined, even marriage is open to us now in many countries. Our situation globally is far from great however, and religiously inspired homophobia continues to darken queer lives. In 11 countries the death penalty for gay sex is still in place. It seems the question of who we are, what we are, why we are as we are, is still not settled. Instead of bewailing assimilation, perhaps we can appreciate that from this stronger base of societal acceptance that it is now time, as a global queer community, to address the roots of our nature and the roots of religious homophobia.
These writers all saw gayness itself as a path to self-knowledge, and queer people as nature people, who, like all indigenous folk, “see life as essentially Spirit-full and essentially good“, and whose destiny is to fulfil the dream of mystics throughout time as we break down the barriers that separate people and “remember we were really SPIRIT all along… then we will assume our responsibilities and complete our tasks in the kosmic scheme of things.”
Visionary Love by Mitch Walker (1980)
I know there exists a gayness, something separate from, and alien to straight modes of being. I know that this gayness excites incredulity, opposition, fear, anger and violence. But I also know that gayness inspires strength, love and profound visions in those who are of it. I can feel these vision in my heart.
I look into my heart and hear messages from beyond, beyond that phoney who-I-thought-I-was, beyond straight society, beyond western culture, beyond time and space. I see an ancient, ancient wise being in my Self, I see new forms of evolving conscious beings, new forms of society, culture, reality. I feel the strong presence of a great wheel turning, the wheel of death/rebirth.
I see visions that the life-source is changing, so that whatever is not of this Changing but is old and prior to it will be cut off, will run out of life and drop into extinction. I see gayness as very much a part of, caused by, leading into and through this Changing. I see gayness as a door, a source, a spirit, a lover, a teacher, or rather as sourcing, enspiriting, loving, teaching. It spirits me away somewhere magickal, strange, profound. I meet teaching wierdness, opening/expanding/dropping me into lights. I feel ecstasy, wonder, delight. I feel SPIRIT.
The sense of gayness as a Spirit path is growing….We discover anarcho-sissydom, life-loving faggotry and more.
Our straight socio-cultural enculturations have blinded us. We must turn to the freer world of our imagination, fantasy, dreams, myths…. Let us build fairy mythologies – gay ways of thinking and doing – to realise and protect our loving soulful brotherhood, to reclaim our Selves, recreate our culture, regain our heritage, remember our fates as beings of Spirit, wisdom, power compassion, truthfulness, light.
This book is myth-building in action… Herein lie fairy tales for reference, example and support in combatting that straight dark maze of manly engulfment… I’m building thoughts of paths to places/lives which do not exist in any straight world, which are simply nowhere. I suppose we could cal this gay theology, philosophy, psychology, politics, physics. But my desire is not to recreate straight academia, but turn you on. My desire is life, not death, freedom, not slavery, for all of us, equally.
I hope we will grow, flow, coagulate, build these loving healing supportive friendships, networks, matricies, homes, communities and non-institutions so vital for our survival. Let’s make living crystal balls, magickal doorways, transformational half-way houses, transmutational fairy cyclotrons. Let’s cross the abyss on silvery wings to new worlds/lost hoes and re/e/emerge with the Great Spirit of all. Let’s have mass migrations.
As we depart from straight realms our thoughts, languages, lifestyles, environments will all change. Periods of confusion and disorientation are inevitable. But keep in mind that, as a gay person, the trip from straight to gay is a healing journey, a journey to wholeness, to health… The prison walls of straight space, straight time will crumble. There are multitudes of dimensions, realities and beings in existence, and much may seem unbelievably or even terribly fantastic at first.
We will change, we will transmute ourselves. Like Native Americans and most all nature peoples we will come to see life as essentially Spirit-full and essentially good. The sun, moon and earth feed us, and we will learn that we are each sun, moon, earth and all else. Then we will be entering our fate to become and be gay. SPIRIT – the intelligent power shaping and sustaining matter, space, time- will bless us, and we’ll remember we were really SPIRIT all along, and then we will assume our responsibilities and complete our tasks in the kosmic scheme of things.
May we be open.
May we be with Harmony and Inspiration.
May we dance and sing our questings, our sorrows and happiness, and taste ecstatic Joy.
May we be healed, and become Whole.
May we be Truth, Compassion and infinite SPIRIT.
A new age, a complete change in all current forms of society, a complete change in what it means to be human…. We gay people have been put in an important place on humanity’s path towards this goal. Edward Carpenter, the great gay visionary, was one of the first to notice this publicly when he wrote in 1919 that gay people “point to a further degree of evolution than usually attained, and a higher order of consciousness.” (Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk)
Being a crazy faggot is part of our radio-reception equipment for the signals across the Bridge. Our norole emptiness provides the tuner to receive the spirits. That’s why we’re called fairies, faerie being the name of the spirit-land in Celtic mythology.
All faggots are feminists, and militant ones at that. To cultivate your woman-energy, your feminism, is to increase your ability to see and walk through the great portal. In fact it’s essential.
“The commitment to ending male dominance as the fundamental psychological, political and cultural reality of earth-lived life is the fundamental revolutionary commitment.” Andrea Dworkin. The commitment of a gay man to ending male dominance within himself is a great and magickal Nightjourney of shamanistic trial and transmutation, a complete and thorough self-alteration, a great and living Round in growing, glowing consciousness, a double-helixed, evolutional Self dancing.
If cocks aren’t used as blunderbusses, they can become fine-tuning knobs on your spiritual tv set.
…have you ever been in love, had any lovers? Every lover contains a spirit. This spirit-being can be a potentially great ally for each of us in our quest. He can become your soul-guide, leading you into yourself.
Imagine that Visionary Love is first seeing, then recognising, and finally joining a vital, mythic, on-going struggle for the universe of free being, for the universe of your true gay being, for worldwide justice for all beings on all levels, a deeply revolutionary com/passionate karmic work with pattern and purpose involving evolution, consciousness, creatures of false and true self, of straightman’s societies and anarcho-communual Spirit utopias, forms of living zombie death and magickal spiralling kozmic ecstasy, reality-forms of a multi-level, multi-sexual political melodrama.
NEW AGE FAGGOT BECOMES SORCERER
At this time and place we have access to much wise knowledge. Sometimes we have to dig for it, sometimes it comes right at us, unbidden. This knowledge is available to aid you on your path. Much of it relates to spirit energies, to enhancing rapport in their realms. … All kinds of fairy tales cultural myths, religious objects such as statues and paintings, are highly symbolic. All spiritual and religious holidays, rituals, dances and orgies are methods to summon the energies. If you see them in this light, they can help you on your way.
This is a time of great transition, and there is much stress…. There is a great Event happening, something vast, right now as I write these words. You won’t read about it in the newspapers, although it’s present in almost every story. It is not political, economic, social or military, yet affects all these aspects of life.
This event is originating at a much deeper level… It includes and permeates our entire planet. It shakes me to our depths. It frightens me. Everyone and everything with eyes, ears and other senses can see, hear, feel and even taste it. It’s Here. It’s coming.
I see her coming. Awe fills me. She carries a scythe, with which she reaps worlds. She is a vast Being. She serves the Great Spirit, which is Herself, and so she strides between the stars towards our planet Earth. She has heard and seen and responded.
RAINBOW BRIDGE
The Rainbow Bridge connects Here (so-called material or mundane reality) with There (the meta reality). There is the hub/source of all realities, all wisdom/energy, also called LOKA, the kosmic starpoint. All things ‘spiritual’ originate There. The heart of gayness exists There. The gift of gayness lies in an increasing ability to see and enter on the Rainbow Bridge. I’ve called the heart and gift of gayness ROIKA. But due to anti-gayness gay men have been defused from ROIKA. Thus they can’t pick up messages coming from There. … Anti-gayness is the technique western society developed to keep gay men from actualising our ROIKA. When gay men actualise ROIKA they become a powerful threat to western society.
To realise ROIKA is to transform ourselves.
Crossing the rainbow bridge is tricky and needs caution
Gayness is the power/potential to cross the Rainbow Bridge, through the Androgyne Door called YAN. Those who do this transform themselves totally, become wise and powerful sorcerers helping others do the same. This is ROIKA, the faggot warrior’s path.
Imagine yourself in a womb-matrix, in a warm, protective, nurturant, free space, a place of renewal, of perfect healing, of soft, calm, quiet, floating, peace. And now imagine yourself as that matrix in which you float. Be gentle. Be strong. Be graceful. Be compassionate. Be she who birthed us all, to whom we all return, infinite warmth, infinite safety, infinite caring, infinite acceptance, infinite love. Be peace. Be silence. Be healing. Be all things, and be healing. Bless all he beings who exist, and send them your love. This is the way of Infinite Warmth, who judges not. She is unending unstoppable healing, gentle as water, yet she wears down mountains of pain, suffering and confusion. Peace, peace to all.
ON FAERIE:
“Fairies everywhere must begin to stand tall and beautiful in the sun. Fairies must begin to throw off the filthy green frog-skin of Hetero-imitation and discover the lovely Gay-Conscious notMAN shining underneath. Fairies must begin creating their new world…” Harry Hay
Let me tell you a story:
About types of beings generically called Fairies, about their characteristic consciousness, their strange awareness, called faerie. Faerie is a see-ing through polarity. In straight consciousness Bi-Polar Thought is king: male and female are opposites, win-or-lose is the game, reality and dream are separate, immutable and contradictory. But there are Fairies, who look on in gentle mocking laughter at such childishness, for they know that everyone is now ‘female’, now ‘male’, that no one ever wins when anybody loses, that reality and dream flip into each other at the flick of a glittering wand.
Fairies see polarities dancing, changing everywhere, constantly. So they know that any pole frozen by itself blocks the flow, becomes a dead weight, an illusion hiding true understanding. So they come to realise that every ‘objective’ thing is but a shadow.
Knowing this, the Fairies can’t take themselves too seriously, either, seeing as they are also an illusion. This creates a marvellous lightness! Fairies are truly blessed, truly free modes of being, for they can laugh at themselves in their deepest places, can transcend their ignorance from moment to moment, gliding out of each limit and restriction even as it manifests, emerging from hir own form like a butterfly or a moth.
This wonderful paradoxical freedom from form, this lightness, enable Fairies to fly. It grants them much deep wisdom.
Once someone came and told me this:
“There is an essence, essence of an eternal, hidden, dark, shining, eerie secret: the simultaneous and continuous creation and annihilation of Form, which is the heartbeat of material existence, which is that beingness, that essential is-ness of all that exists there – trees, people, planets, space, time, matter, energy – all is which is Changing, an infinite Pattern, a total-living weave of beams and streams, eddies, swirls, bursts and flows of is-into-not-is, and not-is-into-is, out of and into an unnameable nothingness-One; that all shapes, forms, are bendings and corners of this flowing-is, this power/nothing, the true behind the false behind the true behind the false in a living, pulsing spiral of All-That-Is.
“And those blessed with faerie can gaze into this essence as it were a crystal ball, and it opens their gaze through swirling shapes and colors deeper and deeper until it becomes unfoldingness itself, and they can see through the earth and out to the stars and beyond, and melt into their gaze and become the point in their Eye and flow into the Crystal itself, passing to its Center, and so become themselves There which then too is Here and All and anything, and thereby they are One from the inside with the bendings and corners of realities, and so they are not yet static things but riders of lightbeams, weightless dancers along the edge – indeed they are the Dancing itself, purposeful, masterless, nothing-points of will; they are the flow, the wind, There at the Source.”
Many Fairies are agents of planet Earth. Their faerie-being gives them telepathic union with nature’s heart, such that they flow with her completely, loving her as they do themselves. In return she gives them her wisdom, her being-ness of and deeply loving respect for the joyful fulfilment of each living creature. Thereby these Fairies become living repositories of all nature, they become planet Earth itself.
In this way Fairies can become other planets as well, other times as well.
Almost all human cultures had myths and stories about faerie lands and astral (star-channelling) planes.
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 starts here, in the bowels of falseself bondage.. a book of uppity queer metathought-liberation, of sissy-frying world-slipping survival tactics, of epic reincarnational trueself recovery ploys, of strategic evolutional consciousness flowering fairy tale. We manifest a mutation in consciousness, for which we have been persecuted and exploited. It’s time to stop this stupidity. It’s time to enter our maturity. It’s time.
Darkness grows in 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.
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.
To be taken by loving Fairies is truly Self-transporting, truly not describable, true Self return, dis-adoptioning, un-orphanising, and real-istically dis-covering, non/sensically re-membering aerotically re-entering faerie family homes. Peace, equanimity, wholeness. Homosexual – gay – faggot – fairy – gone.
Let us create, conspire, organise and plot, spread, evolve, manifest our fates. Let us sing our songs, dance the Dance. Let us be/come Fairies!
Heretofore hidden Rainbow Lovers reach out to their seedling brothers and caress them into maturity, into their ageless soulful Rings. Self uncovers itSelf.
Gay spirit is profoundest love and knowing. A magnificent liberation is possible now for those who remember their true nature as reality-channeling as faerie Selves.
Think of Fairy as a symbol, representing or triggering experience of joyful freedom from the myth of One Highest, liberation of be-ings and conscious forms from the bondage of oneself, opening up to the kosmopolitan nature of Self-universe, to the multivarious unitary truth of the matter.
“Fairies must begin creating their new world through fashioning for themselves supportive Families of Conscious Choice, co-joined in the vision of LOVE (which is the granting to any and all others that total space wherein each may grow and soar to his own freely-selected full potential). Let us gather to find new ways to cherish one another, to reach towards spiritually-sustaining and emotionally-supportive Gay Family Collectives, within which we can explore, in the loving security of shared consensus, the bottomless depths and diversities of the newly-revealed subject-SUBJECT inheritances of the Gay Vision.”HARRY HAY
which is maybe why some straight Christians hate gays.
They were known as the Qedesh, the Anointed –
People went to see them to make offerings to the Gods,
seeking answers through divination or to receive a blessing
body to body, soul to soul
– a visit to the temple helped people remember being part of the Whole –
connected to the gods and spirits,
the guardians of our days on earth –
the Anointed Ones embodied the sacred
through the maleness and femaleness in their bodies,
but the Christians called the Qedesha ‘whores‘,
‘womanish-men‘, ‘ritual shrine prostitutes‘,
who indulged in all the ‘abominations of the heathens‘
that were very common back then
in the worship of the Goddess,
whose temples had stood for millennia
across the ancient world.
Gayness is a vibration
that communicates through love
Queerness is a frequency
connecting the worlds below to the worlds above.
Queer souls were often honoured
in pre-Christian times and in all parts of the globe
for the spirit they embodied
which set them out for special roles.
Third-gendered or homosexual,
inverts, intermediates or Uranians
Ganymedes or Gays, Queers or Queens:
We have always been around
whatever we are named
and we have always sought out pride in who we are
despite the imposed fear and shame.
Despite the dark religious times, in the monasteries we continued our service to the God
as had happened since ancient days;
in the universities we taught
continuing the Greek’s philosophers’ ways;
in the theatres we brought spirit to the people
as Dionysus had done for the ancients –
we manifested gaiety, laughter, we sought and celebrated pleasure
in which we found the keys to the soul’s true sacred treasure.
We filled royal courts and army ranks,
molly houses and brothels
and despite the laws, the sermons, the torture, the hangings, the burnings
and the exiles, fines, stocks, prisons and psychiatric wards,
Queer Love never went away –
for there will come a time
when queer love will change the way humans pray.
Queers are the people of Aquarius
Ganymede is our God, Love is our Goddess.
We are born to awaken to cosmic consciousness
once we are ready to transcend the little self
and become again the bearers and sharers
of the secrets of the soul’s divine wealth.
But in a world that’s blind to its cosmic destiny
it’s easy to get hooked on shortcuts to ecstasy
and damage our mental health.
The world wants to keep us obsessed with the exterior play
but we should remember there is also another way –
that of the mystic, the seeker, the fool
who trusts in the cosmos and sees life as a school
in which in order to grow, we have to question the rules.
Being queer was long seen as a sin
for which severe punishments were inflicted,
then was pathologised by science and medicine
the ‘homosexual’ was invented.
But Love is what drives our queer hearts
and sex is just sex in the end
except when it’s fuelled by love
then it’s here to help us transcend
our sense of isolation and fear:
there’s more than sexuality to being queer.
“The One divides into the Manyin order to experience the Many as the One.
Heterosexual attraction manifests the delightthe Many experience in its variety.
Homosexual love witnesses to the One’s desire to return to Itself and to experience the multiplicity of the Many as a reflection of the Self of the One.”Toby Johnson
rainbow messenger 