In the year 2000 I was emerging from five years in a transformational cocoon called AIDS, wondering how to integrate the cosmic experiences I had been having with being part of the world and joining the living again. The series of Conversations with God books by Neale Donald Walsch were a vital source of insight for me and here are some quotations from Book 1 which I recorded in my notes at the time to refer back to. Two decades later I can happily confirm that I have found all these claims and statements to be utterly true, and the affirmations very powerful..
“THERE IS ONLY ONE PURPOSE FOR ALL OF LIFE AND THAT IS FOR YOU AND ALL THAT LIVES TO EXPERIENCE FULLEST GLORY.”
“If you knew Who You Are – that you are the most remarkable, the most splendid being God ever created – you would never fear.”
“My purpose in creating you, My spiritual offspring, was for Me to know Myself as God. Thus it can be said that My purpose for you is that you should know yourself as Me.”
“Your job on Earth… is not to learn (because you already know) but to remember Who You Are. And to remember who everyone else is. That is why a big part of your job is to remind others, so that they can remember also.”
“You are not discovering yourself, but creating yourself anew. Seek, therefore not to find out Who You Are, seek to determine Who You Want To Be.”
Life is not a school: “School is a place you go if there is something you do not know that you want to know. It is not a place you go if you already know a thing and simply want to experiences your knowingness.”
“It is is not God’s function to create, or uncreate, the circumstances or conditions of your life. God created YOU, in the image and likeness of God. YOU have created the rest, through the power God has given you… In this sense, your will for you is God’s will for you.”
“You will not have that for which you ask, nor can you have anything your want. This is because your very request is a statement of lack, and your saying your want a thing only works to produce that precise experience – wanting – in your reality. The correct prayer is never a prayer of supplication, but a prayer of gratitude. When you thank God in advance for that which you choose to experience in your reality, you, in effect, acknowledge that it is there… in effect. Therefore, never supplicate. Appreciate.”
“Listen to Me in the truth of your soul. Listen to Me in the feelings of your heart. Listen to Me in the quiet of your mind. Hear Me, everywhere. Whenever you have a question, know that I have answered it already. Then open your eyes to the world.”
“YOU ARE MY BODY.
“As your body is to your mind and soul, so, too, are you to My mind and soul. Everything I experience I experience through you.
“I AM THAT I AM
AND YOU ARE THAT YOU ARE. You cannot not be.
You can change form all you with, but you cannot fail to be.”
***
“Be a light unto the darkness and curse it not, and forget not Who You Are in the moment of your encirclement by that which you are not. But do you praise to the creation, even as you seek to change it. And know that what you do in the time of your greatest trial can be your greatest triumph, for the experience you create is a statement of Who You Are- and Who You Want To Be.”
“THERE IS ONLY ONE REASON TO DO ANYTHING: AS A STATEMENT TO THE UNIVERSE OF WHO YOU ARE.”
“Events, occurrences, happenings, conditions, circumstances – all are created out of consciousness. Individual consciousness is powerful enough. You can imagine what kind of creative energy is unleashed whenever two or more are gathered in My name. And mass consciousness? Why, that is so powerful it can create events and circumstances of worldwide import and planetary consequences.”
“Pain is a result of wrong thought. It is an error in thinking. Pain results from judgment.”
“Original sin is when your first thought about something is in error. That error is compounded many times [by more thoughts]. It is the job of the Holy Spirit to inspire you to new understandings, which can free you from your mistakes.”
“You are your own rule-maker. You set the guidelines. And you decided how well you have done; how well you are doing.”
“You may do was you wish without fear of retribution. It may serve you, however, to be aware of the consequences.”
***
“I do not want your worship, I do not need your obedience, and it is not necessary for you to serve Me….
“I desire first to know and experience Myself, in all my glory – to know Who I am.
“Second, I desire that ou shall know and experience WhoYou Really Are, through the power I have given you to create and express yourself- in whatever way you choose.
“Third, I desire for the whole life process to be an experience of constant joy, continuous creation, never-ending expansion and total fulfilment in each moment of now.”
The Soul seeks “the highest feeling of love you can imagine…
“The highest feeling is the experience of unity with All That Is. This is the great return to Truth… This is the feeling of perfect love.”
***
Religions tend to make us feel bad in order that we will strive to be better, but the faster route to the same destination is
“ACCEPTANCE OF WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE RIGHT NOW – AND DEMONSTRATION OF THAT.”
“Celebrate and enjoy all that you create, have created… Whatever is now presenting itself as part of your creation, own it, claim it, bless it, be thankful for it… for to condemn it is to condemn yourself…
“If there is some aspect of creation you find you do not enjoy bless it and simply change it. Choose again. Call forth a new reality. Think a new thought. Say a new word. Do a new thing.”
“The word “I” is the key that starts the engine of creation. The words ‘I AM’ are extremely powerful. They are statements to the Universe. They are commands.”
“WORRY is just about the worst form of mental activity – next to hate, which is deeply self-destructive. Worry is wasted mental energy. It also creates bio-chemical reactions which harm the body… Worry is the activity of a body that does not understand its connection with Me.”
“The soul conceives, the mind creates, the body experiences… The soul then knows itself in its own experience.
“What you conceive you create, what you create you experience, what your experience you conceive.”
***
SEX: “The energy that underscores sex is the energy which underscores life; which is life! The feeling of attraction and the intense and often urgent desire to move toward each other, to become one, is the essential dynamic of all that lives.”
“Play with sex.. it’s just about the most fun you can have with your body… But, for goodness sake, don’t destroy sexual innocence and pleasure and the purity of the fun, the joy, by misusing sex. Don’t use it for power, or hidden purpose; for ego gratification or domination; for any other purpose than the purest joy and the highest ecstasy, given and shared.”
***
DEATH: “You are a tri-part being, made of body, mind and spirit… upon death, the body and the mind are not dropped. The body changes form, leaving its most dense part behind, but retaining its outer shell. The mind goes with you too, joining with the spirit and the body as one energy mass of three dimensions, or facets.”
“The greatest gift you can give the dying is to let them die in peace – not thinking that must ‘hang on’, or continue to suffer, or worry about you at this most crucial passage in their life.”
***
“You are goodness and mercy and compassion and understanding.
“You are peace and joy and light.
“You are forgiveness and patience, strength and courage, a helper in time of need, a comforter in times of sorrow, a healer in time of injury, a teacher in times of confusion.
“You are the deepest wisdom and the highest truth, the greatest peace and the grandest love.
Returning to spend time in the town of my childhood, Stowmarket in mid-Suffolk, after 3 decades away, I am discovering an ancient connection in the land here that is transforming my relationship with my roots. Growing up here in the 1970s-early 80s I formed an impression of Suffolk as a sleepy backwater county, which was historically important but now more the target of mockery (eg Slow-Stowmarket was a butt of Terry Wogan’s Radio 2 jokes): ‘Silly Suffolk’ was a common term, but we didn’t know that the phrase originated in medieval times as ‘Selie Suffolk’, meaning ‘Holy Suffolk’ due to the large number of religious institutions in the county and also due to the reverence felt for St Edmund, the Saxon king killed by the Danes (and for a long time the patron saint of England), centred at his shrine in Bury. In fact Suffolk had been a hot spot of pagan religion too, going back thousands of years: Wikipedia’s History of Suffolk page starts its story with the 5th century Angle kingdom, which was divided into ‘Suthfolc’ and ‘Norfolc’, but I am finding that in order to get a feel of the true spirit of Suffolk there are deeper, older layers to explore.
Certainly the original indigenous culture of this region was lost through a thousand years of invasions and cultural mingling with Roman armies, Anglo-Saxon then Viking tribes. But that culture had deep roots – it had been developing over several thousand years prior to the Roman invasion, and during that long period through the Stone and Bronze Ages the people here had already known contact via the sea with the European mainland, though it seems not so much during the Iron Age (from c600 BCE), when it seems ‘Pretannike’ – the land of the painted people, as Britain was called by Greek explorer Pytheas in the late 4th century BC – became a place feared by continental peoples a mysterious land of fierce tattooed warriors and abode of the dead. Fishermen on the Brittany shores told tales of being guided at night to ferry boat loads of dead souls across the Channel.
It is now thought by archaeologists that the mingling of proto-British and Celtic populations from the mainland over many centuries from the mid 5th millennium BCE was largely peaceful, though DNA studies suggest the original inhabitants of the British Isles, those talented beings who built so many funeral tombs and stone circle monuments from the Orkney Islands to Stonehenge during the Neolithic era (the Late Stone Age), were replaced entirely by the new Europeans. Legends of the Stone Circles being built by giants, our great, powerful ancestors were all that remained – and some of their bones.
During the late Neolithic, at the same time as Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill were being built in the west country, extensive flint mines were opened up at Grimes Graves near Thetford and the region went on to develop into a major centre of metalworking during the Bronze Age, 2000-700 BCE. Stone and Bronze Age settlements in Suffolk have been unearthed at Woodbridge, Barham, Felixstowe, Saxmundham.
British tribes at time of Roman Invasion, 1st century CE
Bronze Age Britain was an age of increasing wealth and abundance in which the Druids rose to the fore as powerful spiritual leaders. The Druids of Gaul even told the Romans that their craft originated in Britain and that it was to Britain that men and women went for intensive training in the magical arts. Roman writers reported that the Druids taught that the soul reincarnates, which belief made the Celts fearless warriors in battle, even fighting naked to show their lack of fear (and to intimidate the metal clad Romans) . Gradually the British land became home to several well-established tribes, which we know about through Roman records. These tribes built hill forts and developed fighting talents as resources became more scarce in the Iron Age.
East Anglia was a busy region in the centuries leading up to the Roman invasion, as evidenced by the Bronze Age remains found at Flag Fen (where sacrificial offerings of swords, spearheads and gold jewellery were given to the water over 1200 years) and Snettisham (a hoard of over 70 complete and many broken precious metal torcs from 1st century BCE found here). The Iceni tribe in the north of the region were a rich and well established tribe when the Romans arrived in the 1st century CE, the Trinovantes lived to the south, centred on Essex. The dividing line between the two tribes lay in Mid Suffolk, in the Stowmarket area, the River Rat was a a border.
Baker and historian of the adjacent village of Haughley, Kieron Palmer, in a booklet about Haughley Church records that evidence of Druidic worship has been found at the western side of the village and that the west wall of the Church was discovered to be “underpinned by gruesome alleged Druidical sacrificial burials when restored in the 1950s”. Recent archaeological digs at a building site in Haughley have turned up evidence of human activity here ever since the late Paleolithic period (11,0000-10,000 BCE), with the majority of the finds dating to the early Neolithic (4000-3000 BCE). Beaker pottery also turned up in early Bronze Age pits (2500-1500 BCE) and a later field system in use late Bronze into the Iron Age (1500-400 BCE).
treasure from the Snettisham hoard, 100 BCE
Stowe was an Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘meeting place’ or ‘special place’, and it seems that this point in mid-Suffolk was once an oak-filled centre of Druid activity, occupied for many centuries (evidence of settlement from the Neolithic era has also been found in Needham Market on the other side of the town to Haughley) prior to the arrival of the Romans, who situated their army camps at sites where the Druids held their power. Making a suitable stop point on the Roman road leading up into the Norfolk lands, Haughley was the site of a Roman settlement (a Roman well and and Roman tiles have been found in the area), possibly the place chosen for their army to set up a base from which they could easily suppress Druid activity.
It seems that once the Romans left around 410 CE people in the east enjoyed a fairly peaceful century until the arrival of Angles, Saxon and Jutes from northern Germany. Although many tales of their fierce invasions were told, they soon settled down to administer wealthy kingdoms (as evidenced by the archaeological finds at Sutton Hoo, near to Rendlesham which was their royal capital in Suffolk) For the locals perhaps the Anglo-Saxons brought something of a return to the old gods and rituals of their ancestral past. The Romans had brought their own deities and practices with them, and, unlike in most lands taken under the umbrella of the massive empire, they were not willing to accommodate the practises and presence of the ancient British Druidic tradition. Eventually Christianity arrived also along the Empire’s trading routes and was widespread by the time of the Roman withdrawal. The Angles and Saxons destroyed the Churches and brought polytheism back – for a time, just until the 7th century mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great, which succeeded over half a century in securing most of southern Britain for Christianity. Where the Druids had once operated and the Romans had settled their army the Angles set up their stowe thornea – a place to meet to worship Thor.
Reverend Hollingsworth in his 1844 History of Stowmarket recorded that the name Stow Thorney, as the town is called in the 1086 Domesday Book, was a reference to the area being the special meeting place of the god Thor. Hollingsworth records that relics of offerings to Thor had been found in the churchyard. (He also refers to very large bones found there which he says “are supposed vulgarly to be the bones of our gigantic fore-fathers, who are thought from such evidences to have been men of vast length and strength of limb” – the Stone Age Circle builders?). The hill between Stowe and Haughley/Old Newton was, the Rev says, known as Thor’s Hill. The extensive green in Stowupland (once much more extensive, as the Rev was already saying back in the 19th century) is called Thorney Green, for the same reason. Used as a rallying point and meeting place during medieval and early modern times, it seems that the Saxons were there on the Green also holding their ceremonial celebrations, reigniting the spirit left by the Druids in the previous millennium/millennia.
The Viking invasions in the 9th century involved several battles in the land of the East Angles, Hollingsworth records that in 870 a “ large marauding army marched from Lincolnshire into Suffolk, burning every church, and murdering every religious person in their progress. King Edmund met them near Hoxne, as was there defeated, taken prisoner, bound to a tree, as he would not become a idolater, and shot to death with arrows. In after years, his body was carried to Bederickeworth, a small village, and a sumptuous church erected to his honour, which gave the name of St Edmund’s tun, to that before insignificant place.” Bury St Edmunds was born.
St Edmund
The Reverend goes on to tell us,- “In Old Newton, on the boundary of Stowupland, at the foot of Columbine-hall wood, which winds peacefully up to Gipping-hall, and through whose green meadows the stream forming the head of the river creeps along, there exists a spot of ground, marked as a battle-field, between the Saxon and Dane, and called Stone Bridge. Bones of men and horses in great abundance have been found for many years in that place…The relicts of this ancient period of warfare lie in heaps four or five feet below the surface, and are circumscribed, as if collected together in shallow pits. Bones of horses and men broken and entire are intermingled with spurs without rowels; bits of sword blades two or three inches broad; pieces of the heads of spears; scraps of armour; horses’ shoes of great breadth… Some of the human jaw bones are of vast size.” He records that in contrast to the Saxon invaders, the Danes continue to cause destruction and chaos even after they have subdued the land.
During the medieval era Suffolk held a famous reputation as a centre of spiritual power – hence ‘Selie Suffolk’, which in age of waning belief has become ‘Silly Suffolk‘. By the 13th century large areas of land were controlled and farmed by monastic houses and religious orders of lay brothers – there were 76 monasteries in the county. Stow Thorney was under the patronage of St Osyth’s monastery in Essex, which is why we have the Abbots Hall in the centre of town here. Hollingsworth recorded that the St Osyth abbey was the oldest in England and that it had began as a convent established by St Ositha daughter of king Frithwald, married to Sighere king of the East Saxons. She lived a religious life there but was martyred by the Danes in 653 during a raid. In the early 12th century the Bishop of London set up an Augustinian monastery at the site, naming it after Ositha. Henry I granted the parish lands of the Church of St Peter and St Mary in Stowe to the abbey. The Reverend says the monks “were considered the living memorials of her piety and wisdom”. And regarding Stowmarket, he says “the fortunes of this parish and its hamlets, as a royal manor and borough, is closely bound up with the monastery for several hundred years.”
St Edmunds Abbey then
St Edmunds Abbey now
Nearby Bury, the burial place of St Edmund, the Christian Saxon king defeated in battle by the invading Danes in 869, grew to become one of the biggest pilgrimage sites in Christendom. The Benedictine abbey there was one of the richest in England until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. This act of Henry VIII must have brought big changes to the lives of people in Suffolk, whose whole existence had been so engaged with the Roman Catholic holy orders. Perhaps the void left here in the spirit of the county made it a prime location for the paranoia and cruelty of the witch craze of the mid 17th century. Wise women and wizardly men who had been accepted during the Merry England of the Middle Ages were suddenly under suspicion. In 1645, when Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General set to work in the county, over 100 women and 17 men of Suffolk were sent to trial.
By the late Middle Ages Suffolk was the most populous county in England, from 14 – 17th centuries it was the centre of the cloth industry, and after that the land’s agricultural potential was increasingly engaged to feed the ever growing population of London.
Its sacred sites desecrated by the Protestant Reformation, and its pagan roots under attack, Holy Suffolk fell asleep, gave its spirit instead through produce from its prime farmland, serving the needs of the ever growing nation, whose centre of power had shifted elsewhere.
My reason for sharing this splash of East Anglian history is because the English are in the throes of a massive identity crisis, which might open the way to some new ‘angles’ on our national soul, and its many parts. England is named after the Angles of northern Germany, because they became the dominant force in the post Roman centuries, but the people of this country have for many thousands of years been formed from diverse gene pools coming from the Celtic, Iberian, Germanic and Norse cultures. Perhaps there is a parallel with the USA here, this island was the original destination for those who felt the drive to GO WEST, and we continue to be an ever evolving nation formed of multi-racial mix of beauty and originality, as genes from people conquered by the British Empire are absorbed into the British soul.
So perhaps to be English in the 21st century might even become an aspiration to live beyond attachment to national identity, to become instead a citizen of the world (since being a citizen of the European Union no longer applies). The English lost their original native cultures (those of the Stone Age circle builders and of the Bronze Age Druidic times) under the yoke of invaders beginning two thousand years ago. That spirit of empire building that the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Danes bred into us became stronger than ever in the English people: Scotland, Wales, Ireland were brought under English control and then we built the largest empire in world history.
The decline of Empire happened very quickly in the mid 20th century, and Britain has been struggling for some decades to find peace with a new identity and role in the world. Celtic nationalism has grown in Wales and Scotland but the face generally shown by English nationalism is confused and sometimes brutal. I don’t think this face reflects the English majority at all, I know that at our best we are one of the most liberal, creative and ‘good time’ people on the planet.Most of the free thinking English people I know had already allowed any sense of Englishness to merge into a much broader European reality before Brexit came along. Note that Scotland, Northern Ireland and cosmopolitan London all voted to remain in the European project, it was the English regions leading the Brexit charge, the areas where a sense of nationhood feels under threat.
View at World’s End Lane, Buxhall
Spending time back in the English countryside in Suffolk, I sense how identity is bound up deeply with the land we walk on, the history in it and the memories it holds. Far from being totally convinced by Christianity, the English people long kept their awareness of our own pagan ways alive in various ways, for example Maypoles were still commonly erected everywhere in the 17th century, and a raucous pagan party would ensue. (Actually we were dancing round the maypole at my primary school, Kingsmead in the centre of Stowmarket in the 1970s, perhaps triggering soul memories in us kids!) The persecution of the witches took hold because the old ways were still around, and increasingly feared. Pagan ritual went underground, but witches continued to be known in Suffolk, popping up in newspaper reports and indeed inquests in the 19th century. Faeries too were much spoken of in the county, Stowmarket had a reputation for sightings, some of which the Reverend Hollingsworth recorded in his History, and the River Gipping was associated with mermaids.
In the 1950s the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, which had first become law under Henry VIII, released the pagan British spirit and led to the formation of Wicca, which has become one of the fastest growing ‘religions’ in the world, and which plays a crucial role in the reclaiming of the native, pre Christian, shamanic spirituality of old Europe. The returning ‘Celtic’ paganism speaks the same fundamental language as the nature based spiritualities of all the other people of the world, and helps open the way to deeper understanding of our human relationship with nature and the spirit realms. For me the difference between monotheistic religion and paganism is the former tells u what to believe and how to behave via hierarchy of male priests, the latter empowers us to make our own relationship with spirit, to find our own answers, and anyone can be a priest. Religion is exercise of power over others (and the earth), pagan spirituality teaches the practice of power with, of co-creation and cooperation.
So as well as our rich history, I think we English, in order to have any hope of grasping a healthy national identity for the 21st century, could gain much from reconnecting to and celebrating once more our true native spirituality, and make that identity one that transcends rather than reinforces the warlike and xenophobic history of nationalisms. For the ancient Druids and before them the builders of ancestral tombs and stone circles were in touch with a deep spiritual reality. Being back in Suffolk I am discovering a land of witches, faeries, druids and gods, of magic, mystery, history and holiness. Bring it on! Bring it back! Let’s dance round maypoles and rave like Saxons, let’s weave spells like Druids and cast circles like witches! Let’s engage the secrets held in the land, for in the 21st century we badly need some new ANGLES on being English.
When I came out in 1986 the few books that had been written about the spirituality of gay-lesbian-bi-trans, ‘queer”, people were far from my radar. Nor was I looking for, or open to, any spiritual meaning in my sexuality, I just wanted to have fun, to free my repressed nature, which of course was a completely spiritual goal, I simply didn’t know it.
In the three and a half decades since I found the courage to be true to myself in a world that I knew would judge, even hate, me, many books have been published on the theme of our queer spirit that seek to expand the understanding of what being attracted to people of the same gender is all about. The first I came across was Gay Soul, Mark Thompson’s 1994 compilation of interviews with gay pioneers, bringing names such as Harry Hay, Will Roscoe, Ram Dass and Joseph Kramer into my awareness. This opened up the doors for me to start exploring the possibility that, far from being unnatural and abominable, my gay sexuality might be a holy gift. I soon discovered Mark’s other works Gay Spirit and Gay Body and the mystical writings of Andrew Harvey, whose work Gay Mystics draws out the hidden heritage of queer spiritual voices throughout time and in every corner of the world.
The turn of the millennium brought forth many new works on gay spirit, of course largely unnoticed by the commercially driven mainstream gay world. It’s clear to me that this flowering from mainly gay male writers was part of our response to the devastating challenge of the AIDS years. These books were truly ground breaking and covered all bases – such as offerings from
Andrew Ramer (Two Flutes Playing),
Toby Johnson (Gay Spirituality, Gay Perspective),
Christian de la Huerta (Coming Out Spiritually),
David Nimmons (Soul Beneath the Skin),
John Stowe (Gay Spirit Warrior),
Winston Leyland (Queer Dharma),
Will Roscoe (Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same Sex Love),
Christopher Penczak (Gay Witchcraft),
Michael Thomas Ford (The Path of the Green Man).
These works, all published 1997-2005, were signs of the gradual opening up of the story around the spirituality of LGBTQ+ people the world over, which was also happening in increasing numbers of gay spiritual retreats, queer pagan and radical faerie gatherings at this time, a turning away from the tame and humble words of some gay people defending us within religious institutions and instead proclaiming the innate and ancient power in our sexuality, as well a manifestation of the longing for deeper meaning in their lives and love relationships than the often shallow immediacy of the mainstream gay scene.
These works built on the inspired writings of the earlier pioneers of this path –
Arthur Evans (Witchcraft and the Gay Counter Culture, 1978),
Larry Mitchell (The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions, 1977),
Judy Grahn (Another Mother Tongue, 1984),
Randy P. Connor (Blossom of Bone 1993).
Since 2005 more books have appeared as more authors share their own liberating insights, such as Salvatore Sapienza (Gay is a Gift, 2009) and Caffyn Jesse (Orientation, 2015). Some focus on de-colonising the notion of sexuality from the binary, western, psychological model developed in the late 19th century – when we look at diverse cultures around the globe it certainly becomes very apparent that homo and trans sexualities have a deep association with spirituality, long ago denied in the monotheistic religions. Thomas Prower takes a world tour on this theme in Queer Magic (2018).Raven Kaldera highlights the sacred history and power of gender-variance in Hermaphrodeities, while books such as Arcane Perfection (2017), a second Queer Magic (subtitled Power Beyond Boundaries, 2018), and most recently The Book of Queer Prophets (2020) are compilations of writings by queer individuals each telling something of their personal tale and sharing their unique eye on the world.
My personal journey into magic and consciousness began in 1995, as this wave of queer spiritual energy was building. I explored esoteric schools, eastern spiritual teachings, celtic paganism and shamanism, as I underwent a complete realignment in my own soul. My journey with AIDS was a modern version of a very ancient experience of ego destruction and shamanic rebirth, one that would have been recognised as such in a traditional tribal setting, but which the modern medical world does not comprehend. I survived this annihilation and rebirth through finding a determination I had not known before, a complete devotion to the path of awakening and service, offered to the gay community that we might reclaim our holy queer spirit, discovering and proclaiming who we are, no longer allowing ourselves to be defined as ‘other’ by others; and I offer my work to the whole of humanity as a missing piece of the puzzle that, when put back into its place, will suddenly make the whole picture much clearer to see.
My contribution to the gradual remembrance of humanity’s cosmic nature is not simply intellectual and book bound, it is an engaged practice, a way of life since 25 years, the first five of those in my aids cocoon guided by the loving presence of the goddess and spirit friends, since then in lively, spirited, colourful, exploratory community with other questing queers who seek to release our creativity, passion, power and holiness, and be of service to the world.
My aids shaman books are not intended to explain everything that I want to share (that will come in a prose work later), they are intended to inspire your own thoughts, your own remembrances, your own soul to come forth and guide you. With quotations to make you think and a poetic stroll through past, present and future realities and potentialities. My words are here to help re-align the subconscious mind towards an outlook of compassionate interconnection with all of life, towards holistic creativity and simple acceptance and enjoyment of who we are, and why we are alive at this time. And perhaps move you to explore some of the fantastic written works on the theme of queer spirit and mysticism in general that have emerged in the past decades.
“Many shamans were homosexual; many of the worshippers of the Goddess under her various names and in her various cults all over the world … openly avowed their homosexuality and were accepted and even specially revered as priests, oracles, healers and diviners. Homosexuals, far from being rejected, were seen as sacred – people who, by virtue of a mysterious fusion of feminine and masculine traits, participated with particular intensity in the life of the Source. The Source of Godhead is, after all, both masculine and feminine, and exists in a unity that transcends both…
“Allowing the wisdom of the third and fourth sexes to be fully vocal in our culture would dissolve the false, rigid categorization of “male” and “female”, and the male-centred, male-dominated, competitive, war-and-power obsessed mentality that it keeps alive.”Andrew Harvey, Gay Mystics
“We look forward to creating a genuine Gay culture, one that is free from exploitation by bars, baths, and gay business owners. We look forward to re-establishing women’s mysteries and men’s mysteries as the highest expression of collective Gay culture and sexuality. We look forward to regaining our ancient historical roles as medicine people, healers, prophets, shamans and sorcerers. We look forward to an endless and fathomless process of coming out – as gay people, as animals, as humans, as mysterious and powerful spirits that move through the life cycle of the cosmos….. Like butterflies we are emerging from the shells of our past restricted existence. We are re-discovering the ancient magic that was once the birth right of all human beings. We are re-learning how to talk to the worms and the stars. We are taking flight on the wings of self-determination. Come, blessed Lady of the Flowers, Queen of Heaven, creator and destroyer, Kali – we are dancing the dance of your coming.”Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture
“The position that gay people take in society, the function we so often choose, is that of mediator between worlds….. In a tribal environment, this means shape shifting into wolves, birds, stones, wind and translating their wisdoms for the benefit of the people of the tribe… in the long patriarchal history that has gradually enveloped the world’s people, the gay function has been to make crossover journeys between gender-worlds, translating, identifying and bringing back the information ……..gay culture is always on the cusp of each intersecting world or way of life, on the path between one world and another.”
“The tribal attitude said, and continues to say, that Gay people are especially empowered because we are able to identify with both sexes and can see into more than one world at once, having the capacity to see from more than one point of view at a time.”Judith Grahn, Another Mother Tongue
and finally, here’s an excerpt from
AIDS SHAMAN 3: DIMENSIONAL SHIFT –
Spirituality is the Aquarian way of Self-discovery, of liberation, understanding and loving community.
There is nothing but human minds holding back the progress to unity…. What we conceive we create, we need a new global story that recognises our Oneness and the many routes to Glory.
Earth centred traditions once derided, are now respected For their wisdom and knowledge Of the body, of the stars, of other worlds, of the soul. The Union of all paths is the goal. We’ve tried living without God – God knows we’ve tried – But faith is something that we have deeply invested inside. Until the separate self unites with its deep core,
the divine place in us that knows we are a part of so much more…. Humanity continues to create more and more Drama, discord and disease…
In our struggles we’ve raped and pillaged the earth. 2020s is the decade where we become ready to give birth To an enlightened humanity and change our world.
The elemental structure of Nature Shows us the way to heal, to wholeness, balance, peace. Nature will find a new harmony When the madness in humanity has ceased.
Diana was the name given to the people’s beloved Goddess, worshipped in Europe for over two millennia and still honoured by pagans today. The devotional love that she once inspired in the wider population reappeared in a very modern form as the almost cult-like reverence of Diana, Princess of Wales, who is back in the news recently, 23 years after her tragic death, and back in people’s thoughts due to the popular TV series The Crown. 23 is considered a very powerful prime number in witchcraft and magical practice suggesting the modern relationship with Diana isn’t over yet, so let’s dive into her deep, ancient roots.
In the ancient world Diana was the Goddess of the Hunt, was associated with the Moon and with the goddess of magic Hecate. Being seen as a nature based deity, she was also known as the Mistress of the Animals. While Roman Gods brought order and discipline, she was the deity of all that was wild, free and untameable. Along with the Greek Artemis, with whom she became identified once the Romans absorbed the Greek civilisation, she had very deep pre-historical roots as the patron of hunters and queen of the wilderness.
At the time of the ancient Roman Empire, as growing urban centres became home to organised, mainly male God-focussed, religious cults, the Goddess Diana became known as the Goddess of the Pagans, meaning the country dwellers. Christians were still calling her that in the late Middle and Early Modern Ages, though for the Church pagan had taken on a much darker meaning. For several centuries after the establishment of the new faith Goddess worship continued in the countryside quietly without drawing too much attention, but from the publication of the Canon Episcopi in the early 10th century it drew more criticism and the Christian authorities became increasingly determined to eradicate all remaining pagan worship. This would culminate in the witch hunts of the mid 17th century.
The Canon Episcopi, published around 905 CE said, –
“Some wicked women… believe and profess that, in the hours of night, they ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the goddess of the pagans, and in the silence of the night traverse great spaces of earth, and obey her commands as of their lady, and are summoned to her service on certain nights… an innumerable multitude believe this to be true … and return to the error of the pagans.”
The Canon also mentions some men being involved. Note that no witchcraft or evil intent is mentioned, it was Goddess worship that was being attacked. This text was widely known by the mid 12th century, and alleged incidences of the night-flight ritual rose in number until the 14th.
English priest John of Salisbury condemned belief in the cult of Diana in the mid 12th, and later that century the Anglo-Norman penitential of Bartholomew Iscanus dictated that, –
“They who… believe and profess that they go or ride in the service of her whom the stupid crowd call Herodias or Diana with a countless multitude and obey her commands shall do penance for one year.”
In late 13th century France Dominican friar (and Saint-to-be) James of Bevagna rebuked women “who go the chase with Diana”. Auger de Montfaucon, a bishop in the Pyrenees denounced Diana’s rites:
“Let no woman profess that she rides by night with Diana, goddess of the pagans …. and raise a route of women to the rank of deities, for this is a diabolical illusion.”
Pope John XXII in early 14th century set up an investigation into a group of male magicians who were said to be making sex rituals with Diana. In Exeter, 1351, the bishop objected to the earthy, sexual imagery of the statues installed in a chapel, which “reminded one more of the proud and disobedient Eve, or the shameless Diana, than of the humble and most submissive Blessed Virgin Mary.” Gradually the distinction that some were able to make between Goddess reverence and what some writers at the time considered the ‘new’ cult of witchcraft gave way to a general suspicion and intolerance. Some felt the Goddess worship deserved the greater punishment, because at least witches, who were seen as being in league with God’s opponent Satan, believed in the male God, while the Diana followers regarded her as all-powerful.
In the late Middle Ages Diana even became associated with Mohammed, as Crusaders in the Holy Land connected the crescent moon on the Islamic flags with her. She was called at times the ‘Queen of the Jews’ and the ‘Wife of Mohammed’. By late 14th century Christians were forbidden to even accept that tales of goddess worship were true. Historian Randy P. Connor, from whose masterpiece of research ‘The Pagan Heart of the West’ these examples come from, writes that “Christians were duty-bound to believe and argue that those who claimed to revere Diana were in fact worshipping the devil.” The Council of Amiens in 1410 forbade women from professing that they rode at night to meet Diana, calling that “a demonic illusion.” Gradually, Diana worship was becoming fully associated with dark witchcraft. Amiens set out that if a priest should “find a man or woman follower of this wicked sect… eject them, foully disgraced, from their parishes.” The infamous Malleus Maleficarum of 1487 (‘The Hammer of Witches’), that would be such an evil tool in the witch hunts of the 17th century, gave instruction to reject claims of riding with Diana as “in truth they are riding with the Devil, who calls himself by some such heathen names and throws a glamour before their eyes.”
This kind of condemnation continued through the next century with a notable exception from Dominican priest Johannes Cagnazzo de Tabia, who in his Summa of 1515 put the case that while both witchcraft and Goddess sects promoted “voluptuous pleasure“, the witches “work much evil“, including causing sickness and death, while Diana’s followers do “none of these things”.
By the fifteenth century the tactic used by the Inquisition was to simply deny the reality of the Goddess Diana, and the night flights that women (and some men) were said to take with her, seeing all such claims as diabolical delusions, and torturing its victims until they affirmed that to be the case. Yet there were some who distinguished between witchcraft practised with evil intent and the ages – old, and not at all malevolent, reverence of the Goddess of the Pagans. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, while not organised as a formal cult, the worship of Diana continued, and she retained a special place in people’s hearts, throughout the Christian centuries.
Historian Oliver Madox Hueffer (1877-1931), in The Book of Witches, 1908, traced the connections between witchcraft and ancient reverence of the Goddess, especially Diana and concluded that “the worship of Diana which for 600 years persisted side by side with Christianity… is far from being altogether extinct in Italy even today.”
Artemis of Ephesus
Temples dedicated to Diana had also once existed, probably the oldest and most well known in the world being the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. This Greek Goddess also had agrarian roots and was famously served by virgin priestesses and eunuch priests. This temple was destroyed by Christians by the year 401 but it was at this site that a meeting of Church leaders just 30 years later gave the Virgin Mother Mary be the divine title, Theotokos, Mother of God. This gave the Church what it needed to re-direct the centuries-old deep devotional love for the Goddess towards the new cult of Mary.
In London the cathedral of St Paul was built in year 604 at a site of Diana worship. Yet a thousand years later Diana rites were still sometimes happening here! Antiquarian William Camden (1551-1623) witnessed a Diana ceremony there and Dutch humanist and priest Desideraius Erasmus (1466-1536) wrote of Londoners making a procession to St Paul’s carrying a deer’s head on a spear, accompanied by men blowing horns. As late as the 19th century writer W. Greetheed recorded seeing a stag’s head atop a spear being carried about in the church, “with great solemnity and sounds of horns… Certain it is this ceremony savours more of the worship of Diana and of Gentile errors than of the Christian religions”.
At Cheapside, north of London Bridge, a large Christian cross was frequently defaced (probably by Protestants) and rebuilt in the 16th century. In his Survey of London John Stowe recorded that there was “set up a curiously wrought tabernacle of grey marble, and in the same, an image alabaster of Diana, and water conveyed from the Thames, prilling (ie flowing) from her breast.” Art was made in the Renaissance that depicted Mary standing on a crescent Moon, merging her the with the symbolism of Diana.
The Witchcraft Acts in England, the extreme blood-thirstiness of the Inquisition on mainland Europe and the witch craze of the second half of the 17th century, all served to drive pagan worship even further underground, yet the spirit of Diana has not left us. She was the beloved Goddess of the People for at least 1500-2000 years, she is the Queen of Hearts as her modern avatar Princess Diana became known.
When Lady Di became Princess Di she captured the hearts of the nation, if not the world. Some cultures, especially in the Far East know Britain through magical faerie tales and royal dramas, they see us as the land of myth and mystery, as indeed did the ancient Celtic, Germanic, Roman and Greek worlds. Diana’s story fed this dream of Britain as the New Jerusalem, the home of the Holy Grail, and the dream of the return of the Divine Feminine to her rightful place alongside the male God, a dream that sits as a longing, often unnamed, in the hearts of all souls across the world.
When Princess Diana died in the Paris tunnel (underworld symbol! so many Goddess myths involve her experiencing a journey to the land of death), I was myself hovering between the worlds, sick to the max with full blown AIDS. In July 1997 I had been hospitalised with PCP and had been lucky to survive. My return to health would begin early in 1998, and the second half of ’97 was the lowest physical point of the journey. But spiritually it was one of the most amazing and revelatory. At the start of 1995 I had dropped my atheistic mindset and dived into a spiritual journey of self discovery, inspired and fed by western pagan magic, eastern religion and from mystics of all the world’s magical and religious traditions. My overwhelming impression was that the missing element in all the religious debates and in the modern scientific culture was the Goddess. Spiritual practice and good healing marijuana herb brought me into direct communion with her. My soul came to life as my body faded away.
I learnt that in my soul I am, and have been since many centuries (millennia?), a priest of the Moon. It took me some years to grow in understanding of what this might mean in the world today. Since 2005 I have been hosting FULL MOON DRUM CIRCLES in south London, where several dozen people meet for an evening of rhythm, ritual and dance. From stillness to ecstasy we unite bodies, minds hearts and spirits for a moment of healing, release, rebalancing and community that connects the earth, the skies and us. We go home charged up and nourished.
In this practice I regard the drum circle rites as a chance to explore the ecstatic, communal roots that were the core of the nature based spirituality that stretches back on the British Isles for at least 5000 years (and of such practices the world over, the suppression of which our Christian European forebears were responsible for). This land of magnificent neolithic burial tombs, ritual landscapes and stone circles, was once a bronze age paradise that people across the European mainland feared as the land of the dead, guarded by ferocious tattooed tribes. The name Britannia evolved from Pretanikkai – meaning the painted people, as told to 4th century BCE Greek merchant Pytheas by the Gauls across the Channel, the people of Britain called themselves ‘Pretani’. The name given by the Romans to the unconquerable northern tribe – the Picts – also referred to this body art, as did the Welsh name for the people to the east – Prydyn.
Druids led the religious life of the painted peoples of Britain, a group so powerful and ancient that the first Greek philosophers regarded them as their forebears and the Romans, unlike in most other lands, made no attempt to bring their religion into the umbrella of the Empire’s divine pantheon, they had to be crushed. The ancient practices of the British Isles were lost, but the Romans brought their own deities with them, and Diana worship would have likely synchronised well with the native cult practices. After the Romans came Angles, Saxons and Jutes from northern Germany, bringing the Norse Gods into the mix, and leaving such a mark that we name most of the days of the week after them.
During the Christian hegemony Britain has never entirely lost its connection to its pagan past – during the centuries that the Witchcraft Act was in force there were still plenty of active magical groups, from the Rosicrucians to the Golden Dawn, and in the 20th century the UK gave birth to the now global spiritual path Wicca. But we have lost touch with our history. Yet, as I discovered when hovering between the worlds while living with AIDS, that long journey is still alive inside us. When we let the obsessive grip of the outer world drama drop and turn heart, body and mind to the soul inside, for which there is no better outer symbol than the Moon going through her phases, we can access the light and love of the Mother Goddess to guide us in life.
Diana wants us to know.
Want more? Try this excellent YouTube presentation on the cult of Diana, Goddess of the Pagans
“Diana was the goddess of the hunt and of all newborn creatures. Women prayed to her for happiness in marriage and childbirth, but her strength was so great that even the warlike Amazons worshipped her. No man was worthy of her love, until powerful Orion won her affection. She was about to marry him, but her twin brother, Apollo, was angered that she had fallen in love. One day, Apollo saw Orion in the sea with only his head above the water. Apollo tricked Diana by challenging her to hit the mark bobbing in the distant sea. Diana shot her arrow with deadly aim. Later, the waves rolled dead Orion to shore. Lamenting her fatal blunder, Diana placed Orion in the starry sky. Every night, she would lift her torch in the dark to see her beloved. Her light gave comfort to all, and soon she became known as a goddess of the moon. It was whispered that if a girl-child was born in the wilderness, delivered by the great goddess Diana, she would be known for her fierce protection of the innocent.”
Diagnosed HIV+ in 1990 when aged 25, and Long Term Survivor of AIDS, I have lived most of my life with a deadly virus in my body. I have thought long and hard about what a virus is on a metaphysical level, why it affects some people and not others, why it has different effects on people. Inspired by the likelihood of death looming over me in the 1990s I dived into spiritual study and practice in order to get a better, deeper understanding of life and soon came to respect the HIV virus as being a profound catalyst for my personal evolution.
There are many voices in the world today telling their tales of awakening, healing and growth through health crises. I am one of those people with such a tale to tell. HIV pushed me to drop my materialistic, atheistic beliefs about existence and explore mystical teachings. As I came closer to death (with a CD4 count of 3 at the lowest point in ’97) I surrendered my thoughts, my beliefs, my pain to the conscious universe and began a conversation with it that has never stopped since. I believe a combination of human and spiritual love alongside a positive mindset kept me alive until effective medication arrived to help, and I emerged from AIDS as a healer, a man with a sense of purpose and a trust in the divine plan at work in the universe.
HIV affected certain groups in society more than others, and of course not everybody who lived with AIDS experienced the apotheosis I am speaking of. Those of us who did find a state of transcendence over the darkness of our condition achieved it because we came to understand that we are all always creating our own experience of life in every moment, through our beliefs, thoughts and desires. We accepted we had brought ourselves to this point of challenge and transformation, not blaming others for it and dropping any sense of being the ‘victim’.
COVID-19 is a virus that affects every sector of society, nobody is excluded this time. Despite the upheavals and inconveniences we are all experiencing now the mystic in me is excited to see the opportunity being offered to the whole world to break through the veils of illusion that keep us believing we are separate beings in a principally material universe.
I dropped the belief in separation and allowed my own soul to reveal to me the unity and interdependence of all existence. It is only the human mind that keeps us firmly locked into the experience, the illusion, of individuality. It is designed to do that, so that consciousness – spirit – can explore itself through each of us. Humans love to use alcohol, drugs and sacred medicines because they all alter this sense of separation, they give us a taste of the deeper connected state, but only shifting the way we think can enable us to always be aware of and in tune with it
When we cease to identify with the stories and fears that our ego develops in order to maintain its apparent integrity, and shift instead to seeing the world with the eyes of the soul, life becomes a sacred dance, in which the fear of death changes into celebration of eternal life lived in the here and now, and disease becomes a teacher, a message from the soul, that we are in some way out of balance.
If we come to see existence as a unity, then we can no longer regard a virus as something separate to us. If all Creation is a dance of and within the Divine Mind then the virus, which exists somewhere in the liminal state between life and death (for it has no independent reality at all, it depends on living entities for its own existence), is a parcel of divine consciousness with its own part to the play in the bigger picture of the evolution of life on this planet. A virus brings different life lessons to different people, it can be seen as a messenger with both personal and collective insights to share. HIV brought some deep lessons to the LGBT community and to the other groups deeply affected. COVID-19 has come at a time when climate change threatens our entire global civilisation, and has important lessons to teach.
*****
There are plenty of articles and lots of speculation online about the collective material and spiritual lessons humanity might gain from this pandemic, but I have found very little commentary about the metaphysical level of the nature of the virus itself or about why it has widely different effects on those it infects. This from Misa Hopkins resonates with my insights into why HIV hit me, and hit the gay male population, so hard. On a smaller scale, this is what I see happening every time somebody has the flu or a cold.
“Viruses grab hold when we abandon the self. In other words, they come in and hang out when we are not attending to our bodies’ health or our emotional and mental well-being. We check-out, so-to-speak, by not attending to ourselves, and the viruses check in.
“Viruses are able to gain entry when you are depleting yourself through stress, poor diet, and not enough oxygenation of your cells. You could think of it as creating an internal environment better suited to the viruses than to your health.
“The question you might want to ask yourself to access the metaphysical meaning behind a viral illness is, “What causes you to abandon yourself?”
“Now consider that abandonment occurs when you feel defeated in some way or are pushing yourself because you don’t feel worthy. You’ve abandoned your ability to create a balanced, happy life, because somewhere deep inside, you don’t believe that is possible.”
As well as underlying spiritual causes of this viral pandemic, this is an opportunity to address the spiritual effects of it and the way we each spiritually respond:
“There are three levels of response to theCOVID-19 outbreak: how it affects us physically, mentally and spiritually. The physical response came first, and by now everyone knows about self-isolation, social distancing and testing. The second effect, on our psyches, is being experienced personally but with only fitful answers and advice. The best advice in the mental area is meditation and yoga, relaxation techniques and paying attention every day to finding not just relaxation but joy and comfort in your life.
“But it is the third area, the spiritual effect of the outbreak, that is being neglected, even though the presence of death, whether we want it to or not, evokes concern about the state of our souls. Spiritual well-being is alien to many people’s daily lives, and with the decline of organized religion, millions of people experience a sick soul, however you want to define it — weariness of heart, existential dread, a sinking feeling that nothing really matters — without finding a way out.
“Don’t spend more than a few minutes diagnosing these feelings; everyone is experiencing them.”
He recommends:
Having a sense of meaning and purpose.
Loving and being loved.
Self-esteem, a sense of your own worth.
Tapping into inner peace and joy.
Being of service to others.
Generosity of spirit. “We don’t need to apply the words “religious” or “spiritual” to these modes of healing. They are based on long traditions, both East and West, that have examined and understood the human condition. More to the point, they are practical. They give you a sense of control over your life. By bringing you closer to your soul, spirit, higher awareness or deeper self (choose any term you prefer), these things reverse the most damaging spiritual trend in modern society: the desperate urge to flee from ourselves. “Your soul is the most intimate part of you, and it isn’t found by running away. Write down how you can perform an act of kindness today, show appreciation to someone, offer help to those in need, or bring comfort to someone feeling lonely and anxious — the simple human gestures we tend to overlook. In a time of crisis, the impulse is to go into emergency mode, fear, concern and panic. Giving in to those impulses will engender an epidemic of soul sickness. “I particularly want to underscore the issue of finding inner peace and joy, which can seem like a remote possibility just now and in the coming months. In the world’s wisdom traditions, it has been taught in every culture that inner peace and joy are available only through looking inward. The Old Testament says, “Be still and know that I am God.” The New Testament says that the Kingdom of Heaven is within. The Indian Vedic tradition says that Ananda, or bliss, lies at the heart of creation.”
*****
My journey with HIV/AIDS brought me visions of the enlightenment, healing and spiritual evolution of the human species. It felt to me at the time that the personal spiritual transformation I was undergoing would soon be coming to many more people around the world. A quarter of a century later this process is underway. This is a time of making choices – to seek for deeper understanding, love and healing over succumbing to fear or denial. This is a time of opportunity to spend more time with ourselves, while social activities are curtailed, a time for spiritual practice and for self-healing. For those already on that path this becomes a time of holding steady, of being the presence of love, faith and stability while most of the world reels around us, of continuing with our own path of self-realisation and sharing the light we have in our souls.
*****
I wrote some years ago…..
HIV IS A CALLING TO KNOW OUR SOULS
TO FACE MORTALITY
AND BREAK THROUGH THE ILLUSIONS, CONFUSION AND LIES OF OUR TIME.
HIV IS A CALL TO TURN INWARDS
TO FACE THE SELF
FIND ITS MOTIVATIONS, BLISS, DEEPEST DESIRES AND BRING THEM FORTH.
HIV IS A WAKE UP CALL
TO SEE WE NEED NOURISHING IN SOUL
AS WELL AS BODY.
OPEN TO THE POSSIBILITY THAT THERE IS NO DEATH
ONLY A SHIFT IN PERSPECTIVE
OVERCOME FEAR AND FACE THE SHADOW
EMBRACE THE LIGHT AND GROW
HEALING IS VITAL
This applies as much to COVID-19 as it does to HIV, Cancer or any healing crisis.
*****
Historically, plagues have often been turning points in human development and also catalysts for spiritual and mystical exploration. Here are a few examples from the last millennium:
Mystics who were alive during the Black Death of the mid 14th century included:
John Ruusbroec (1293-1381), Flemish priest believed in embodied union with God and wrote radical, influential works. To him,
“the development of the soul has three stages: Active, Interior, Superessential. The Active life is that which men are most accustomed to: the life of the material world. The Interior life is the life of the spirit that is touched by religious contemplation. And the superessential life is that which lies beyond description and is man’s existence in enlightenment” (quoted from goodreads.com)
Julian of Norwich (1342-c1416), anchoress and wise woman, whose mystical work followed from visions she had aged 30 when a mystery illness seriously threatened her life. In ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ she wrote of the maternal nature of God,
“You would know our Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well. Love was His meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did He show you? Love. Why did He show it? For love. Hold on to this and you will know and understand love more and more”.
Famously she found an optimism and confidence that was unshakeable:
“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
“Greatly ought we to rejoice that God dwells in our soul; and more greatly ought we to rejoice that our soul dwells in God. Our soul is created to be God’s dwelling place, and the dwelling of our souls is God, who is uncreated. It is a great understanding to see and know inwardly that God, who is our Creator, dwells in our soul, and it is a far greater understanding to see and know inwardly that our soul, which is created, dwells in God in substance, of which substance, though God, we are what we are.”
“As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother.”
The Cloud of Unknowing, written c 1375, author unknown, is hailed as one of the most important medieval works on contemplative practice. The book proposes the way to know God is not by analysing his activities and attributes, but by surrendering the mind, the ego, to the state of ‘unknowing’, so that the true nature of God might reveal itself.
” We can not think our way to God. He can be loved but not thought.”
1665-6 saw England hit by a major outbreak of plague.
George Fox, founder of the Quaker movement lived at this time. He believed in equality, non-violence and that it was possible to have a direct relationship with Christ, without the intercession of the Church’s priests, as had the heretical and ‘Free Spirit’ movements that had been destroyed by the Catholic Church. Quakerism looked threatened with the same fate, with Parliament enacting laws against dissent, but in 1689 persecution was ended by the Act of Toleration. The ‘Society of Friends’ spread widely in England and Wales and was soon active in north America, where William Penn established the state of Pennsylvania, running it on Quaker principles.
Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), poet, clergyman and author of ‘Centuries of Meditation” celebrated the glory of his own personal relationship with God, and divine presence in the form of Nature. He called the bliss of knowing God’ will and love ‘felicity’
“You are as prone to love, as the sun is to shine.”
“You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.”
“To think the world therefore a general Bedlam, or place of madmen, and oneself a physician, is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination, and the way to Happiness.”
“Therefore of necessity they must at first believe that Felicity is a glorious though an unknown thing. And certainly it was the infinite wisdom of God that did implant by instinct so strong a desire of Felicity in the Soul, that we might be excited to labour after it, though we know it not, the very force wherewith we covet it supplying the place of understanding.”
“It is a good thing to be happy alone. It is better to be happy in company, but good to be happy alone. Men owe me the advantage of their society, but if they deny me that just debt, I will not be unjust to myself, and side with them in bereaving me. I will not be discouraged, lest I be miserable for company. More company increases happiness, but does not lighten or diminish misery.”
Among prominent 20th century mystics who lived through the Flu pandemic of 1918-20 were
Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), author of ‘Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness’ believed mysticism was for everybody, not just monastics, she saw it as the inevitable future of the human race:
“…speak no more of Father, Son and Holy Spirit nor of any creature; but only of one Being, which is the very substance of the Divine Persons. There were we all one before our creation; for this is our superessence… . There the Godhead is, in simple essence, without activity; Eternal Rest, Unconditioned Dark, the Nameless Being, the Superessence of all created things.”
“When love has carried us above all things into the Divine Dark, there we are transformed by the Eternal Word Who is the image of the Father; and as the air is penetrated by the sun, thus we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us, and penetrating us.”
“We are all the kindred of the mystics. ..Strange and far away from us though they seem, they are not cut off from us by some impassable abyss. They belong to us; the giants, the heroes of our race. As the achievement of genius belongs not to itself only but also to the society that brought it forth;…the supernal accomplishment of the mystics is ours also. ..our guarantee of the end to which immanent love, the hidden steersman. ..is moving. ..us on the path toward the Real. They come back to us from an encounter with life’s most august secret. ..filled with amazing tidings which they can hardly tell… According to their strength and passion, these lovers of the Absolute. ..have not shrunk from the suffering. ..Beauty and agony have called. ..have awakened a heroic response. For them the winter is over. ..Life new, unquenchable and lovely comes to meet them with the dawn.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), scientist, philosopher and Jesuit priest, served in the First World War and later wrote that
“…the war was a meeting … with the Absolute.”
He has been called the first scientist to realise the universe and the human are inseparable and “perhaps the man most responsible for the spiritualization of evolution in a global and cosmic context” (1996 Encyclopedia of New Age Beliefs.)
He wrote, –
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
“Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time.”
“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”
“In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.”
*****
A virus is defined on medicine.net as
“A microorganism that is smaller than a bacterium that cannot grow or reproduce apart from a living cell. A virus invades living cells and uses their chemical machinery to keep itself alive and to replicate itself.”
Philosopher Matthieu Donner writes in ‘Thinking like a Virus: Contagion, Postmodernist Epistemology, and the Ethics of Belief’:
“…like beliefs, viruses also prey, and ultimately rely for their existence, on the host cell(s) they come to parasitize, and only conceptually exist outside of it.
“If the virus exists within the liminal space between life and death, in an in-between which is neither/nor yet always already both, contagion similarly operates as a dissolving force, a process which defies fantasies of control, corrodes internal integrity, and ignores the borders that define and defend identity… As the virus problematizes the possibility of distinction between host and non-host, between life and non-life, contagion more largely exposes the inadequacy of our cultural desire for boundaries. Residing between, in the fluid indistinction characteristic of the point of contact where terms blur into each other, contagion uncovers the operations of culture and reveals the illusionary dimension of any and all distinctions. It loudly exposes the fact that, outside man and the boundaries man has erected for himself in order to make sense of the world, the division between organisms, between life and death, but also between concepts such as truth, knowledge, and belief is one whose ontological foundations is inherently void.”
One way or another the Cosmic Intelligence will eventually uplift the whole of humanity into a sense of connection with its true nature. For many this will be an almighty shock. For those of us on the path to self-knowledge already it will be a much anticipated and welcome moment. For all of us the pandemic of 2020 is an opportunity to up our game, retrain our minds and prepare ourselves for the many shifts coming our way in the years ahead.
Since way back in prehistorical times humans have left behind evidence of a deep emotional, psychological and spiritual relationship with a feminine mother spirit which is noticeably lacking in the mainstream cultures and among the mass of the population around the planet today. For the majority of people in the confused and conflicted, frightened world, the Mother Goddess is Missing: from our relationships, our thoughts and our sacred practice, if we have even have one. The Mother is absent from the world’s collective story and most people’s inner worlds – and this matters, because it is through the feminine that we feel, experience and know our connection to the planet, to wholeness and interdependent unity, to what some call God. The Divine Mother is not just a concept in philosophy, she is a lived experience that most people no longer know about.
Life began in the Oceans. The waters are the womb of life, it was only once life was adapting to living on the land that the penis evolved.The first creatures that emerged from the ocean bore their offspring in eggs – they recreated the ocean inside themselves. The womb evolved on the same principle. The Mother gave birth to life, and ancient archaeology, mythology and religion all affirm that this is how the people once understood it, and that they made great efforts to maintain an active, vibrant, passionate relationship with her.
Venus of Willendorf
Venus of Laussel
The earliest art made by humans, both cave paintings and statuettes, come from the Upper Paleolithic period, 25000 – 10000 BCE, and it almost exclusively features images of women. Some caves appear to have been used as sanctuaries, and the style seems to represent abundant fertility, the famous Venus of Willendorf is one of many examples of items found. The Venus of Laussel, from the Dordogne in France, holds a bison horn at head’s height pointing upwards – an ancient precursor perhaps to the Greek Artemis and Roman Diana, Goddesses of the Moon and the hunt. It is possible that way before the Paleolithic early humans also felt this mother aspect of creation: Neanderthals buried their dead curled in fetal position, likely to represent re-entering the earth (the tomb as the womb) to be reborn again.
From 5000 BCE we have a sudden surge in evidence of a structured and evolved spiritual culture emerging across Europe. Humans shifted from nomadic to a more settled lifestyle, building megalithic stone monuments, elaborate tombs and stone circles, especially along the Atlantic edge of Europe and part of the Mediterranean. The Goddess is represented in the art and architecture of these sacred places, some of which were also aligned to the solar seasonal shifts.
In time the Goddess came out of the caves and into the light via mythology and creation stories. Many Indo-European cultures considered the Sun to be the life-giving Goddess, from the Celts and Germans of northern Europe (in German the Sun is still feminine, die Sonne, and the moon masculine, der Mond, and English still remembers the ‘man in the moon’), to the ancient Scythians, whose formidable Sun Goddess Artemis of Tauris had a big influence on the Greeks. Greek civilisation was developing at the same time as the Hebrew culture in the Middle East, and in both we can observe the transition to male-dominated religion during the first millennium BCE. Artemis became associated with the Moon, though she remained a supremely powerful and respected being, and Apollo took over the Sun crown. The Old Testament records the efforts, over centuries, put in by Hebrew kings (though not all of them) to eradicate worship of Goddess Asherah among their people.
Artemis and Asherah
Around the world the Mother appears in Creation stories and myths: In Japan it was a Goddess presiding over the course of the Sun; the Navajo of north America see the universe as spun into being by Great Spider Woman; the three Norns of Scandinavia also sat spinning the web of life, destiny and fate at the roots of the cosmic world tree, Ygg-drasill; In Egypt the Sky goddess Nut nourished the earth with her rain. The world now names the highest mountain in the world after a British explorer, but to the Tibetans it has always been Chomo-Lungma, Mother Mountain of the Universe. In South America veneration of the Goddess as Pachamama (Mother of Space and Time) has survived centuries of Christianity.
The oldest known recorded story in the world is that of Gilgamesh, from the 3rd millennium BCE, a story of a passionate love between two men and a quest for immortality, in which the Goddess plays a major role. As Ishtar then Inanna in Mesopotamia she was a Goddess of both Love and War, and also gender-transformation, with tales of transgendered people being created to serve her. There are also legends that point to her being usurped by her male son/lover, and her queer priests being outcasts in the world until her eventual triumphant return. The Genesis story of the Old Testament, if regarded in the context of the many creation stories from those times, can be seen as a consciously designed attempt to put women in second place. In this story woman is made from man, the opposite to the biological reality, and told from the start she is there to serve. The Bible compilers chose not to include the other Jewish myth, that of Adam’s first wife Lilith, who considered herself his equal and was exiled by Father God into the wilderness as a result.
Cybele
Cybele, the Mother Goddess of Anatolia, the Asian part of Turkey, was regarded by the Greeks and Romans as so ancient and venerable that the Greeks identified her with their Goddess Rhea, older than all other deities and called the Mother of the Gods, while the Romans brought a meteorite stone from her homeland, along with her loud, queer, gender-bending priests, the Gallae, to Rome in 200 BCE and installed her with great ceremony in a temple as the Magna Mater, the Great Mother patron of the empire guiding and protecting the advance of civilisation. For the next 600 years the Goddess reigned supreme across the Mediterranean, not only as Cybele, but in her forms as Isis, Diana, Venus, Minerva and more. Her rituals were often lively, ecstatic, erotic and liberating, and her worship was led by women, transsexuals and feminine ‘gay’ men.
Myths represented the male God as the Son and/or Lover of the Goddess, such as Attis, the lover of Cybele whom she drove to an insane frenzy while jealous because he was to marry a human princess – he castrated himself to avoid the wedding, the bride cut off her breasts in the mania that hit the wedding. Then the Goddess had remorse, took her lover’s testicles and buried them, violets then grew from them. By the second century CE this myth, and the Cybeline Spring ceremonies, were increasingly focussed on the resurrection of Attis, with a ‘holy week’ of ecstatic and also bloody ceremonies, during which new priests would self-castrate in a heightened, ecstatic euphoria, followed by a month of joyful Goddess celebrations, known as the Hilaria.
Led by a queer and very sexual priesthood, the Cybele cult was hated by the rising Christian church more than any other. Many of the Church Fathers tirades against sex come from their efforts to stop people going on to Cybelline orgies after Christian mass. Once Christianity became the official religion of Rome it was not long before all other practices were banned, and the last records of Cybele worship are from 5th century France. In 411 a Council of Church leaders at Ephesus declared that Mary was to be known as Theotokos, the Mother of God, which led to the Roman Catholic veneration of the Virgin, the divine title given to her in the city where Artemis had been venerated for thousands of years, where her chaste priestesses were powerful, respected Virgins. The Theotokos gave the Bishops a way to channel the intense devotion that people everywhere felt for the Mother away from the old goddess and into the Church.
From Mother of the Gods to Mother of God, from Virgin priestess to the Virgin Mother. The feminine aspect of the Divine remained with the people, it was she who moved their hearts and souls. The Church would have preferred this devotion to be directed at Jesus and the Father, and over time, this is what it worked to achieve. During the Middle Ages those who resisted the authority of the Church, or who remained more committed to pagan ways, continued to venerate the Goddess in ways of their own choosing. Diana was particularly present in people’s awareness, as Goddess of the Moon, and tales abounded of women flying off on journeys in the night with her. The persecution of witches in the late Middle Ages and early Modern times often included the use of torture to extract confessions in which the accused women (and also sometimes men) would deny the reality of the Goddess and state that their deity was actually the Devil.
Diana
Note the similarity of Devil and Devi – the Sanskrit word for the Goddess. The Hindu culture did not send its goddesses into oblivion, they have always been celebrated and still inspire devotional worship in people today. But in the west the monotheistic religions poured all that was not suitable for their schemes into the concept of the Devil. When Protestantism arrived in the early 16th century the new form of Christianity considered the Catholic love of the Virgin to be almost pagan, along with the cult of saints. The icons of spirit that inspired people to feelings and acts of devotion and compassion were pushed out of the picture and just as early Catholics went round destroying the statues and temples of the pagan Goddesses, the Protestants set out destroying the cult of the Virgin. For the last few centuries we have been encouraged to put our natural devotional emotions into work, into patriotism, war, into sport, marriage, and of course escapist entertainment.
Yet some people also put them into the Goddess. Since the Renaissance of the 15-16th century the holistic pagan sensibility has tried to push its way back into our lives, hit each time by an authoritarian backlash. The Romantic poets of the 18-19th century dreamed of an Arcadian return of a simpler life in tune with nature and the gods. Oscar Wilde invoked the same thing. Since the repeal of the Witchcraft and similar acts in the UK in the 1950s, European paganism has launched itself into the world and, despite familiar, conservative backswings, continues to grow in western cultures, especially north America. This is in part a movement of white people who were colonised by Christianity over a thousand years ago, rediscovering our own native practices that were denied and debased. The return of European paganism is reflected also by the rapid growth of interest in spiritual and shamanic cultures from around the world, as we recognise that the traditional nature-based cultures were in touch with something deep that the modern world has mostly lost.
What is missing is the presence of the Mother. Zulu Sangoma and High Sanusi Credo Mutwa explains the African wisdom that we each have inside us a warrior mind (which is the male god, the rational individualised sense of self), and the mother mind (which we all share as the portal to collective consciousness, which reveals our oneness with all life). He expresses in this video the simplicity of how we can know the Mother, saying “We must awaken the mother mind within us. We must feel what is going on in the world. We mustn’t just listen to newspapers. We must ourselves, feel.”
Historians and archaeologists, alongside feminists, pagans and modern mystics in the West have gradually prepared the groundwork during the 20th century for a mass revival of the divine feminine that is now underway, but has yet to have impact on the awareness of people glued into the mainstream belief systems. Robert Briffault‘s work ‘The Mothers’ (1927) presented evidence that a matrifocal society had preceded patriarchy, in 1921 Margaret Murray’s‘The Witch-cult in Western Europe’, described the late medieval/early modern witches as remnants of an ancient pagan religion, which set off fierce controversies. Psychologist Erich Neumann published ‘The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype’ in the 1950s, Welsh poet Robert Graves explored the evolution of the Mother in Europe in ‘The White Goddess’ and demonstrated the major theme of Greek mythology is the gradual reduction of women from sacred beings to slaves (in ‘The Greek Myths’ published 1955).
In the 1970s American-Lithuanian archaeologist Maria Gimbutas presented controversial ideas about ancient Europe, saying that until the Bronze Age and the arrival of Indo-European invaders from the east, cultures were matriarchal and peaceful. Feminist writers in the 1980s such as Merlin Stone ‘When God was A Woman’ and Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor ‘The Great Cosmic Mother’continued the work of bringing to a wider audience knowledge of the centrality of the Goddess, and women, in the traditional cultures of the past. More recently Randy P. Connor‘s 5 volume masterpiece ‘The Pagan Heart of the West’ has given us a thorough study of the ancient and ongoing appreciation of the divine feminine through the medieval and modern periods, despite the determined and bloody efforts of Christianity.
During the past few decades a new Goddess movement has been emerging in the world. The Great Mother is returning to her place in human hearts and minds, gradually. Modern mystics such as Andrew Harvey spread teachings about her return. His book ‘The Return of the Mother’ (1995) traces how the divine feminine was hidden in the world’s male-led religions, and he presents the case for how a radical embrace of her all-encompassing transformative love will change humanity. Harvey says, “Coming to know the hidden and forgotten Mother and the marvellous wisdom of the sacred feminine as revealed from every side and angle by the different mystical traditions is not luxury; it is, I believe, a necessity for our survival as a species.”
Modern pagans in the West chant
“We all come from the Goddessand to Her we shall return…”
African, and also Hindu and other traditional wisdom, can remind us left-brained westerners that the Mother is accessed through the feeling body. She is speaking to us through – as – our body all the time, and through the land, weather, the plants and the animals. Hinduism says that the Father Shiva is outside creation but the Mother Shakti is right here present and incarnate in everything, we meet her spiritually and emotionally – we can train all our senses to perceive her. Mother worshipping peoples have always respected the human body as well as the Earth and its animals, recognising the divine presence in the flesh, in sexuality, and in ecstatic/intoxicated states of being. The Mother religions were sex-positive, which is why, in the eyes of the patriarchal Christians, seeking to control people’s lives, lusts and ecstatic behaviours they had to go.
And yet the Christian holy book contains the Saviour Jesus giving prophecies of the coming of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, to help the world in the end times. In the original texts the Holy Spirit is presented as feminine, but from Greek translations onwards it became male. Jesus is referring to the Mother Goddess, but could not say too much in the patriarchal Jewish environment he was born into. It is in the concept of the Holy Spirit that Christianity has hidden most of the powers of the Divine Feminine for the past 2000 years. Note that Jesus calls her the Comforter, because the presence of the Holy Spirit is experienced through the senses, which is in line with the Indian description of the immanence of Shakti. And pagans get it too – the Mother is not just a psychological or mythological concept, She is a lived experience, a loving presence and a source of strength, support and comfort. For most of human history most people would have just taken this for granted. Even the atomists of ancient Greece, who first proposed that matter is made up of atomic particles and everything else is just our projection, still went to the temple to sacrifice to the Goddess.
Monica Sjoo in the Great Cosmic Mother says “True religion is the original umbilical cord that binds our individual selves back to our larger, universal source. That source… is the Great Mother, who is the great cosmic weaver, the divine potter, the carrier of the heavenly water jar; we participate in her substance, her nature, her processes, her play and her work….
“The reality implicit in the Universe – in each one of us, in the self at the heart of being – is her way. It is very ancient, and has no time. …. Ecstasy is the only way through which the soul can lose itself in union with her…. Some male mystics have also understood this…
“Ecstasy is the dance of the individual with the All.”
Louis Lagana of the University of Malta wrote in ‘The Re-Emergence of the Great Mother Goddess‘: “In Jungian parlance the Mother Archetype resides in every human psyche and is a symbol of protection and fertility and regeneration. This concept also belongs to the field of comparative religion and embraces widely varying types of the mother-goddess. The discussion of ‘Feminist Archetypal Psychology’ shows that the Great Mother Goddess archetype is activated and is returning to consciousness. The Great Mother Goddess archetype was very important in the Western world from the dawn of prehistory throughout the pre-Indo-European time periods, as it still is in many traditional cultures today.”
Elinor Gadin wrote these words back in 1989, they badly need to be heard and understood across the world: “there is a growing awareness that we are doomed as a species and planet unless we have a radical change of consciousness. The reemergence of the Goddess is becoming the symbol and metaphor for this transformation of culture. With the return of the Goddess, the new power of the feminine is being expressed in all areas of life. There is a re-evaluation of the female principle in religion, in psychology, in the arts, and in the quality and relationship of humanity to the planet we live on. We are in the midst of a social evolution that will ultimately change how we see everything, as radically transformative as the smashing of the atom.”
Goddess worship does not involve sitting quietly in rows listening to preachers telling you what is right and what is wrong. To worship the Goddess, to know her inside ourselves and see her in others, we might embrace altered states of perception through, passing gates opened by love, music, dance, ecstasy, sexuality, the body, sacred medicine plants. All these things can connect us to the oneness of life, make us feel safe and at home in the universe, but without these things, without the Mother, humanity is a frightened child being used and abused, told to what to do, and punished for not obeying the rules by a cruel patriarchy that tried to run the world without her presence.The planet is in transformation, Nature itself is now in crisis and so are we. But missing from psyches and our spirituality is a sense of the unifying love of the very tangible presence of the the Mother. Her return can unite and bring healing to our world.
ONCE UPON A TIME all Love and Play and Sex between humans on planet earth was natural, normal and not-restricted-by-laws. We lived in the garden of Eden in the sense that we had not made some things right and some things wrong. We experienced the innocence of being a child of creation.. Every day we saw miracles, the wonder of life impressed us. We explored our urges and accepted death as natural, we died without fear, for we saw the dance of eternity in all things, we saw that everything runs in cycles – day/night, summer/winter – and we accepted the death between lives.
Our most ancient original ancestry calls to the modern world’s incarnate queer spirits: the transgendered and the gay and lesbian communities, to the hippy rainbow children, to the disabled communities and to all the outsiders – to all who are born to question the authority of the status quo and participate in the shift of human consciousness to higher levels of unity and understanding in all areas of life, from the sexual to the social and political, to the spiritual.
Our most ancient original ancestry calls to us all to remember that we are born souls, free and pure made from the divine template – in god’s image (each of both male and female, in his/her image Genesis 1:27), the Atman is Brahman say the Hindus (the individual soul IS the oversoul), the I AM is THAT and the nature of THAT is LOVE/ANANDA/LIGHT. They call us to realise that our bodies are temples, and that sexuality is sacred: sexual energy is the divine life force, able to open the channels of spirit within and between us. The time has come to overcome and unravel the fears and taboos around sexuality, and instead honour it for its potential to take us on the fast track to self-knowledge and enlightenment and celebrate the simple sweet fun of Soul Energy eXchange.
Our most ancient original ancestry calls the queer peoples to embrace our nature as twin souls/ two-spirits. The Native Americans, and earth-centred cultures the world over, were aware that those born with a combination of masculine and feminine energies had certain propensities that made them best suited to certain, particularly spiritual, roles in the tribe, and today in America the Two Spirits are reclaiming their history and roles. There is a history of queer/non-binary people taking roles as spiritual functionaries, shamans and healers on every continent.
Our most ancient original ancestry reminds the queer people of the world that we are born today as spirits following the call of the soul to grow into who we really are and to become what we can be – healers and mediums, artists and poets, creators of harmony and balance within the human race.
Many on the planet still fear and hate us. We challenge them to face their own fears. Our existence challenges them to live up to their ideals of love and religion’ and freedom. We are the sign that humanity is ready for a more heart-centred era where we learn to live as one spirit, one species, beyond ignorance and prejudice, putting love at the centre of human life, and giving room for all to follow their hearts.
Our most ancient original ancestry lived at a time before ‘Thou Shalt Not’ had been thought of. In some parts of the world this original state was never forgotten, in some it was only recently lost. The call goes out to invoke this knowledge, this remembrance on behalf of all queer souls, for the good of all people, on the planet today.
Queer Spirituality is the movement of lgbt+ people taking matters of faith into our own hands, making way for the discovery of the innate, magical flow of the divine gifts of the Soul. It is queer people finding our own ways to commune with and celebrate the Mystery behind all Creation, however we perceive that.
It is queers opening the doors to freedom of self-expression, learning how we mould our own reality and chart our own path in life through our beliefs and attitudes, opening the heart to unconditional love and compassion, celebrating the ecstatic in the erotic and the divinity to be found in nature, each other and all existence.
I believe that Queer Spirituality is about the lgbt+ people of the planet becoming conscious of the Unity of all life: it’s not that we have ONE LIFE, it’s that there is ONE LIFE and we are it. We can use religious terms and imagery to describe this, but we can also find our own forms of expression. By being outside the mainstream norms of society queers are perfectly placed to work our own answers, this applies to spirituality as much as to our sexual expression, the relationships and cultures that we create. Everyone on earth is an incarnation of the oneness, and deserving of the right to self-expression, to be who they truly are and to love whom they wish to love. This is the message Queer Spirit brings to the world, the same message that the Gay Liberation Front was voicing from the early 1970s, and which is the point of Gay Prides the world over, but now we need to take that liberation into the spiritual realms.
Spiritual liberation is the missing element in the modern journey of lgbt+ people around the world. Coming out about our sexuality or gender identity results from our need to be true to ourselves, we listen to our souls and from the soul comes the courage to be who we are. The same principle applies to spirituality – it comes from inside us. External forms of spirituality, i.e. religions, are cultural manifestations of collective spirituality, but they are also controlling, often repressive forces, set up to bring order and cohesion to society. The fact that certain religions have got so caught up in their dark fascination with hatred of our kind should tell us something – perhaps that we have some power, some magic, in our souls that they are very afraid of.
Most coverage of lgbt+ spiritual matters in the media focusses on the religious debates about us, and the efforts some valiant queers are making to improve matters within faith groups. But there is another story – that of questing queers pursuing their own personal growth/evolution/enlightenment – and of them occasionally gathering together to explore what queer community could become with a major dose of spiritual awareness injected into it. Queer Spirit Festival in the UK is such a gathering.
Mainstream lgbt+ culture occasionally debates religious issues but gives so little attention to the individual journey to self-awareness that so many of us are on. It also usually completely ignores its own prophets …. it is to these queer pioneers that we could be looking for a greater understanding of who we are and what we bring to the world.
Prophets such as
Walt Whitman:”If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.“
Edward Carpenter: “When the individual self, reaching union with the universal, becomes consciously and willingly the creator and inspirer of the body – that is indeed a Transfiguration. The individual is no longer under the domination of the body and its heredity, but rising out of this tomb becomes lord and master of the body’s powers, and identified with the immortal Self of the world.”
Harry Hay: “Our beautiful lovely sexuality is the gateway to spirit. under all organised religions of the past, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, there has been a separation of carnality, or shall we say of flesh or earth or sex, and spirituality. As far as I am concerned they are all the same thing, and what we need to do as faeries is to tie it all back together again.”
Allen Ginsberg: “Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel! The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!”
Elsa Gidlow: “What if we smashed the mirrors And saw our true face? What if we left the Sacred Books to the worms And found our True Mind? What if we burned the wooden Buddhas? Gave the stone Buddhas back to the mountains? Dispersed the gurus with a great laugh And discovered the path we had always been on?“
Audre Lorde: “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”
Judith Grahn: “The tribal attitude said, and continues to say, that Gay people are especially empowered because we are able to identify with both sexes and can see into more than one world at once, having the capacity to see from more than one point of view at a time.”
Arthur Evans: “The new socialism is not just political, it is magical and sexual.”
Larry Mitchell: “Romantic love, the last illusion, keeps us alive until the revolutions come.”
Ram Dass: “If I go into the place in myself that is love, and you go into the place in yourself that is love, we are together in love. Then you and I are truly in love, the state of being love. That’s the entrance to Oneness.”
James Broughton: “If you don’t fill your days with love, you are wasting your life.”
Andrew Ramer: “We enter a new era in our history. We enter an era when love and not pain will be our teacher, when joy and not sorrow will colour our lives. Never before on this planet have people lived this way. But after thousands and thousands of years of struggle and growth, we have come to the point in time when all of us fill be fully incarnate in our bodies, fully present as spirits manifesting in physical form. Without our wisdom and our power, humanity cannot make it to the next cycle. With our power and wisdom, shared freely with the tribe of all tribes, everything is possible.”
Raven Kaldera: “Transgendered people have long been robbed of their own spiritual history, not knowing that there were once times and places where ours was considered a spiritual path in and of itself… We are all sacred and it is time that the world knew it.”
Andrew Harvey: “It’s important to realize that you have the divine on your side, that the divine is not against love, or the body or sexuality, the divine wants the complete flowering of body, heart, mind and soul together to produce a completely different kind of human being.”
Queer Spirituality is not about religion. It is the story of lgbt+ people finding out who we are, uncovering our hidden spiritual history as shamans, healers, monks, artists around the planet, discovering what that inheritance means for us today and becoming a force for the growth of love, understanding and compassion in the world. Queers of all faiths and none reveal that beyond the divisions of the old religious paradigms awaits a rainbow land of light, colour, creativity and consciousness.
In his incredible book Gay Mystics, Andrew Harvey shares this with us:
“Many shamans were are are homosexual; many of the worshippers of the Goddess under her various names and in her various cults all over the world … openly avowed their homosexuality and were acceptred and even specially revered as priests, oracles, healers and diviners. Homosexuals, far from being rejected, were seen as sacred – people who, by virtue of a mysterious fusion of feminine and masculine traits, participated with particular intensity in the life of the Source. The Source of Godhead is, after all, both masculine and feminine, and exists in a unity that transcends both…
“Allowing the wisdom of the third and fourth sexes to be fully vocal in our culture would dissolve the false, rigid categorization of “male” and “female”, and the male-centred, male-dominated, competitive, war-and-power obsessed mentality that it keeps alive. The return of the Sacred Feminine that is everywhere trying to occur is, in part, a return of the uncanny, of those insights and aspects of ourselves that have been banished from our awareness for too long, repressed or demonised. The Mother is preparing a revolution of consciousness for the whole human race, but this revolution will be possible only when we invite the wisdom of the feminine, with its instinctual understanding of the sacredness of all life and of all true love, back into our hearts and minds in its full radical splendour.”
As another queer spiritual ancestor put it:
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”Rumi
Harry Hay (1912-2002) Here are some quotations and photos to assist communion with the spirit of Harry, gay activist and founder of the 1950s Mattachine Society and one of the three founding motherfathers of the Radical Faeries…. Harry was born in Worthing, UK, and lived his life in the USA.
Give yourself permission to enjoy being gay. You do have to give yourself permission. You have been told you may not. Give yourself permission to be free.
Throw off the ugly green frogskin of hetero-imitation to find the shining Faerie prince beneath
When we begin to love and respect Great Mother Nature’s gift to us of gayness, we’ll discover that the bondage of our childhood and adolescence in the trials and tribulations of neitherness was actually an apprenticeship for teaching her children new cutting edges of consciousness and social change. In stunning paradox, our neitherness is our talisman, our fairie wand, our gift we bring to the hetero world to….transform their pain into healings; …transform their tears to laughter: …transform their hand-me-downs to visions of loveliness.
Our beautiful lovely sexuality is the gateway to spirit. Under all organised religions of the past, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, there has been a separation of carnality, or shall we say of flesh or earth or sex, and spirituality. As far as I am concerned they are all the same thing, and what we need to do as faeries is to tie it all back together again.
The term ‘spiritual’ represents the accumulation of all experiential consciousness from the division of the first cells in the primeval slime, down through all evolution, to your latest insights of subject-subject consciousness just a minute ago. What else can we call this overwhelmingly magnificent inheritance—other than spiritual?
I was an older brother. So I had to do a lot of things first. My father was a self-made man, and he would beat me senseless. But he was a Scotsman, and stubborn. I’m his son, and I’m stubborn, too. I go on being stubborn.
We know how to live through their eyes. We can always play their games, but are we denying ourselves by doing this? If you’re going to carry the skin of conformity over you, you are going to suppress the beautiful prince or princess within you.
Confronted with the loving-sharing Consensus of subject-SUBJECT relationships all Authoritarianism must vanish. The Fairy Family Circle, co-joined in the shared vision of non-possessive love – which is the granting to any other and all others that total space wherein each may grow and soar to his own freely-selected, full potential – reaching out to one another subject-to-SUBJECT, becomes for the first time in history the true working model of a Sharing Consensus!
Subject–SUBJECT consciousness, a concept proposed by Harry Hay, believed by Hay to be gay people’s unique perspective on the world. Hay saw heterosexual society existing in a subject–object dynamic; where men, who had the culturally acceptable power, saw only themselves as subject and therefore higher than women, who were treated as objects and property. Hay extrapolated this interpersonal-sexual dynamic (male-power:female-subordinate) into a broader social context, believing that the subject-object relationship was the driving force behind most all of societies ills. Objectificiation served as a barrier, emotionally separating an individual (subject) from another individual by dehumanizing them, making them object.
When Hay looked at same-sex relationships, however, he saw a different dynamic at work. He believed that homosexual relationships were based on mutual respect and empathy for the other: a longing for a companion who was as equally valuable as the self. Hay termed this interpersonal—sexual dynamic “subject—SUBJECT” (which Hay capitalized for emphasis in all of his writings). He believed that this subject–SUBJECT way of viewing the world was gay people’s most valuable contribution to the greater society. By empathizing with all people, relating to each other as equal-to-equal, society would change drastically and social injustices would be eradicated. (Wikipedia)
From Sri Aurobindo’s masterpiece Savitri, published in 1940, described on wikipedia as being about “the transcendence of man as the consummation of terrestrial evolution and the emergence of an immortal supramental gnostic race upon earth”
A giant dance of Shiva tore the past; There was a thunder as of worlds that fall; Earth was o’errun with fire and the roar of Death Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made; There was a clangour of Destruction’s wings: The Titan’s battle-cry was in my ears, Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night…..
I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth; Forerunners of a divine multitude, Out of the paths of the morning star they came Into the little room of mortal life. I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn, The great creators with wide brows of calm, The massive barrier-breakers of the world And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will, The labourers in the quarries of the gods, The messengers of the Incommunicable, The architects of immortality. 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.
SAMHAIN: the pagan new year festival of death and rebirth, when the dead are honoured and our place in the cosmic whole remembered. Across the world so many people feel the call to mark Samhain, whether in formal ceremony or the informal celebrations of Halloween. More ancient than any religion, this festival has deep roots in our souls, and gives us the chance to connect to them.
The veils are thin, we remember the dead, we make fun of the darkness, we celebrate the shadows and the spooks, we just know this is the witches’ time of year.
The veils are thin and we may pass through them, recall once more the ancient ways
the dance of creation, the rhythm of seasons, the power of moons, the light of the soul
and how the Goddess, through the Wheel of the Year, shows us how to be whole.
Day is balanced by night. Summer is balanced by winter. Female by male. Right by left.
Life is balanced by death.
Modern culture has cut most people off from our own intrinsic deep inner understanding of death and the spirit realms. The process started under the centuries of monotheistic religious hegemony as the priests made entry into heaven dependent on obeying the rules they set down for life, but modern generations are also afraid of death because, rather than hell or heaven, the rationalist, atheistic worldview denies that there is any possibility that our core substance, our sense of self, survives the demise of the body.
In general death is avoided as much as possible in western culture, but 2020 has seen daily death statistics on our screens, and as the season arrives when both traditional and religious cultures and secular around the world remember and commemorate the dead in their various ways, this point of the year – that was honoured by our European ancestors as one of the two major pivotal points of the calendar (the other being Beltane on May 1st), and considered it the start of the Celtic New Year – is standing out as a hugely significant turning point in the collective evolution of the human species and the future of planet Earth.
These turning points have been coming since the 1960s, a gradual yet rapid transition from the conflict-driven astrological Age of Pisces into the hopefully bright new age of humanitarianism and personal liberty in the Age of Aquarius. The late 1980s brought a second wave of awakening energy, experienced in the mass culture as the arrival of house music, rave, ecstasy, following the post –60s cultural backlash and the gloomy economics of the 1970s/early 80s.
The second summer of love opened the gates to several years of expansive, awakening energy and millennial fervour, which eventually got subsumed in another backlash – this time fuelled by an economic boom in the early 2000s, leading us down the path of greater consumption, increasing inequality, greater alienation from and abuse of the planet and each other – and of course into recession and a decade of austerity. Any chance in the UK or USA to move out of that dark phase has been held back for five years by the political insanity around Brexit and Trump. And now by a pandemic, which some suspect is a cover for the political states to tighten their control on our lives and prevent any chance of ongoing collective enlightenment.
And yet since 2012, fuelled by the very Aquarian phenomenon, the Internet, there has been another wave of awakening spreading fast around the planet. The mainstream media focusses on the darkness of conspiracy theories on the world wide web, and activists can be so focussed on the commercial abuse of our personal data, that the wide sharing of positive, enlightened energy, eg via astrologers, spiritual teachers, energy empaths, tarot readers, healers of many kinds, on the net is not commented on. For the first time we are all equally able to share our views on existence, and as we do it becomes clear that the outworn paradigms that have been at play, colouring all our lives across the world, are fast collapsing.
WE ARE APPROACHING THE END OF THE WORLD
BEING DOMINATED BY THE AGENDA OF THE PATRIARCHY
SERVING THE HUNGER OF THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
WE ARE COMING TO THE END OF
BEING TOLD WHAT TO BELIEVE BY RELIGIONS
BEING TOLD WHO WE CAN LOVE BY OTHERS
A FALSE CONFLICT BETWEEN SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE
BELIEVING THERE IS NO PURPOSE TO LIFE.
WE ARE APPROACHING THE END OF A WORLD
THAT LOST ITS CONNECTION TO THE SPIRIT, TO THE DEAD, TO NATURE
SAMHAIN 2020 all over the world people are reconnecting themselves body and soul to the cosmic streams of energy,
recovering from the damage that religion did to our relationship with our sacred flesh and with sexuality
and from the harm that science has done to our belief and trust in our souls.
The recovery of our connection to the unity of the life and the cosmos
to the magic of life and the mystery of death as the divine and blissful goal.
The Shift that must come is from commercialism to compassion
to re-engaging with the presence of magic, spirit, love in every moment
honouring all paths to self-knowledge
listening to all voices
to build a world built on caring for the earth and each other.
TO HELP THIS ALONG INVOKE THE LOST GODDESS, AND BE HER LOVER.
This time of year is important to me because it is through facing death from AIDS during the mid 90s that I came to know life as a spiritual as well as physical creation. As I became weaker through illness I entered a multi-dimensional awareness, seeing all of existence as energy in movement – conscious energy, motivated by love. I met entities without physical form and learned that the spirit and human worlds are much closer than we usually think. So I consider ritual where we share time together with the spirit world to be an essential part of birthing a new age of human understanding.
There is a spiritual transformation happening on the planet. For those who have awoken to that fact, Samhain is an ideal time to release deep seated old, unhelpful beliefs, to connect to the non-material worlds that are right here to help and support us, and to celebrate stepping into a new phase of life – Samhain is the pagan new year and can be the start of a year ahead of significant growth and discovery.
The first thing to do is to remember our eternal connection with spirit, the next is to offer to spirit the parts of ourselves that are dying, the parts that hurt and seek healing, the parts that are ready for transformation and also the dreams we have for the future. Lighting candles, making a fire, drumming, toning, singing, sitting in silence…. calling to the wonder, the mystery, that supports all life, remembering friends and relations who have passed out of the physical plane… contemplating the vastness of the cosmos, and the seasonal changes nature is undergoing as she pulls herself inwards, back into the earth, in preparation for the winter journey…. there are many ways to get the most out of this magical part of the year.
Since I first experienced the intense thrill of ecstatic communion with the spirit that flows through all life I have had few other desires than to be in that state of connection and enjoy it with others – sometimes with great energy and passion, but also often with sublime stillness, whether with a special one or within a group of like-minded, trusted souls. To share time and energy with people who also feel that buzz of connection, who embrace the freedom, flow and light within the soul, is quality time in joy surpassing for me all the flashy parties and hedonistic potions the world can offer. But we all carry some degree of shame/fear/guilt/pain that can prevent us from entering the world of natural bliss… .
Samhain is a time when the spirit, often through the medium of our personal ancestors whose love we can still feel, can help us to shift our personal, and the collective, darkness, release it into the void, so freeing us to live more deeply and delightfully in the NOW, honouring at Samhain that there will always be an interplay between light and shadow, that is the nature of life, but our relationship with the dark can be one of love over fear, compassion over cruelty and understanding over blindness.
Samhain 2020 brings so many strands of the transformation happening to us on planet Earth into perspective, and offers us all the chance to make the shift of paradigm from a world of separation to one of re-connection.
BLESSED BE
May all Beings in All Worlds be Happy and at Peace
Science is the modern religion of the masses, one of the many opiates that have replaced traditional faiths and serve to discourage the general population from pursuing spiritual /magical paths of self-discovery. Science keeps the world asleep because certain fundamental principles on which it operates have infiltrated the collective mind, the shared belief systems that hold society together, even though science’s own greatest thinkers did not buy into them. Unfortunately these particular beliefs separate us from each other, from nature and from our own true selves.
But there is change afoot, I just wonder how far it is reaching. In the Scientific American blog in 2019, in an article about a conference at Esalen Institute called ‘Physics, Experience and Metaphysics’, John Horgan pointed out the emperor’s new clothes:
“…some scientific materialists are insufferably arrogant. They claim they can explain everything, and yet they cannot account for consciousness, the origin of the universe or the origin of life.”
This group came together to consider “Are we matter, which just happens to give rise to mind? Or could mind be the basis of reality, as many sages have insisted?”. Being held at the legendary New Age centre on the Californian coast it was probably unlikely there would be much dispute about the answer, but perhaps a bit of posturing about who understood it best!
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake in The Science Delusion identifies the beliefs which underlie so much scientific research and have become accepted as true by the majority of the western world, as…
Everything is essentially mechanical
All matter is unconscious
The total amount of matter and energy is always the same
The laws of nature are fixed – nature and evolution are purposeless
Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains.
I invite you to look at the beliefs you hold on these points. Have you been deluded by science? And if not, have you fully shaken off the residue that these beliefs, if you ever held them (and we almost did, because of the education we received at school), have left in your subconscious?
Isaac Newton is hailed by scientists as their great ancestor, but by the latter part of his life he had decided that scientific research was too limited and dedicated himself to mystical research. John Maynard Keynes said “Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.“
Isaac himself said, “Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance.”
Great scientist Albert Einstein‘s profound mystical statements often appear as internet memes:
“Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”
“I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.”
“I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice.”
“All religions, arts, and sciences are branches of the same tree.”
“True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.”
“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”
Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander (born 1953) had a Near Death Experience in 2008 which revealed to him that consciousness exists outside of the body. His book Proof of Heaven was on the New York Times bestseller list for 97 weeks. Eben has predicted that science will one day work out for itself that the brain does not give rise to consciousness, that consciousness does not end with physical death.
2020: We are in a global pandemic.Presented to us as science vs nature.
The governments of the world well know that their efforts to control the spread of the virus only serve to slow it’s progress down, they will not eradicate it. If we were to look at the virus through the mystic’s eyes as well as the scientists we could form a very different interpretation of what is happening. Humanity is so cut off from its core connection to the mystical truth of existence, from experience and understanding of that core reality, that the virus is seen as an enemy, to be defeated at all costs. Fear spreads round the planet, basic liberties are curtailed. But this virus can serve a divine purpose, as it forces us to slow down and take stock, both in how we are treating our planet home, and in our own lives.
The governments of the world want us to ‘trust the science’, which to me sounds a terrifying mantra that could have come from George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. It tells me we are definitely not in a brave new world, but stuck in a spiritually blind, materialistic one, where the old cry to put our Faith in the Lord in replaced by a call to Trust the new religion, Science.
A health crisis – AIDS in the 1990s – pushed me to the edge of life and led to me asking profound questions that transformed my experience and understanding of it. My health crisis showed me that the science based belief system I had adopted as a teenager was teaching me nothing about who I am and the deeper story of human life on earth.
It is time the whole world shook off the chains of the rational, materialist, death-fearing, secular, scientific paradigm and let in the connection, mystery, magic, light and love of the soul’s deeper nature. Through this pandemic the world could wake up to the understanding that a health crisis of any kind can be a doorway to deeper engagement with life, expanded awareness of self and sense of purpose.
The Great Goddess, worshipped by all of the many nations across the ancient European/Mediterranean/Asiatic world for thousands of years, gave birth to Christianity, in full awareness that her power would be eclipsed for the duration of an astrological age as the male gods took over the heavens. Her avatar, Jesus, knew this too, and spoke of her eventual return as the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, whom he said would ‘teach all things, shall bring all things to your remembrance’. We have been told to regard Christianity as an outgrowth from Judaism, but this is not the whole story.
Lost on the modern world but certainly obvious to everybody in ancient times, the significance of Mary’s virginity was not that she had not had sex with a man, but that she was a holy priestess of the Goddess, probably Artemis, whose temple at Ephesus, one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World, and not far from Palestine, had been a huge centre of worship for thousands of years. It was to Ephesus that Mary retired to live after Jesus’ crucifixion.
It was also at Ephesus, after the temple had been destroyed by Christians, that a Church gathering of 250 bishops in 431 CE declared Mary ‘theotokos‘, the Mother of God, thereby opening the way for the devotional love that the populace across the Empire had long felt for the various Goddesses – such as Cybele, Isis, Artemis/Diana, Aphrodite/Venus – to be channelled into Marian shrines and kept within the Church, while at the same time it affirmed the divinity of Christ. Sacred imagery of a mother goddess and human son was nothing new to the ancient world, it was a very common motif from Cybele (who gave birth to Attis, later her lover), to Isis (mother of Horus), to Aphrodite (who was mother to many male gods, including Eros, Priapus, Hermaphroditus and the feminine male Dionysus), to Venus (mother to Aeneas, ancestor of the Roman people).
Jesus was born among the Jewish people, who had a thousand years previously marked themselves out as different from the other tribes of the region by rejecting Goddess reverence and making their Father God the one and only supreme being. The Christian Church regarded Judaism as its forerunner and shared its patriarchal attitudes, for example apopting the Hebrew creation myth, one of many that were told at the time, but the only one which put the woman firmly in her place as the servant of man. Most creation myths of the Middle East gave the prime place to the Creatrix Mother. But actually Jewish mythology also tells of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was thrown out of the garden of Eden because she refused to surrender to his will. Second time round Adam’s primacy was affirmed by claiming Eve had been made from his body, the opposite to the reality of childbirth.
The Genesis story of Eden would have been understood differently to ancient peoples than to most of us today, just like the Gospel’s tale of virgin birth. The snake was one of the most prominent images of the Goddess-centred pagan faiths, packed with symbolism, including sexual. The Genesis story is saying that, once again as with Lilith, the female lands them in trouble, this time because she has let the pagan faith lead her astray.
At the time of the birth of Jesus however the Goddess power was still in full sway. Cybele, the most ancient Mother worshipped since at least 6000 BCE in Anatolia, eastern Turkey, and known to the Greeks as the Mother of the Gods (that phrase again!), had been adopted as the Magna Mater of the Roman Empire two hundred years earlier. Her worship united the world from Britain to Turkey, and it was spread through the Empire by her itinerant, queer or transgender Gallae priest/esses, whose flamboyant, loud, erotic and bloody rituals were hated by the Church Fathers, not least because, for the first 300 years of Christianity, the Roman citizens were happy to go hear a Christian preacher in the afternoon then attend an orgy at the Cybele temple in the evening.
All the holy priesthoods of the ancient Goddess featured both virgin females and transgender or gay males. The Old Testament tells of repeated efforts over 400 years by Hebrew kings to stop their people sacrificing and building phallic poles to Asherah, their local version of Ishtar, Goddess of the region since 10000 BCE, also known as Inanna and Astarte. There were some kings who were more tolerant, such as Solomon, whose many wives came from many cultures, bringing their ways with them to his famous temple. The OT tells also of the Hebrew kings’ efforts to eradicate the Qedesha, translated into English bibles as ‘sodomites’ or, nowadays, ‘male shrine prostitutes’, but whose name meant in fact the ‘Anointed’ or ‘Holy Ones’.
The title of Mother of God moved from Cybele to Mary as the Christians set to wiping out Goddess culture once it had become established as the only official religion of Rome in the late 4th century. This move to name Mary Theotokos (as opposed to Christokos, the Mother of Christ – the heated debates over this at the Council of Ephesus led to a schism between Roman Christianity and some, mainly Persian, churches that was only finally addressed and healed in 1994) was a conscious act taken in full awareness that people everywhere held the Divine Feminine in the highest regard, taken because this would enable them to dismantle the worship of other female forms and bring more people into the new faith.
The Church was also busy changing the gender of the Holy Spirit from female to male, the means being the Greek language. In Hebrew ‘ruach’, the word for spirit, was feminine, also in Syriac ‘rucha’, and writers in those languages used maternal imagery to describe the third member of the Trinity. In Greek however, the words used were of either male or neutral gender, and this has of course fed into other translations. Most Christian writings today about the Holy Spirit use He pronouns, but there are some churches that do see a She, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the Unity Church, whose founder Charles Fillmore said of the Holy Spirit, “love is always feminine”. What the Church declared and what people believed have not always met of course, and while European art of the Middle Ages depicted the Holy Spirit as male, there is one surviving fresco in Urschalling, Germany, in a church of St Jakobus, that shows her female.
Jesus also said that people will know the Comforter when they come because the Holy Spirit already “dwelleth with you”. The Goddess in Judaism had been channelled into the concept of shekhinah, referring to invisible, divine presence, regarded and experienced as feminine. Yahweh was above the world, shekhinah was divinity moving through the world in all things – just as the Hindus see male Shiva as the overseeing Father and female Shakti as the Divine present in manifestation.
Note that Shiva is regarded actually as half male-half female, as he contains all within him, and this reflects the totally disregarded description of the Hebrew God in Genesis as being both male and female (which should in fact be clear from the Genesis verses that say he made humans male and female ‘in his image’). Arabic has the word sakina, translated usually as tranquility/peace but which actually indicates so much more, as is clear from its similarity to shekhinah.
In its efforts to evangelise the Roman Empire the Church also took on traits of the Goddess priesthood – such as the wearing of robes, its insistence on celibacy for priests (people were simply not used to holy servants having spouses and families, they were not ready to accept it) and of course built churches at pagan sites (eg St Pauls Cathedral in London at a site where Diana was worshipped) and the timing of Christian feasts to fit and replace the pagan calendar. The Archgallus of Rome, head of the genderqueer servants of Cybele, became the Pope, complete with the same style of headgear, the mitre.
The association of trans/queer people with the Goddess temples and rituals goes way back into pre-history, but from those times we have some myths that suggest we were created by the Goddess for that very purpose. A hero named Asushunamir, who was both male and female, was sent into the Underworld to rescue Goddess Inanna, a task they fulfilled, but not without suffering a curse from Inanna’s dark sister Ereshkigel, which was that they (and their kind) would be hated and feared by the world. Inanna could not remove the curse but appointed the queer/transgender people (known variously as kurgurru, assinnu, galatur at different times in the long history of Mesopotamia) to be her special, beloved servants, and promised a time when the curse would hold no more and they be recognised in their holiness again.
Jesus was aware of all this. The Gospel of Matthew records Jesus saying that there are those who chose to become eunuchs ‘for the sake of the kingdom of God’. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas he speaks of uniting/transcending the male/female in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The future for transsexuality is also referred to by Isaiah in the Old Testament, who predicts, for those eunuchs who serve the lord faithfully, an ‘everlasting name’, ‘ better than that of sons and daughters’. Those joining the Gallae priest/esses of Cybele undertook public self-castration during a frenzied ritual on the Day of Blood, where Attis, the dying (through botched self-castration) lover of Cybele, was remembered. The ritual involved carrying an effigy of Attis tied to a pine tree through the streets raising the ecstatic energy and the next day celebrating his resurrection. This ritual predated Christianity by a very long time, and of course the Christian Church Fathers hated this ceremony, so timed the Easter festivities to replace it.
The Catholic Church encouraged the channelling of devotional feelings for the Goddess into the honouring of Mary, but of course throughout the Middle Ages the populace of Europe were not so quick to let go of their love of other versions of the divine feminine. Diana worship, which was especially associated with nature and the night, with the moon, continued among the country folk for centuries. It was generally Her that witches went to meet at their night time Sabbats, though the Inquisition and later the witch trials would use torture to force prisoners to say they were meeting with the devil.
For English female mystic Julian of Norwich in the late 14th/early 15th century Jesus himself became the Mother. She lived as an anchoress, living a life of prayer in an enclosed space, through a slit in the wall she would dispense advice and wisdom. She was very highly regarded but the nuns of her order kept her writing about the Motherhood of Christ secret for centuries after her death. ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ is now regarded as one of the finest works of medieval mysticism.
Protestantism, from the 16th century, regarded Catholic veneration of Mary and the saints as no better than pagan cult practice, and pushed the divine feminine further into the background. It shared the Catholic fear of witches however and the peak of the witch hunt craze came in the 17th century.
Then reason and rationalism rose to the fore, and religion gradually lost its dominant grip on our lives, but it has yet to release its power over our souls, for so much of the taboos it enforced were carried forward into the rational age – not least the prejudice against gay, lesbian, bi, queer and trans people, which is still far from dismantled as we progress into the 21st century. Religions still influence the attitudes of a large percentage of the world’s population, but without real historical knowledge of how faith was in the pre-Christian world, people today do not see much of the underlying significance of the stories in the holy books on which they base their faith, nor do they understand where their religiously justified, irrational and stubborn prejudices stem from. The long told story of Christianity’s ‘Triumph’ over paganism hides the fact that the religion was born from the Goddess-centred faiths of that past time as much as from the Judaic prophecy of the Messiah.
But the Goddess isn’t worried. She has never gone anywhere. Anyone who has felt the presence of expanded, vibrant, high vibrational, peacefully embracing love has met Her, even if they called it ‘Him’. The shakti-shekinah-sakina is present in all matter, in both ‘he’ and ‘she’.
In the Pistis Sophia, a Gnostic text from the 3rd century, quoted in ‘Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same Sex Love’ by Will Roscoe, we learn of a very special teaching: ‘Then the disciples said to him, “Rabbi, reveal to us the mystery of the light of your Father, since we heard you say, ‘There is a baptism of fire, and a baptism of the Holy Spirit of light, and there is a spiritual anointing which leads the souls to the light-treasure.’ Speak to us now of their mystery, so that we may inherit the Kingdom of God.” Jesus said to them, “These mysteries about which you ask, there is no mystery higher, which will lead your soul to the light of lights, to the places of truth and the good, to the place of the holy of all holies, to the place in which there is neither female nor male, nor form in that place, but a continuing, indescribable light.”
Jesus came to do a job, his inspirational life kicked off a stream of growth for humanity that has unfortunately utterly severed our connection to the actual presence of the divine in the world, except for rare, magical moments that become the highlights of our lives. To heal our disconnection from the planet, from love, from the god and goddess within ourselves, we need – as a species, but each of us individually can help that day come – to reconnect to the light-giving, loving, teaching, compassionate and comforting Divine Mother Presence in everything- the shekhinah, shakti, sakina: the Great Holy Goddess Spirit.
When we look at the past it is always through a coloured lens.
Historians have always tended to reflect the values of the ruling elite of the time and record history from that viewpoint.
Translators of ancient texts have always hidden things in order to not offend the currently dominating, acceptable morality of the time.
Anthropologists to be judgmental of the people they study and dismissive of their culture in ways that serve the myth put out by the hierarchy they serve.
That’s why the history of the queer peoples of the planet has yet to be properly told. Many versions of queer history are possible, focussing on legal, social, literary aspects, but queer history can not be told fully without understanding the spiritual qualities of gay and lesbian love, of trans and bi-sexuality, nor without understanding that it was the suppression of those qualities by a totalitarian, patriarchal, war-mongering union of religion and government that produced the evils of homophobia still causing so much harm in the world today. The history of queer people and the history of faith on planet Earth are utterly intertwined.
In fact this suppression is not causing harm only to queer people, who in many places have to live in fear, secrecy and with their creative, loving nature seriously suppressed, but to all people, for by enforcing conformity of belief and expression – about how we see the divine, about how and with whom we express love and explore the erotic aspects of life, about how we celebrate and revel in being alive – the dominant forces in the world limit the growth of individuality, self-awareness, creativity and divinity in the world.
Queer people see that it matters not who loves who,
it matters not how an individual wishes to define and explore their gender identity,
it matters not how we dress to self-express,
nor how we choose to experience the sacredness of existence –
nor does it matter if a person wishes to explore substances that alter the way they experience the mysteries of being.
And it harm none, do what thou wilt – the witches creed should be adopted by the global LGBT community.
But these things have seemed to matter the dominant hetero-patriarchal culture for a long time, to the authoritarian system which until recently in the West was still executing or locking up queers – an evil terror of course that still happens in parts of the world.
The military-industrial system still criminalises and attempts to control people’s use of drugs, unlike any other civilisation in the history of the world.
Most of the conflict of the last millennium has had religious belief at its root, and even today not all religious people have found a way to live and let live.
The scientific paradigm and dominant materialist outlook keeps most people’s attention away from the greatest adventure there is to have while alive – the spiritual quest to self-realisation: to reach for higher love, holy light and mystical understanding in these times is still to be a rebel outside the acceptable, majority-led agreed reality.
And yet queers, judged so often for our partying, fashion obsessions, for our love of drugs and sex, are pre-programmed to be part of the urgently needed dimension-busting exploration of consciousness and the ultimate collective species wide shift to a new, compassionate and life-affirming paradigm. Most queers already care, about other people and about the planet and her creatures.. Most of us already consciously or not exist to live and let live, love and be loved, create and enjoy. Though sometimes criticised for shallowness and bitchiness, kindness is the more commonly expressed quality amongst us. Those of us who lived through the AIDS years saw the love of queer people close up. When the governments and churches were ignoring our plight, it was the LGBT community that stood up and took action, caring for the sick, building community and becoming much more politically motivated than previous to the epidemic.
Nobody would have believed in the 1990s that many countries of the world would have legalised same sex marriage within twenty years. This is a sign of the power in our queer hearts and minds. The old stories about us need to go, it is time that the Queers of the world were truly recognised for the good spirit, love, joy, healing, creativity, passion, colour, compassion and intelligence we bring to the human family.
The visible, collective presence of queer people, united in the cause of the human right to love, has already changed the world fundamentally. We are pioneers and freedom fighters. We know that nobody is free until everybody is free. There is much more for us to do.
History is not over yet and ours is still being written.
On the Spiritual Gay Men Group on Facebook somebody asked a simple question:
CAN SEX BE SPIRITUAL?
It’s turning out to be our most engaging post yet, with over a hundred comments, and over 90% of the men speaking up are absolutely sure it either is or can be…..
‘100% sex IS one of our most spiritual and powerful practices when we engage with the right intention THIS is so important for everyone, but especially us as gay men of spirit. To bring spirituality into your sexuality is becoming more unified in your own wholeness.’
‘The body can make you feel very VERY connected. Bliss surrender intimacy’
‘Of course. Really gets the Kundalini going, if it is good sex…good sex is how good you can let go and surrender’
‘Tantra teaches such sex… the orgasm is different. Also I like the part about how much pleasure can one open up to and how far can one follow it.’
‘Yes. Being vulnerable and trusting.’
‘being ready to take a trip to euphoria right?’
‘I do and want to practice as such with the right partner.’
‘Sex is about bliss. Not lust. About chemistry.‘
‘Absolutely’
‘For sure’
‘Absolutely! Sex with my man is our spiritual path!’
‘Oh to find the right man to take this journey with me.’
‘Yes. That’s the kind of sexual experience I long for.’
‘I believe it can be if those involved are vibrating on similar frequencies and levels of consciousness. Imagine two people who both have nurtured their energy to a point of higher consciousness. There’s bound to be some fireworks there when they decide to deliberately and consciously come together.’
‘when its used in love n not for selfish motives ‘
‘Everything in life can be.
‘100% sex can be a spiritual act.’
‘It’s supposed to be!’
‘It’s most definitely transcendent.’
‘Of course! That’s when it is the most intense.’
‘Only had a bad experience but I think that when I find someone special it would be cool.’
‘Absolutely! Sex can be very spiritual
‘yesssss’
‘Of course it is ‘
‘Yes it is a transfer of energy between to souls. You give of yourself to another at the same time they are giving a part of themselves to you.’
‘It is’
‘Definitely ‘
We did have one or two voices coming from a different perspective:
‘Nope. Sex is entirely physical… biology/science explains ‘
‘Def not, to me is totally the opposite, and i like it this way better’
but the great majority of comments were like this:
‘Yes, it can be, with the right SPIRITUAL partner.’
‘I hope so’
The thread features this thought provoking reply:
‘It’s an interesting concept. It all depends on how you see spirituality.
If you keep it true to the concept of a soul and a path to liberation and awareness, then sex for the purpose of pleasure is the opposite of spiritual because it ties you to physical pleasure derived from physical stimulation of sexual organs.
The transient joy and sometimes the sense of connection that is derived from sex can seem spiritual but it in fact is not if it did not lead to further awareness or enlightenment. In reality, if it deepens the attachment to another physical being, it is not a spiritual act.
This argument is purely based on the definition of spirituality as being enlightenment through awareness of oneself as a soul that is purely energy.
If you view spirituality differently, then you may see sex as a spiritual act.’
To close here are a couple of my contributions to the thread:
‘Sex is the most powerful way to integrate the physical, emotional and spiritual …. and the key is the mental, what we believe about it opens or limits the nrg flow. sex can be entirely ego centric and never reach the heart, but once it is connected to heart the doorways to the higher chakras, ie to the subtle dimensions, can open.’
‘Gay men were among the sacred sex workers in the ancient temples. The Christians started to call it prostitution from 3rd century. We’re mentioned in the Old Testament, Book of Kings.. The king James English translation says “there were sodomites in the temples”, but the original word, Qedesha, means ‘Holy Ones’.
‘Gay Christians don’t mention this because they are part of a church that separates sex and spirit. Harry Hay of the Radical Faeries said our job as gays today is to bring them back together ‘
On most worlds beings never lose touch with the Oneness,
with the Source Of Life, Awareness and Love inside themselves.
Only certain worlds and some souls undertake the journey of separation,
on planets where the innate connection to Source is dropped
– for a while – and perhaps only by one species –
giving rise to a journey of creativity, emotion, suffering and exaltation
in a paradigm of binaries, polarities and mystery,
where the search for reunification with Source becomes the planetary history
and the breaking of binaries becomes part of the journey to glory.
On the Earth while individuated we experience separation
but within us we carry the ability to know ourselves as the Oneness,
to know our existence is the Eternal Infinite Compassionate Consciousness:
being That we are not created or destroyed,
We Are.
Whatever form our journey, whatever we experience
The Oneness is holding us, loving us, enjoying us.
It never loses faith, only our minds can do that
Tell the mind it is safe, and find the peace it can generate.
In Two Flutes Playing (by Andrew Ramer) the earthly phenomenon of separation is depicted like this…
“Earth is still unstable at its core, it still wobbles on its axis—in fact everything that lives upon it wobbles. To some, that is an awful tragedy, the cause of their difficulties, the source of their inability to successfully manifest spiritual intentions. For there are planets that do not wobble on their axes, do not have unstable cores. And certain individuals have lived before on such worlds, or visited them between incarnations. And when they get to Earth they often complain about the way that things are here. It does no good to tell such individuals that they have chosen to incarnate here, that no one forced them to do it. It does no good to remind such individuals that this world is one of the most varied and beautiful in this galaxy. The best that one can say to make life a bit easier is that the very factors that make Earth life difficult also make it challenging, creative and exciting.
“If you have lived on a planet with a stable core whose axis does not wobble you will know what I am talking about. On such worlds, spiritual life is not difficult, one does not have to struggle to learn, remember and manifest spiritual intentions on the physical plane. But worlds like that are boring. They may not have war. But try and imagine a world where people whistle the same song for ten thousand years, and styles of clothes never change, and the same chants recited over and over again for millennia echo in the courtyards of their sacred places. That kind of life suits certain individuals. But if you are here, you can be certain that you left such a planet or checked it out and decided against it. For with all its faults, life upon the living, breathing being you call Earth is challenging and infinitely creative. The soul is stretched to its fullest capacities. And ultimately, the great difficulty is more than balanced out by the joy of Earth’s diversity and infinite creative possibilities. In a single Earth year in a single city, more songs can be written and performed than on certain planets in their entire history. Please remember that.”
On the Earth Humanity is on a journey to discover Oneness, but the journey is at the same time a return to Home, a remembrance. We can each contribute greatly to the next stages of this journey by offering, dedicating our lives as a divine service.
The conscious offering of our individual experiences to the overall fulfilment of the journey of the Oneness on this planet connects us to the infinite energy and potential of the universe, gives us the tools to make the changes we require and seek in our lives, and increases the harmonious potential in all our interactions with other beings, whom we now recognise and respect as utterly equal manifestations of the Oneness.
The recognition and remembrance that all life is the same as us, is what we are, including animal, vegetable and even mineral, leads us to a path of growth, to a form of love that embraces all beings and all existence. This movement out of darkness (ie pain and ignorance) and into light (peace and joy) is fuelled by our love and dedication. Everything we do can be filled with love, joy and creative energy – it’s as simple as directing the mind to make it so, and casting out all mental energy that suggests life is anything other than the perfect dance of the Divine Holy Spirit in Form. Think this is hard? That’s why humans have deities, to anchor us into the higher purpose. That’s why we have meditation, to build mental muscle. That’s why we religions teach compassion, to treat other as self, to love and to be kind, for each one of us is holy in our own right.
The Hindus speak of Sat – Existence/Life, Chit – Consciousness/Awareness, Ananda – Bliss/Love. This is describing the core sacred nature within us, which is also the doorway to the multi-dimensional reality, the multiverse of light and serenity. The more we find this inner place of simple, sweet BEING – this place which needs no gendered godhead, no religion or rules, no action or debate – the more at home in the universe we can know and feel ourselves to be, and so the more enthusiastically we can embrace the game of life on a planet with a built in wobble. For Fear is the stalker on this world of separation and duality, preventing our happiness, our joy, our light from blooming forth, fear is the mind killer and the emotion strangler too. The antidote to fear is to know and feel the love of Oneness, in ourselves and with others – as we find this out and live this truth, ultimately we will make this world a happier place.
Sri Aurobindo
A rather more celebratory description of life on worlds without wobble, where the Oneness is not forgotten, and the experience of individuation does not lead to extremes of suffering and bliss here from Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri (Book 2 “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds” Canto 9, ‘The Paradise of the Life-Gods’)….
“The shining Edens of the vital gods…
All things were perfect there that flower in Time:
Beauty was there creation’s native mould,
Peace was a thrilled voluptuous purity.
There Love fulfilled her gold and roseate dreams
And Strength her crowned and mighty reveries;
Desire climbed up, a swift omnipotent flame,
And Pleasure had the stature of the gods;
Dreams walked along the highways to the stars;
Sweet common things turned into miracles:
Overtaken by the spirit’s sudden spell,
Smitten by a divine passions’s alchemy,
Pain’s self completed transformed to potent joy
Curing the antithesis twixt heaven and hell.
All life’s high visions are embodied there….”
We can use this vision to create a new dance of Shiva,
to visualise a new world to come, but also remember:
We came to the Earth for a different experience,
one with filled with danger, challenge but huge potential
for acts of love, compassion, creativity and sheer delight.
The Earth wobbles.
We will never now ideal harmony here
but we can recognise that in the chaos and mystery
there is divine purpose, pattern and presence
there is joy to be had, love to relish
and new experience ours to create
as we give birth to a divine human race.
Sir George Trevelyan 1906-1966
“Man can decide to throw off the fetters of his own self-bound egoistic thinking, which, when taken in mass, makes the stuff of cruder materialism. As each individual allows the rock to split and rises to the incorruptible, the fabric of the old will change and perforce a new world will appear, consecrated to glory, unity and all-encompassing Oneness.” Sir George Trevelyan
Sex is an act of worship Love is a game of mirrors… The ultimate destiny is union Of the genders we find within us.
When we see ‘other’ We engage fear and distance To see all as ‘sisterbrother’ Is to lose our own resistance.
The way to becoming one united conscious species, Involves dissolving the many delusions Around gender, sexuality and race That the Caucasian patriarchy have so firmly put in place.
I am me, you are you In essence the same Nothing more is true.
We came here to help each other through The Shift of the Ages The 5th dimensional Awakening: Old paradigms are shaking And the New World will come through.
The mental attitudes and beliefs we have in place in the mind frame and colour our experience of life, and in fact are calling those experiences to us. This is what the Law of Attraction is all about – our mental energies emit frequencies which draw similar frequencies to them, good or bad, simply based on what we are putting our deep thought and faith into.
Therefore every now and again it pays dividends to look at the core beliefs we have running in our subconscious minds. If we don’t do this we risk ‘old programmes’ running the show of our lives today. Especially during times of rapid change in life circumstances, or big shifts in our emotional lives, it is a good time to go within and check that we have positive core beliefs operating that support our well being and are calling good experiences into our lives.
The future is not written. However, our imagination is often busy writing it rather than experiencing the current moment. This is, I suggest, usually caused by an emotional reaction to a notion of something in the future arising in our stream of thought, a reaction which is actually a suppressed emotion from the past trying to make itself known by preventing us experiencing the present. If we imagine our happiness lies in the future we are denying the possibility of it existing here and how, and also setting ourselves up for a fall if that future arrives but doesn’t deliver what we expected. But when we imagine a dark future of trouble, issues and angst we are being influenced by something in our past that we haven’t healed yet – we can remind ourselves when we spot this happening that the future is not written, is in fact ours to create – that in fact we are invoking a future all the time through our mental and emotional bodies – so envisioning dark futures is not a great idea (such thoughts also produce immediate chemical and emotional reactions in our bodies as if the dark thing were happening right now) – but of course often it can be hard not to imagine a dark future because we tend to base our assumptions about what is to come on our experience of the past. We tend to believe in this pattern –
EXPERIENCE – CONCEIVE – CREATE
but the universe is running on this pattern, that, when engaged consciously, will bring us what we actually want in life
CONCEIVE – CREATE -EXPERIENCE
Ie to change an experience that you do not want or like, change the belief that conjured it into being, choose a different thoughtform that will lead you towards what you do want. The fullest explanation of this can be found in the series of Conversations with God books by Neale Donald Walsch.
We can surrender all our thoughts, fears and expectations about the future, release them from our energy field – perhaps to the Dark Goddess or the Void or our deity of choice – simply refuse to believe in them – and please note we do not need to judge them for existing, they are what they are, but we do not have to listen to them nor hold on to them. We can accept that the future is in the hand of the Universe, of the Divine, of Creation… and it works wonders to also believe that the Universe/Divine/Creation is poised at every moment to move into alignment on the many levels of Being that exist, to bring you into a state of bliss filled connection with yourself, with the people around you, with nature – BECAUSE IN FACT IT IS! The cosmic consciousness is always on the verge of union, or shifting like night and day in and out of unity – we humans are the meeting points of the maya/illusion of separation/suffering with the yoga/union of joyful, playful. loving oneness. In our minds we create pathways to unity or crisis, all the time – the law of attraction is always in play, trying to manifest the vibrations emanating from our mental frequencies, and the emotionally charged beliefs we put behind them.
Once we realise we may be creating potential unhappiness in our own future, simply by imagining it there, and get that we actually have some power over that – then it is time to practise the art of surrender to the higher self. The higher self can absolutely handle the future, maybe even has it planned out already – the higher self (perhaps approached through a deity) is always creating pathways to a future of unity, love and concord. We can give all our hopes, fears, dreams about the future to the higher self – yes tell it what you DO want, be clear on the positives, but then stop thinking about them and live in the now… and at the same time surrender to it, and invite it to transform, every single dark thought that arises in the imagination about the future. There is really no need to hold anything about the future in the emotional field except hope, faith and trust!
For all of us born in the 20th century it’s likely we were indoctrinated from birth into believing in ourselves as separate beings, told that our self-awareness that is the product of our physical form, whose thoughts are powerless, but who have to compete and struggle to make our way in the world. It’s fairly unlikely we grow into adulthood believing and feeling we are held, from the inside, by the all-loving, generous source of creation, who gives their own precious, divine gift of self awareness to us, that we might evolve into divinely conscious beings in our own right. This is not what we generally were told, except in some religious versions, sometimes very twisted ones.
Good religion exists too of course, and during the 20th century there have been many teachers and prophets both within and outside established faiths who have brought forth the wisdom of unity and love. The established forces of governments, academia, global corporations, finance – the military-industrial complex that runs the world at the moment holds on tightly to a materialistic paradigm that serves it well, but does not serve the planet nor her inhabitants, that does not connect us to the All-Being.
The Core Beliefs that have infected the world with viral poison and are holding back the evolution of our species are
THAT WE ARE ALL SEPARATE BEINGS
THAT THE BODY AND SEXUALITY ARE ANYTHING LESS THAN DIVINE COSMIC VEHICLES FOR OUR CONSCIOUSNESS
THAT ALL FORMS OF LOVE ARE NOT EQUAL
THAT LIFE IS A RANDOM ACCIDENT IN A HEARTLESS UNIVERSE
As we each individually work out the truth about these things for ourselves – and it seems to me a lot of people have already done so – the collective consciousness shifts and the great institutions that run our lives will either adapt or collapse.
Shifting to or strengthening our own personal core beliefs to an
ACCEPTANCE OF UNITY OF ALL LIFE AND EXISTENCE
THAT THE BODY AND SEXUALITY ARE SACRED
AND SO ARE ALL FORMS OF LOVE
THAT LIFE IS AN ETERNAL JOURNEY, ON WHICH WE ARE DESTINED TO AWAKEN TO COSMIC BLISS
and by making sure that all other beliefs we are permitting in our mind space are in accord with these life-enhancing, light-bringing, core values, we rapidly accelerate our individual contribution to the holistic and healthy evolution of the whole. We bring wellness into our own lives, as our souls relax and our hearts, minds and spirits expand.
With these core beliefs in place, the future becomes a much less frightening place.
THE EMOTIONAL PLANE OF REALITY IS AS VAST AND MYSTERIOUS AS THE PHYSICAL.
The elemental model of our human nature teaches us to give attention to, and to seek balance between, four aspects of our being. The four elements ‘manifest’ in us as body (earth), mind (air), spirit (fire) and emotion (water).
We live in confusing times. The predominant mainstream culture preaches a scientific, materialist, rational take on the world, with spiritual and religious perspectives sidelined. The internet reveals that many people the world over are involved in the alternative subculture of mystical, new age, astrological exploration. Amidst the melee of voices and offerings, it stands out to me that the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of being are widely explored and discussed but the emotional level of existence is under appreciated and poorly understood. I see people who have pursued and found rewards from spirituality and self-development but who do not appreciate the very real, visceral, effect of the ever shifting waters of the emotional field of reality and who do not seem to get that the Goddess has given us a great big barometer to use in order to understand the emotional plane – the Moon.
Through pagan practices we can shift ourselves away from the soul-denying mainstream culture and from the often body-denying, sex and pleasure-phobic religions, towards a reconnection with the natural world and the eternal cycles of the cosmos, We can re-engage ourselves physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally with the Creation of which we are both a product and an integral part. We are not separate from it, but our minds have in general been so conditioned to believe that we are isolated individuals, that separation is all we usually experience. Through the emotional body we can have the most direct experience of interconnectedness.
Through understanding the nature of the element of water we can gain insight into the emotional reality. The planet’s oceans and tides are under the influence of the Moon and so it is with the emotional body. At Full Moon emotions are strong and demand expression, at Dark Moon there is a strong inward pull, and we can feel emotionally, and energetically, low. When the emotions are heavy or very inward, it reduces the amount of physical energy available to us. While the Moon is waning there is a gradual inward shift, then an outward move again after the New Moon.
The Moon moves each month through the 12 signs of the zodiac, reflecting back to us the various aspects of being as it does so. Spending 2.5 days in each sign, the Moon – and the emotional field – moves through a repeating pattern of FIRE – EARTH – AIR – WATER. If we follow the path of the moon in our awareness, eg using a moon diary to know in which sign the moon is each day, and to deepen our knowledge of the qualities associated with that sign and its element, we will soon get to notice the repeating patterns in our own energy bodies.
Fire and Air Moons are more expansive and outgoing than Earth and Water Moons, for example. Fire Moons can get us energised, creative and active, Water Moons often call us to rest, dream and take care of ourselves, they give us chance to deepen relationships and also to release old or stuck emotions from our energy field. Earth moons are very focussed and practical in their spirit, while Air Moons can call us to share our feelings, our hopes and visions.
The key to happiness or suffering about this ebb and flow of the emotional field lies in the mind. The stories we tell ourselves in our head are heard by the subconscious, which then feeds back an emotional reaction. If we frame our experiences in dark tales of suffering and self-judgement we create more dark feelings in our own being. Of course the inner being knows that we are in reality not these dark tales, it knows we are in fact bright light and divine love and nothing else, so it is also holding on in there and waiting for us to turn our thoughts around and bring ourselves into alignment and inner harmony.
Attuning to the Pagan Wheel of the Year and knowledge of the Moon and other cosmic cycles re-integrates us into the divine plan, gives us the tools to drop the fear that the belief in separation engenders in our subconscious. Astrology as a practice is not necessarily about knowing what’s coming in the future – though once we have an understanding of the powerful underlying elemental energies that are constantly influencing our feelings we can hope to navigate life’s seas more effectively and joyfully – it exists to help us know our part in the vast unified play of consciousness, it helps us explore archetypal energies, the interrelation of physical, emotional, spiritual and mental energies, revealing that we are all reflections of each other and of the cosmos, weaving patterns in our lives just as the planets dance through the constellations in the sky.
The most direct way to know and experience ourselves as an interconnected being, part of a collective consciousness, is through our feelings, through the emotional body. It helps to take on board that on all levels of reality – physical, spiritual, mental and emotional – we are partakers of a greater unity. Our body-minds are equipped not simply to know ourselves as individuals, but as the Whole also, if we choose to access that part of our nature. Psychedelic and sacred medicinal drugs can be a fast route to understanding this, but applying that knowledge practically and effectively in our lives requires dedication and self-awareness on our part. The Pagan Path attunes us to the greater whole and gives us the tools to do this in very practical ways.
A great challenge on the spiritual path is to become the master of our own emotional body. Energetic waves – energy in motion – rise and fall, hitting our consciousness, threatening our balance and equanimity, taking us on emotional roller coasters. The very linear focus of many spiritual paths tell us we should be aiming for a goal of enlightenment and awareness that is usually presented as a static state. But we do not live on a stable, static planet – it wobbles on its axis – and we should not expect our emotions, or our lives, to be any different. Water is the element of emotion, and the amount of water vs land on this earth should tell us that the emotional level of being is very real, very important and central to our experience here. Paganism reveals to us the cycles of life and how to align with them for maximum benefit, for oneself and the whole.
We are challenged while here on Earth to grow in all four parts of our Being – to grow physically and discover what we can do with these bodies; to develop our minds, our intellect and understanding; to expand spiritually on the journey of self-discovery and self-realisation; and to build a strong emotional body. The soul in us wants experiences that make it grow – it treats all life’s events with an equanimity our minds can usually only aspire to – because through emotional experiences, both dark and light, we grow in strength, character, wisdom, passion and the ability to channel the powerful vibrations that the soul seeks to bring into this world.
The emotional plane is a level of reality in which we all partake. Eventually we reach a point in ourselves where old emotions from our past no longer bother us, and the ebb and flow of happiness, sadness, anger, emptiness and love are accepted, even enjoyed. At that point we are free to raise emotional energy consciously, to connect ourselves body-mind-emotion in order to positively and generously add to the abundance of joy, love and bliss in the world, also to add tears of compassion. We can connect our own emotional field to the collective field, to the universal emotional plane, which is as vast, as complex, as fascinating and as divine as the physical universe, and is awaiting our explorations and our offerings of love, compassion and joy as we each help to raise the frequencies of the collective human emotional and spiritual planes.
The idea that male and female are two distinct and separate genders, into one or other of which everybody is supposed to fit, is a very modern, patriarchal model that, although now widely spread through the world, has no basis or grounding in history, or in biological nor spiritual fact. It is high time we decolonised gender and sexuality from the crippling notions imposed on both in the names of both religion and science in recent centuries.
I will leave the biology to others, here are some observations on the spiritual nature of humanity:
Christians sometimes justify their transphobia by utilising the verse in the first chapter of the book of Genesis that says,
“God created Adam in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female God created them”.
Yet while this is interpreted today to mean men and women are separate genders, the ancient Jewish sages taught something quite different. They knew that this was a declaration that humans are androgynous in their core nature, that male and female are expressions of the soul, and rather than a clear line between the two there existed a spectrum of possibilities of genderfluid combinations. In fact at least one ancient Greek translation of Genesis reads “male and female created He him” not “them” (gnosis.org)
Ancient Hebrew teachings gave consideration to those who fell outside the gender polarity – teachings handed down through oral tradition but eventually being written down in the third century. The androgynoswas someone with both male and female characteristics, the tumtum, one whose biology is unclear, the aylonit, who identified as female at birth, but at puberty, develops male characteristics, and the saris, who appears as male at birth, but later takes on more typically female biology. Rabbinical text the Bikkurim starts a discussion thus
“An androgynous, who presents both male and female physical traits, is in some ways like men and in some ways like women. In some ways, they are like both men and women, and in other ways, like neither men nor women.” (Bikkurim 4:1)
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.” (Isaiah 56:12)
Jesus was schooled in the rabbinical tradition and he too let us know that he understood the spiritual power of transsexuality. Discussing eunuchs in the Gospel of Matthew he tells us,
“For there are eunuchs who were born that way, others were made that way by men, and still others live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 19:12). Aware of the potential controversy perhaps, he went on to say “The one who can accept (also translated as ‘receive’) this should accept it.”
Ancient mythologies from the Middle East and Europe, like those from other parts of the world, contain many tales of gender transformation, and for millennia people who themselves embodied gender fluidity were regarded as having special powers. For this reason trans people often took up holy roles in the community. In the story of Ishtar, the form of the Goddess worshiped for at least 10000 years in the Mesopotamian empires, transgender priest/esses, the kurgurru and galatur, were created especially to be her servants. Similarly, Goddess Cybele, whose worship was centred in Anatolia in modern Turkey but went on to spread around the Mediterranean and as far as Britain once the Romans adopted her as their Magna Mater, Great Goddess, was served by the transgender Gallae priest/esses. Their flamboyant, loud, sexual and sometimes bloody ways were much hated by the early Christians. Augustine recognised the Gallae as “the sons of the earth. The Earth is their mother” but called them also “castrated perverts….. madmen…. foully unmanned and corrupted.”
Inscribed pottery shards from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt (2000–1800 BCE), found near ancient Thebes, list three human genders: tai (male), sḫt (“sekhet”) and hmt (female). (Sethe, Kurt, (1926), Die Aechtung feindlicher Fürsten, Völker und Dinge auf altägyptischen Tongefäßscherben des mittleren Reiche, quoted on Wikipedia)
From ancient languages we can tell that a gender was viewed as fluid, as a spectrum: Latin had the word virago, for a masculine woman and mollis for a feminine man (this word stuck around for a long time, eg the Molly Houses of 18th century London. Other ancient Greek/Roman words for effeminate males included cinaedus (originally the word for an exotic dancer from Asia Minor), baptai (effeminate and licentious, originally the baptai were gender-variant, homo-erotically inclined priests of the Goddess Kotys, who originated in Phrygia, Turkey, and crossed into Greece 7th century BCE), and effeminatus.
Pliny (1st century CE) wrote that “there are even those who are born of both sexes, whom we call hermaphrodites, at one time androgyni“
For one thousand years in Europe Christian teachings gradually reduced and removed all memory of ancient knowledge about the spiritual power of both homosexuality and transsexuality. The idea that both these naturally occurring features of the human soul were ‘against nature’ took hold. But when European Christians set out to explore the world they found that in most cultures same sex relationships were not considered taboo, and that cross-dressing, gender-bending shamans served as spiritual functionaries in tribal peoples on every continent.
The Native American tribes often recognised 3,4 or 5 genders, and each had their own special words for the gendervariant, magical servants of the spirit.
Examples include, for male bodied Two-Spirits, winkte (Lakota tribe), lhamana (Zuni ), nádleehí(Navajo), boté(Crow), . There were words for female bodied two spirit shamans including hwame (Mohave), hetaneman(Cheyenne) and tayagigux (Aleut). Terms used for both male and female two spirits included t‘übás(Northern Paiute), and tangowaip(western Shoshone). Some of these terms can be translated as “manwoman” but there are other meanings too –Nádleehí, for example, literally means “one who is changing.”
The Europeans called the gender-bending shamans berdache, a French word for a passive homosexual, and this word stuck for centuries until the Native Americans themselves chose to replace it with the term ‘Two-Spirit’, which is a suitable translation for the many words the tribes used to use, it referring to the presence of both male and female spirit in one person.
In Zapotece communities of Mexico a third gender is recognised, called the Muxe. In a 1551 letter sent from Brazil Father Pero Correia wrote about women who “carry weapons like men and marry other women. Being called ‘women’ was perceived as a major insult.” The Amazon was given that name by Europeans because of women like these, who reminded them of legends of ancient European warrior women.
Crossing into the Pacific Ocean, in Polynesian and Hawaiian societies the Mahu were men who lived as women and served the community as healers, caretakers and teachers of the hula dance traditions.
African cultures also saw gender in a holistic rather than binary way:
“mudoko dako” were effeminate males among the Langi of northern Uganda, they were treated as women and could marry men.
“gor-digen” were men-women of Senegal
“chibados” a third gender in south western Africa: Portuguese Jesuit Joao dos Santos wrote in 1625 that the chibados were “attyred like women, and behave themselves womanly, ashamed to be called men; are also married to men, and esteeme that unnaturale damnation an honor.”
“skesana” and“iqgenge” – Zulu terms for trans-gender people
“mumemke” and “shoga” – Swahili terms for trans-gender
“tsecats”were a third gender class of dancers and ceremonial magicians in Madagascar.
“…among the Dagara people [of Burkino Faso], 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.” Dagara Teacher Malidoma Some quoted from http://www.menweb.org/somegay.htm
In Asia trans or third-gender people appear in many cultures. The Hijra of India today are a surviving remnant of what was once a proud tradition of spiritual community. They have survived the attacks of Muslims and Christians to be a living link to the queer shamanic servants of the ancient world. The Kathoey of Thailand have a long, rich history too, but not one universally recognised by Buddhism, which in this respect can act like the Abrahamic religions, viewing homosexuality and transsexuality as lower vibrational. Buddhism is after all also a patriarchal system, but Hinduism has long recognised a third gender and its sacred nature. It is referred to in the Vedas, in the Kama Sutra and in ancient medical, legal and astrological texts. The Supreme God Shiva is considered to be transgender in their Ardhinashvara aspect, which brings us back to where we started.
GOD IS TRANSGENDER
THE SOUL IS TRANSGENDER
ULTIMATELY WE ARE ALL TRANSGENDER
BUT SOME SOULS ARE HERE TO EMBODY THAT NATURE DIRECTLY
AND RECLAIM ITS SACRED PURPOSE, POWER AND PRESENCE
But compared to two decades ago, many more have awakened
to the MYSTERY, the MAGICAL, the MYSTICAL….
and are finding the natural, sacred flow.
2020 Pandemic brings change and transformation
A portal to life lived in a new vibration:
With the soul at the centre, what’s important redefined,
humanity recalling how to be gentle and kind.
Nature restored as our Divine Mother
The Goddess returns to show the way home.
Many are finding the WAY, AWAKENING to NEW POSSIBILITIES
yet can so easily get distracted into fantasy or conspiracy
forgetting the goal is simply to REMEMBER
that I AM YOU and YOU ARE ME –
when we reach this knowing, we birth a new humanity
and can build a new world, built on compassion and equality.
LIGHTWORKERS OF THE WORLD
yes speak to the aliens but don’t expect them to save us
and yes many are already here in disguise –
but hey they too are human this time
and have to master THIS game.
No matter where we’re from
all we really have to do
is to REMEMBER
that YOU ARE ME and I AM YOU.
Look each other in the eye
feel how souls merge with earth and sky
re-unite the worlds through the human form
arrive in theHERE AND NOW
with NATURE in all her GLORY:
it’s we ourselves, not aliens
who will rewrite humanity’s story.
LIGHTWORKERS OF THE WORLD
no don’t obsess with 5G and vaccines
these things are perhaps indeed not what they seem
for NOR ARE YOU, let it be known,
IT’S TIME TO AWAKEN FROM THE DREAM.
Humanity is now outgrowing old models mechanical
as it is also outgrowing old religions puritanical.
We are masters of our own fate
It’s all about the FREQUENCY we vibrate.
Engage the high vibration of wonder
of the magical child at play in the cosmic universe –
to keep your head above the delusions:
in the 5th dimension there are no enemies
no viral attacks or toxic throwbacks –
the universal field of LOVE
is accessible to all, it answers to your call.
LIGHTWORKERS OF THE WORLD
remember, that there are many DEATH WORKERS here amongst you too
Some of you here to help passing souls make it back on through
the veils to the spirit dimensions with joy, peace and grace
it’s time to heal the mental fears of the human race.
TELL YOUR FRIENDS THERE IS NO DEATH
SHOW THEM HOW TO REACH HEAVEN WITH RHYTHM AND BREATH.
SHOW THEM IT’S SAFE TO OPEN THEIR MINDS, HEARTS AND INNER VISION
SPREAD THIS WONDER, THIS LIGHT, THIS JOY –
TRULY THIS IS OUR MISSION.
“If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Between adult Humans, various kinds of erotic love are possible
love of woman and woman
love of man and man
love of woman and man
sometimes the sex of the body does not reflect the active gender of the person
.
all forms of gender and love deserve respect and honour
all deserve room to grow and thrive
in a balanced world all forms of love will be seen to have their role and purpose
all are required to bring harmony and peace to the collective human soul.
There are some people who embody both genders, and even other gender identities – these souls have a special spiritual message for us that I cover in other blogs.
From Two Flutes Playing, by Andrew Ramer:
“Love is genderless. Love is an energy that freely flows. In the end it does not matter who loves who. For the energy that fills the space between them is what matters.”
“The male body vibrates differently than a female body. Their patterns of energy are different. So a male and a female body create a different pattern of combined energy in their meetings than the union of man and man, or of woman and woman. Once all religions knew this. The energy of those exploring the male-female path emerges in spirals. Woman to woman energy expands outward in rippling circles. The energy of man-to-man love creates a pillar, a column, a tree of living light, of liquid fire rising. So the spiral, the circle, the line. The differing faces of oneness. The bowl, the jug, the plate shaped out of clay. The ancients knew this. And this knowledge surfaces and resurfaces through time. Sometimes hidden, sometimes secret, still it lives on in the heart of humanity. Surfacing, going into hiding, waiting for the time when it can flow freely again.”
“It is not the same for two men to be joined together as it is for two women or a man and a woman. It is not the same, nor is it different. In love being shared, it is identical. In bodies and frequencies being different, that which rises up from it is not the same. And the human community needs all the colors of loving that its genders allow. The human fabric needs all the colors woven in. The spiritual heart needs all colors, in order to transform human life on this planet, in order to begin the era of universal connection.”
“The work of love between men is holy, the work in community and the work of two together. The brain is made for two-together loving. And through that kind of loving, love is spun out to the world. For too long love has been denied to men together, love, tenderness, caring. For too long the love between men has been unspoken, and only the outer form, the dance of sex, has remained. Sex is sex when only bodies dance it. But when the heart joins in, then sex is sacred. Sex made holy is that through which two can channel love out to the world. Sex made holy is that through which two connect to the origin of the world itself…
“For any two men who come together in a loving relationship create and generate an energy that can be used to heal the world and move it through the coming changes to a time of light and love and spiritual freedom. In touch, in loving, a vibration is created, a song, a chant. This is the sound of two flutes playing. And the power of that song is two together moving through consciousness, two together pursuing the essence of life, two together healing. Any two can heal. Every two men together bound by love can use their energy to be gay healers…
“It is time for men to gather together in communities and celebrate the love that two can share together. To make public this love is to establish loving strands to the community, so that the love two generate can be woven outward. Each public celebration is a blessing to lovers and to community.”
“In the love of man for man, the unity of the cosmos affirms itself. And in a world of two sexes, were it not for that sacred bonding, your species would unhinge itself into warring halves. A mystery. That men and women can come together in their loving because men love men, because women love women. Same-sex love affirms unity. Without that affirmation, men and women could not meet. Their polarities would unhinge them, each from each. In a world of two sexes, however different they are from each other, each sex bears within it the fullness of humanity. Where there is one human, female or male, in their heart, all of humanity lives. This is a paradox, that part is the same as the whole. But it is true. In a world of two sexes, where woman is, man is suggested. Where man is, woman is remembered. So that whosoever pulls away, man to man or woman to woman, from the mainstream of woman to man communing, in their closeness the fullness of humanity will flower, if they cast away fear, if they allow twoness to happen. For in their love, in their oneness, they are reminders to everyone of the fullness that every man and every woman carries. Sometimes it is easier to see the whole when part is not present, as men and women may forget when they dance their dance of bodies. Love between men can remind the world of that.”
The British quite naturally come in for plenty of criticism for the way they imposed Christianity on the many peoples of the largest empire the world has ever known, but we Brits should remember that Christianity was also a foreign religion once to us, which was imposed on us from the 7th century onwards. Very few of us Brits today are aware that 1000 years after that effort began, the Old Religion, our native faith, which was sometimes erotic, ecstatic and practised while intoxicated, was still very much alive and widespread among the populace, despite the efforts of church councils, parliamentary laws and the bloodthirsty activities of witchfinders to eradicate it.
In 1660 a 134 feet tall Cedar Maypole was erected on the Strand in London to celebrate the return of the King – the Restoration of the monarchy after 18 years of strict Puritan rule under Oliver Cromwell was for most a huge cause for celebration. Historian Catherine Arnold writes in ‘City of Sin’ that as Charles II took the throne “the city erupted into one giant party which was to last for the rest of his life.”
For 18 years in the middle of the 17th Century the theatres and fun palaces had been closed, pubs were raided, fig leaves placed on naked statues, heavy fines imposed for swearing, and maypoles across the country were felled, considered by Puritans “a heathenish vanity” and a “stynkynge idoll”. For almost two decades the government made a concerted effort to control the worship, behaviour and to reform the morality of the British nations, until the people got utterly sick of it. The Puritan Commonwealth led by Oliver Cromwell was one of the first attempts to impose a rigorous fundamentalist religious culture on a populace. It failed spectacularly.
The English Civil War began in 1642, King Charles I was deposed then executed a few years later. Puritans took over the reins of government and enacted many laws to control public behaviour. This included the death penalty for incest or adultery. Brothels had been big business in London for centuries, a source of income (through rented properties) for both church and state, and just prior to the upheaval, in 1641 parliament had decided prostitution should be regarded not as a crime, but as a public nuisance. But under the Commonwealth headed up by Oliver Cromwell the whorehouses, known as ‘stews’, of south London became warehouses for trade, with only one or two high class brothels remaining, such as ‘Oxford Kate’s’ in Bow Street.
The Maypole is one of the most powerful symbols of pagan magic – it represents the union of earth and heaven. It is decorated and danced around to invoke that experience of cosmic connection in the revellers. To the Puritans of the 17th century, who were determined to complete the Protestant conversion of the country begun a century earlier under Henry VIII, the Maypole was a “stynkynge idoll” because it was associated with drunken and sexualised goings on. In 1644 Maypoles were outlawed, and poles around the country torn down, including London’s central pole on the Strand, which stood at 100 feet tall and had stood there since at least the end of the previous century, possibly at a site long regarded as a pagan centre of worship. For sure Maypoles had been erected in London since centuries (millennia?), with permanent sites appearing from at least the Middle Ages. Other famous London Maypoles included those at Cornhill and Aldgate Wards. The resurrection of the Strand Maypole in 1660 was a grand occasion with the King in attendance. The new pole was taken in procession with much drumming, morris dancing and festivity from Scotland Yard to the site on the Strand. It took a crew of seaman four hours to erect the pole, and the merriment continued, as Catherine Arnold said, for 25 years until the death of the King.
Diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was delighted when the May rites returned, recording in 1661 that he and his wife and friends going to Woolwich to spend the night in the countryside in preparation ‘to ‘gather May-dew’ in the morning.
It was not only in central London that the downfall of fundamentalist religious control was met with an upsurge of pagan sentiment, as evidenced by the reappearance of maypoles around the country. Philosopher and amateur archaeologist (he discovered the Avebury stone circle!) John Aubrey (1626-97) wrote that poles “were set up at every crossway”. A pamphlet entitled “The Cities Loyalty Displayed” celebrated the return of the Maypole to London.
The huge Strand Maypole was severely damaged by strong winds in 1672, and only a stump remained until 1713, when it was rebuilt again – this time it only survived until 1717. The Maypole site was taken over to build the Church of St Mary le Strand, which still stands, and the pole itself was bought by Isaac Newton, who used it in the building of an aerial telescope. So the last London pagan ritual pole, representative of our ancient search for spiritual answers, became part of the search for a new scientific explanation of our existence here on Earth.
Even so, this was not the end of Maypole celebrations! Historian Randy P Connor in ‘The Pagan Heart of the West’ looks for signs of continuing May celebrations, and relates that in 1708 the British Apollo reported that it was commonly accepted that the Maypole rite was an ancient, pre-Christian, ceremony. Gullivers Travels author Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), a devout Anglican, celebrated the Maypole, personifying it and giving us its view on the Puritans, –
“And once a Weaver in our Town,
A damn’d Cromwellian, knock’d me down.
I lay a prisoner twenty Years;
And then the Jovial Cavaliers
To their old Posts retor’d all Three,
I mean the Church, the King and Me.”
He was not shy about referring to what went on there either…
“No couple-beggar in the land E’er joined such numbers hand in hand. I joined them fairly with a ring; Nor can our parson blame the thing. And though no marriage words are spoke, They part not till the ring is broke”
Beltane was still celebrated in many places around the UK in the late 18th century, often in the vicinity of ancient stone circles. Brady’s Claris Calendaria recorded that “not only the common people, but those of every rank in the vicinity of the place, joined in the tumultuous dissipations of the day… gave a free indulgence to… riotous and disorderly practice, dancing through the streets in wanton attitudes… Even the priests, joining with the people, in procession to some adjoining wood on the May morning.” The French revolution gave a political air to Beltane rituals, with Maypoles becoming known as ‘liberty trees’ in France, and revolutionary Henri Gregoire (1750-1831) wrote that during the American revolution against the British, “on the banks of the Delaware… maypoles became the citizens’ rallying signal in every community.” This surely fed into the eventual adoption of May 1st as a socialist day. Maypoles, and May celebrations, were historically always times when conventional behaviour and morality broke down, the hierarchical order felt threatened by the libidinous freedom displayed by the common people, May Day has always belonged to the people, and the hugely popular Maypole on the Strand in central London was a powerful statement that, whatever the rulers and churches were saying, the people were still in touch with the free-spirited, pagan roots of the British nation.
Cross-dressing gender-bending was a significant feature of May festivities, the roots of which can be found in ancient Dionysian ecstatic worship that used to take place in the Spring season, and also in shamanic pre-religious cultures globally. The ancient, and perhaps also not-so-ancient, peoples of the planet possibly understood more about the interplay of gender energies within one’s own being than most of the world seems to today. Ancient cultures had many words for gender-variant people – the fluidity of gender and the magical power given by that fluidity was once quite universally recognised, and eventually feared. Cross-dressing in ritualised celebration was known as a way to unite the inner genders and access ecstatic states. In much earlier times the genderfluid priest/esses of the pagan deities, such as the Gallae servants of Cybele, the priestesses of Isis, Diana, Hecate and many others, had set the example of erotic, ecstatic worship that opens up the inner world to the divine realms, and this knowledge has always been present somewhere in the human psyche. Even though it has been thoroughly repressed first by sex-phobic religions then by a materialist, scientific paradigm that divides Creation into separate parts and leaves us feeling alone in the universe, the erotic, ecstatic call to transcendence exists in us all and will one day find its way back into our understanding. The urgent need in the world today is to reunite humanity with its spiritual nature, which is exactly what a Maypole is there to do.
How about we reclaim the Maypole for London? Resurrect it as symbol of the British people waking up from the dream of separation, of being both oppressed and oppressor and renewing our pacts with the planet and with the spirit worlds. In the late Stone and Bronze Age 4-7000 years ago the people of Britain developed a highly sophisticated mystical culture, perhaps leaving behind the many stone circles on these islands as a reminder to the people of the future that this journey here in human incarnation began in communion with both cosmos and nature, and will end that way. Those ancient people understood the natural rhythms of creation, and the magical tool and symbol that is the Maypole was very probably bequeathed to us by them.
When i was at Kingsmead Primary School in Stowmarket, Suffolk in the 1970s, we used to dance around a maypole every Spring. Only decades later did I learn about the subversive and erotic/ecstatic nature of maypole rituals, as part of the Radical Faerie tribe. The Faeries, perhaps more than most pagan groups, have embraced the sexual and subversive power of the Maypole, but of course it’s not just Faerie queers who feel the call of the Old Religion. Paganism was illegal in the UK from the reign of Henry VIII until the 1950s, not that that stopped the Beltane revelries, and the return of our own ancient British magical traditions has been gradually spreading through the nation and beyond since repeal of the Witchcraft Act. Wicca, a British religion, invented in the 1950s as a way of structuring the pagan path, is hugely popular in the USA, where it is recognised by the military as an official religion.
The Maypole could have a big future, as it has had a long past. There is no more joyful symbol or community ritual, nothing quite so powerful and dramatic. As humanity, and as the Brits, deal with the existential challenges coming our way in the third decade of the 21st century, the Maypole represents our connection to both the physical and spiritual realms, and our role as human beings to unite the two.
LOCKDOWN in the UK was announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the evening of Monday 23rd March, at Equinox Dark Moon. The Spring equinox usually brings a burst of activity, as Aries month delivers fire energy and sense of independence after the Winter journey, but in 2020 the activity is turned inwards. Much of the world is under instruction to STAY HOME, we are forbidden from mixing with friends and family outside of our immediate household, and when in public we have to engage social distancing protocols.
Just prior to the Equinox, Saturn made the shift from Capricorn to Aquarius – the water bearer is the sign of group consciousness, but Saturn is the planet of restriction, teaching and structure. Just as the teacher and restrainer arrives in Aquarius we are all told to avoid our social connections. This is leading to an expansion of online interaction (which is very Aquarian) and it is likely that through this pandemic crisis humanity will learn to make much better use of the technology it has recently developed.
Back in January, the conjunction of Saturn with Pluto in Capricorn had been long anticipated by astrologers as a crunch moment in our collective evolution, a dangerous and challenging conjunction last seen as the Reformation split Christendom in the 16th century. Pluto represents the Dark Lord, the mysterious forces in consciousness that invisibly affect and even direct our experience here on the Earth. During the past 2+ years while Saturn has been in Capricorn, our species has become acutely aware of the harm we are doing to our planet, its eco-system and its inhabitants. The desire for change has grown, but our ability to make the necessary changes was questionable. Then as Saturn joined the Dark Lord Pluto in the sky the Coronavirus epidemic hit hard in China, and a few weeks later the whole world is thinking of little else but COVID-19. Commerce has all but stopped, so has international travel – pollution levels are falling, CO2 emissions dropping – and humanity is getting a hard and fast lesson in community over commercialism, in compassion vs capitalism.
As we enter Spring, Mars energy comes to the fore – he is the ruler of fire sign Aries. But this year Mars is also part of this Plutonian shutdown – he travelled through Capricorn from February 16th until March 30th and was in CONJUNCTION WITH PLUTO on MARCH 23rd, THE DAY THE UK LOCKDOWN WAS ANNOUNCED. The Dark Lord has Mars in his grip and is directing his energy internally rather than the usual external, expressive, active spirit of Spring. Mars arrived in Aquarius on March 30th, bringing fresh air into the mix, and will now stimulate our mental and spiritual faculties until May 13th, encouraging us to find novel and creative ways of dealing with, and sharing about, the new experience humanity is having.
Lockdown began in the UK at Aries Dark Moon – ie at the start of the new astrological year, as the planet’s annual journey pushes us to experience our individual, independent energy. This is often a tricky transition for many people, but Aries New Moon offered a helpful mindset here, ie the ability both mentally and practically to engage and adapt to a brand new reality. In the first week of Lockdown, the moon moved through fire, earth and air – through Aries, Taurus and Gemini. The Taurus moon (Thursday afternoon to Saturday night) gave a practical, earthed spirit which could help us accept the shift in circumstances and slow down as we adapt to it. Gemini moon brings a communicative spirit – people are sharing more about their experiences during this crisis, and views about it that are ‘alternative’ to the mainstream media reports are starting to spread.
During the second week of Lockdown the Moon will progress from air Gemini through the watery, and naturally home-loving, family focussed Cancer and the generous, playful, summer energy of Leo. The moon energy is waxing, ie building towards an emotional peak at Full Moon in Libra on the 8th April. This means that we feel more emotionally connected and aware as the days go by – and yes that could be challenging if our mental attitudes and practical circumstances are not supporting our well-being. If we can find our inner peace within this strangest of storms then the moon’s vibrational input to our emotional experience of our existence during this second week of Lockdown could be rather enjoyable.
However, on March 31st Mars will be conjunct with Saturn in Aquarius, and we are warned this is one of the most destructive alignments of the year, and could bring the darkest moment of the pandemic. On April 4th Jupiter and Pluto will be conjunct for the first of three times this year. Jupiter is the planet of joy and generosity, but Pluto of death and destruction. Let’s brace ourselves.
However, supporting the chances of JOY, even in this time of restriction and adversity, is the Goddess of Love and Money, VENUS. From March 4th Venus has been in her home sign Taurus, where she (and the feminine in all of us) feels very sensual and pleasure-focused. Venus in Taurus supports tangible expressions of love and romance – this is an area of life that is well aspected right now, so it is likely to be where many of us are finding happiness at this time. For those self-isolating, this love force still applies, both in how we interact with others through the internet and in how we choose to give pleasure to ourselves. A positive mindset is one of the greatest tools we have to get through these crisis times, and pleasure is a key tool we can use in creating positivity. This isolation experience may teach many people that the pursuit of pleasure can be a much more simple, and less expensive, activity than we have been accustomed to. Focused on our homes, our bodies, our loved ones, this time of retreat for humanity will bring about a realignment in how we relate to each other, to ourselves and to the planet.
The Spring will see the big players in this drama losing some of their dramatic power as their retrogrades begin – Pluto from April 25th, Saturn from May 10th and Jupiter May 14th. Astrologers are suggesting this is when the pandemic will become less deadly and less disrupting to our lives, but also warning of frustration and gloom in the Autumn as Pluto goes direct again (October 4th) and his returning power reminds us this virus has not finished with us yet.
Astrologers were extremely concerned about the effects of January’s Saturn-Pluto conjunction, and it seems they had good reason. Equally they are very excited about the conjunction in Aquarius of Saturn and Jupiter at the Winter Solstice 2020, seeing this as a a huge reset for our species and our world. We have known for years that Pluto’s task while in Capricorn is to shake up and destroy political, commercial and industrial institutions that are not serving the well-being of planet and people, but it was not clear really how this would come about.
2020 is reminding us that humans do not get to set the agenda on this planet after all. There are greater forces at work, even if they appear invisible, subtle and small to us. We as a species can survive by adapting and attuning ourselves to the planet and her natural rhythms. Many astrologers have for a long time been anticipating a huge change for human consciousness and in the way we live. It has been hard at times to imagine how that might come about – but in the first few months of the third decade of the third millennium we are learning LIFE CAN CHANGE VERY QUICKLY.
Astrology gives us tools with which to analyse and interpret the vicissitudes of life, it reminds us that we are part of a whole, and that existence is an eternal cycle of patterns and rhythms. Finding our place in the whole removes much of the existential fear of being a human alone in the universe. In this time of social isolation humanity may well discover just how fundamentally connected we really are.
THIS is so important for everyone, but especially us as gay men of spirit. To bring spirituality into your sexuality is becoming more unified in your own wholeness.’
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