THE TOT ‘T’
KING OF THE CANYON
Formation of a Mystic
FIRST, some poems- in transit down to prose. Hope you can handle it. Such is at the core of our topic:
I.
Out in the Country North of L.A., 1949 ff.
We started in a 15′ trailer, out in the country north of L.A. – under a giant wild cherry tree
with Jimson Weed threatening fierce geisha beauty through earthbound gourd vines spread on the hot
sand
but I learned my first five years bare foot in the gravel and stickers, wild fragrance summer and spring-
what not to step on…. What to avoid- how to jump
down the hill. I knew not to fall into the yuccas- just natural I guess. To avoid Rattlesnakes and Black Widows… couldn’t.
There were 5 of us. My older brothers, normal guys, slept outside through the dry seasons in an Army Surplus bunk bed.
It doubled as a playpen for me by enclosing the bottom bunk in chicken wire.
Coyotes couldn’t drag me off, like they did the free range chickens and turkeys.
There was a redwood water tank about 5 feet tall and ten feet in diameter filled to black, green and shards of sky.
It smelled of wet verdant ecology in that brittle, spare, sage, sand and chaparral place, where we almost ‘made it’… Nothing grew in the refreshment of that upright pond, ‘cause of the tannins in the redwood- I know now. Ecologies are so complicated!
Dad played ball- and chain for our sake. Mother wore those full summer dresses,
and was too beautiful
smart-
she became a teacher.
Her heart almost like that place, and she walked her own way…
Sunsets pure and clean before smog, an heroic stage for our small dramas…
I was with her when she died 55 years later in a similar place. The others all gone before-
Now that I’ve sucked in the wind that whipped our iris garden down
year after year…
Kick the Hornet’s Nest
Run, jump, slide down hill
No danger to die or kill
Slide beneath branches
Jump the brush of tiny ranches
Run wild wind and down to fill
A spread of time
Between womb
and tomb.
A child
Off course that day,
Didn’t kick the paper nest nor
Even see it in time
Off the line
-Of sight as
It was
Nearly naked
I was.
Joy of being that young
Free of economies
And election
I was free to knock that nest off its branch. Didn’t look
Didn’t know they were there
If they cook
Or care.
Nor did they care for me
Until I was gone
Not so far
14 miles to that old doctor.
Old red truck, Model T
Stings,
Red Sings of lumps
Bumps
The size of half dollars
Dozens of stings on my little body still
Ripe with baby fat.
Fight a big sting
But then was well.
Nice to be young
No heaven or hell
That people dream
Then try to sell…
Old now
Rocking
fall
And smile
Asleep.
In Kindergarden,
I rebelled against the teacher, whom I loved, but I refused to be a Brownie in the Christmas play because I was afraid that my older brothers, father and friends would think me queer. Really resisted until I finally gave in, but was changed to another Kindergarden class after Christmas. Odd, considering what was to happen just
5 years later. Really ironic.
III.
Pasture, fields
We were green incisions
breaking rocky sand after huge, hill slipping rains
Then the blue hills on long stalks, and golden orange sweeping to a climbing sky
sweet horse-breath tough muzzles
long hair, pulling lips and yanking teeth, naked and bareback we rode over cliffs to a peaceful ocean…
Wolf purple and Indians brush the slopes with salt skin sweat enough to lubricate a long soccer run across high school into
College, friends forms shapes
Color that keeps to itself to inspire only in love
Love that leaves and comes back and leaves again
So that there is only God- but God doesn’t want ‘only God’ or why us?
All I see is those long stalks and feel the sticky sap that seeps and weeps when we picked their great blue bells—much more variegated in its person than the name belies. Now it’s a knife of a thousand revelations that I was a lucky kid in our hiding place and willing to pay the wind for its bite and the long walk up those rocky hills to know its love,
Once I lay on its side writhing that migraine out, so that old school bus driver stopped on his way home and climbed up to take care of me, though I was a quarter mile off the road and up the side of our hill that dad built on—all gone now. More of what I learned to do as they were brawny and bold with those big flags of stone– More of light glinting across my ball, the eye to my soul, sent now to save or kill.
9. Sure Path
Turpentine Washes and Oil Pastel on Paper 32″ x 24″ 1974
…And how archetypically American that we should have first explored our love in that dusty barn out back on Chris’ family’s ranch in ‘60s Southern California. Days were still smog free. Clear, clean heat waves rose from the broken pavement of the road. Small herds of cattle rested, chewing beneath scattered trees on the dry hills. Dry stack of alfalfa bales stored in that hot barn and covered with the old horse blanket was our prickly, uncomfortable bed for those early explorations. Sometimes the alfalfa stems and leaves would get caught in our clothes, between our sweaty legs. The cows didn’t care. They would eat it anyway. We were so young when we first started but we didn’t get serious until much later. Not serious. No, that’s not the word. “It” became a terrifying compulsion. Compulsion? Not exactly that either…
Penetration- what a surprise! Fondling, on horse back riding double- wonderful. Once, penetration was so painful that he fell to his knees, then on his side in frightening anguish. But, with greater care, they continued in that old barn,
And in the Wash of our mighty river. The lightfulness of the canyon, and
surrounding nature- the experiences were somehow transcendent.
It’s the light on those days that I remember now.
And against the front gate with the threat of country traffic.
What magical flow, what electro-chemical exchange between friends was begun in that beautiful clear light of days. We were too young at 10 for even the idea of lust or adultery. This was DISCOVERY! The world was new and ripe full of wonderful sensations. We didn’t know how reproduction worked! Didn’t think necessarily what we did had anything to do with making babies. It didn’t, but could with certain changes in cast…
In the school bathroom, book storage shed and ball room … Then the young banker’s son moved away and he was left on his own to muse about the experience. He had tried on occasion to ritualize the experience like some of the tribes of a great continent to the east, pictured in National Geographic- how they structured their religious cultures with drums, dances and costumes.
At the Riding school- where he had his first job- too many idle nights for the boys who lived and worked there- Later in Art School there was Michael and Harry. I’m not sorry we never got electric- Weren’t meant to I guess- well maybe Harry- I can enjoy the memory of Michael much more–
When the green oats covered any spare place in southern california, in our canyon… Or with you in that filthy valley full of fornicating banks and used car lots especially spangled in prim wrapped banners of red and white strips—barbers gone wily. Wouldn’t have mattered– could have been in that flooded field with water up half way to the wide empty mouth/you squatting on top of that great drain without anything on but a leather and fleece aviator’s jacket atleastyourpectorlswerewarm that night with you hanging down like that
with moon slivers sliding down the trunks of oak trees
and walking on water like the Lord!
Hmmm… that wasn’t you, but it could have been.
Then college. There were several exchanges! Harvey! Harvey was the best. Capable of love. (See Chapter Six re Bakersfield. He appeared but was dead. He looked alive and young like we were…) Hung like a horse in our twenties. Straight. But for our occasional encounters, I believe. I preferred him, even ‘to the love of women’- especially my two college girlfriends great in their own ways, but still… I seemed to float on top of him in perfect, naked, resolution and delight as he whispered my name. He on me. Love not lust. Well, a bit of that. But we were both capable of love. Then. Unlike the others that could have been turn-a-dime hustles.
But more, more, more is required.
Then the monastery: 1975- Abstinence on every level might be useful. (I had already started an extremely ascetical lifestyle as an Art Student when I was 19 in 1968.) Chastity, i.e. divine dimensions of appreciation for experience, existence itself- Love- in all its dimensions. Self-sacrifice. Sacrifice: ‘To make sacred…’ sacred sex? Brain. Heart. Sacrum. 3 Regions, 3 major Chakras.
There is more to biology than social standards might allow. …
MALE DREAM:
After traveling for a week with a friend in northern California, 1985, I had a surprising dream. In the dream, on a grassy hill there is an exotic pavilion, a tent. I approach. Through the tent flap, I see a young man, lying naked on a bed, legs dangling over the bedside. He seems to be waiting for me. The situation is spread with attraction and danger. The young man lay on some softly lit, rich fabric covering the bed. A boy/man. A young adult. I approach more closely– I nurse suckle the (energetic) milk from him as I spread further his muscular, no longer hairless, legs.
The scene of the dream shifts to a large procession. A group of aristocratic looking women in medieval or renaissance garb move from behind the tent toward a river below and distant mountains. A thunderstorm is building and threatening above and behind the mountains.
The scene shifts again to the river’s side where I am trying to pull by rope, a heavy log, up, over the bottom branches of a large oak tree.
A vast flood charges, dark and thundering down the river valley. Both the tree and I disappear in the powerful waters. There is a sense that the waters are destiny and great peace…
The metaphor of the flood was not negative at all. I was inundated with something remarkably positive. The important and surprising point of this dream is that when I awoke, I was flooded with an energy of enormous delight from this dream. Energy far beyond sexual ecstasy. For hours after I woke, sensations of ebullient joy flowed through me. Not just joy, but energy. Flowing, endless energy. For weeks after, if I told the story or even remembered the dream, I would again be suffused in delight. What enabled me to evoke these levels of light-filled delight? The erotic elements in the dream? Not exactly. I believe that the dream indicated a shift between masculine and feminine poles in my psyche that engaged states of consciousness flooded with amorphous, transsexual (transcendent of opposites) delight.
Such states of consciousness might be the foundation of culture as well, since such dualistic (pluralistic) states and their resolution/transcendence are, I believe, the underlying content and construct of human perception. Homoerotic love is an example since it is able to evoke feelings in individuals as powerful as the heterosexual drive to procreate. The biological urge to propagate in any species, characterizes and indicates a capacity to redirect major elements of human personality. The homoerotic emotion indicates a condition free of otherwise inexorable biological logic. The feminine, the earth, and the storm, are evoked here, I suspect.
The homoerotic emotion is a catalytic strain laced through the psychic structure of human kind, perhaps the whole biological universe. It is a dangerous and invaluable alternative, the experience of which is fraught with endless social problems. If it were not very potent, why would people react so strongly to what really seems to be, otherwise, a minor issue. Only a few topics generate the level of vitriolic bigotry that this topic manages to arouse. The prohibitions against it in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible are untrustworthy in that they probably are reactions against flagrant practices in erotic religious cults of powerful cultures surrounding the authors of the Old and New Testaments–the negative reaction thus being as much xenophobic as homophobic.
After all David loved Jonathan “more than women.” Jesus Christ, who supersedes all previous God/World agreements, for Christians, said little about sex at all–but forgave the one caught in sin by sinners–much less about the homoerotic emotion– except perhaps secretly to St. John.
What I am treating here is the homoerotic emotion, not Gay culture. That is something else for a different discussion. Here we merely discuss an important, powerful element in human perception- and in this story.
The problem might be in the deeper construct of culture. Many cultures in the past 5000 years, since the development of civilizations and empires, have been so characterized by masculine domination and willful progress, as to be trapped in their own pathology of aggression. It is a situation increasingly, violently, out of balance. As the corporate, universal order of the world subconsciously tries to balance itself, individuals respond in the most remarkable ways. Perhaps Gay culture is such a response. I believe the more universal, homoerotic emotion certainly is.
FURTHER SPECULATION: The dualistic powers that govern the biosphere are called upon to save it. These opposite elements are but an expression of the inexpressible Godhead. Poisons become elixirs, in the right circumstances, with certain personalities. Sexuality and violence are closely related reactions that inherently seek the Eden of union, balance and radiant beauty in all things– sometimes they just react. …the natural world is reeling from traumatic blows being struck against it by militant profiteering and commercial technology. Profit and security are the motives now that dominate the dominant value structures in the world: Security in a world increasingly insecure. Profit in a world increasingly bereft of natural resources, as vast populations, dazed by suffering, mourn their own fruitful increase. Is there a way to respond to this sad demise of the natural world, our deep spiritual relationship with it? Is there a way beyond the rational sanctity of humanist virtue and religion that has so far failed to save us from the raging human heart?
[80.] DIVINE ANDROGYN
See also #[44] and #[70] www.nepsis.com.
Before an embryo differentiates into male or female, the sex organs are the same. This painting reflects upon the capacity for coitus and the ecstatic drives that propagate species… Also, many Christian icons depict the Holy One issuing from such a vertical ovoid shape. “Out of the Motherly Womb [of the God the Father] came the Son…” Patristics 101.
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I include the following long note because of its focus is on the similar anthropological themes as the fiction and poetry above. I find its insights to be very helpful and its references include the minor and the great of early Religious Studies and Anthropology. The reader is encouraged to do their own research. I found this online location ascited below. So,
PART I. The Intermediate [LGBT] in the Service of Religion 15
CHAPTER I.
As Prophet or Priest
A CURIOUS and interesting subject is the connection of the Uranian temperament with prophetic gifts and divination. It is a subject which, as far as I know, has not been very seriously considered–though it has been touched upon by Elie Reclus, Westermarck, Bastian, Ivan Bloch, and others. The fact is well known, of course, that in the temples and cults of antiquity, and of primitive races it has been a widespread practice to educate and cultivate certain youths in an effeminate manner, and that these youths in general become the priests or medicine-men of the tribe; but this fact has hardly been taken seriously, as indicating any necessary connection between the two functions, or any relation in general between homosexuality and psychic powers. Some such relation or connection, however, I think we must admit as being obviously indicated by the following facts; and the admission
leads us on to the further enquiry of what the relation may exactly be, and what its rationale and explanation.
Among the tribes, for instance, in the neighbourhood of Behring’s Straits–the Kamchadales, the Chukchi, the Aleuts, Inoits, Kadiak islanders, and so forth, homosexuality is common, and its relation to shamanship or priesthood most marked and curious. Westermarck, in his well-known book, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 1 quoting from Dr. Bogoraz, says:–“It frequently happens that, under the supernatural influence of one of their shamans, or priests, a Chukchi lad at sixteen years of age will suddenly relinquish his sex and imagine himself to be a woman. He adopts a woman’s attire, lets his hair grow, and devotes himself altogether to female occupation. Furthermore, this disclaimer of his sex takes a husband into the yurt (hut) and does all the work which is usually incumbent on the wife, in most unnatural and voluntary subjection. . . . These abnormal changes of sex imply the most abject immorality in the community, and appear to be strongly encouraged by the shamans, who interpret such cases as an injunction of their individual deity.” Further, Westermarck says “the change of sex was usually accompanied by future shamanship; indeed nearly all the shamans were former delinquents of their sex.” Again he says, “In describing the Koriaks, Krasheninnikoff makes mention of the Ke’yev, that is men occupying the position of concubines, and he compares them with the Kamchadale Koe’kcuc, as he calls them, that is men transformed into women. Every Koe’kcuc, he says, ‘is regarded as a magician and interpreter of dreams. . . . The Koe’kcuc wore women’s clothes, did women’s work, and were in the position of wives or concubines.'” And (on p. 472) “There is no indication that the North American aborigines attached any opprobrium to men who had intercourse with those members of their own sex who had assumed the. dress and habits of women. In Kadiak such a companion was on the contrary regarded as a great acquisition; and the effeminate men, far from being despised, were held in repute by the people, most of them being wizards.”
This connection with wizardry and religious divination is particularly insisted upon by Elie Reclus, in his Primitive Folk (Contemporary Science Series). Speaking of the Inoits (p. 68) he says:–“Has a boy with a pretty face also a graceful demeanour? The mother no longer permits him to associate with companions of his own age, but clothes him and brings him up as a girl. Any stranger would be deceived as to his sex, and when he is about fifteen he is sold for a good round sum to a wealthy personage. 1 ‘Choupans,’ or youths of this kind are highly prized by the Konyagas. On the other hand, there are to be met with here and there among the Esquimaux or kindred populations, especially in Youkon, girls who decline marriage and maternity. Changing their sex, so to speak, they live as boys, adopting masculine manners and customs, they hunt the stag, and in the chase shrink from no danger; in fishing from no fatigue.”
Reclus then says that the Choupans commonly dedicate themselves to the priesthood; but all are not qualified for this. “To become an angahok it is needful to have a very marked vocation, and furthermore a character and temperament which every one has not. The priests in office do not leave the recruiting of their pupils to chance; they make choice at an early age of boys or girls, not limiting themselves to one sex–a mark of greater intelligence than is exhibited by most other priesthoods” (p. 71). The pupil has to go through considerable ordeals:–“Disciplined by abstinence and prolonged vigils, by hardship and constraint, be must learn to endure pain stoically and to subdue his bodily desires, to make the body obey unmurmuringly the commands of the spirit. Others may be chatterers; he will be silent, as becomes the prophet and the soothsayer. At an early age the novice courts solitude. He wanders throughout the long nights across silent plains filled with the chilly whiteness of the moon; he listens to the wind moaning over the desolate floes;–and then the aurora borealis, that ardently sought occasion for ‘drinking in the light,’ the angahok must absorb all its brilliancies and splendours. . . . And now the future sorcerer is no longer a child. Many a time he has felt himself in the presence of Sidné, the Esquimaux Demeter, he has divined it by the shiver which ran through his veins, by the tingling of his flesh and the bristling of his hair. . . . He sees stars unknown to the profane; he asks the secrets of destiny from Sirius, Algol, and Altair; he passes through a series of initiations, knowing well that his spirit will not be loosed from the burden of dense matter and crass ignorance, until the moon has looked him in the face, and darted a certain ray into his eyes. At last his own Genius, evoked from the bottomless depths of existence, appears to him, having scaled the immensity of the heavens, and climbed across the abysses of the ocean. White, wan, and solemn, the phantom will say to him: ‘Behold me, what dost thou desire?’ Uniting himself with the Double from beyond the grave, p. 20 the soul of the angakok flies upon the wings of the wind, and quitting the body at will, sails swift and light through the universe. It is permitted to probe all hidden things, to seek the knowledge of all mysteries, in order that they may be revealed to those who have remained mortal with spirit unrefined” (p. 73).
Allowing something for poetic and imaginative expression, the above statement of the ordeals and initiations of the angakok, and their connection with the previous career of the Choupan are well based on the observations of many authorities, as well as on their general agreement with similar facts all over the world. There is also another passage of Reclus (p. 70) on the duties of the angahok, which seems to throw considerable light on certain passages in the Bible referring to the kedeshim and kedeshoth of the Syrian cults, also on the kosio of the Slave Coast and the early functions of the priesthood in general:–“As soon as the Choupan has moulted into the angakok, the tribe confide to him the girls most suitable in bodily grace and disposition; he has to complete their education–he will perfect them in dancing and other accomplishments, and finally will initiate them into the pleasures of love. If they display intelligence, they will become seers and medicine-women, priestesses and prophetesses. The summer kachims (assemblies), which are closed to the women of the community, will open wide before these. It is believed that these girls would be unwholesome company if they had not been purified by commerce with a man of God.”
Catlin, in his North American Indians (vol. i., pp. 112-114), describes how on one occasion he was in a large tent occupied in painting portraits of some of the chiefs of the tribe (the Mandans) among whom he was staying, when he noticed at the door of the tent, but not venturing to come in, three or four young men of handsome presence and rather elegantly dressed, but not wearing the eagle’s feathers of warriors. He mentally decided to paint the portrait of one of these also; and on a later day when he had nearly done with the chiefs, he invited one of these others to come in and stand for him. The youth was overjoyed at the compliment, and smiled all over his face. He was clad from head to foot in the skin of the mountain goat, which for softness and whiteness is almost like Chinese crape, embroidered with ermine and porcupine quills; and with his pipe and his whip in his hand, and his long hair falling over neck and shoulders, made a striking and handsome figure, which showed, too, a certain grace and gentleness as of good breeding. “There was nought about him of the terrible,” says Catlin, p. 22 [paragraph continues] “and nought to shock the finest, chastest intellect.” But to Catlin’s surprise, no sooner had he begun to sketch his new subject, than the chiefs rose up, flung their buffalo robes around them, and stalked out of the tent.
Catlin’s interpreter afterwards explained to him the position of these men and the part they played in the tribal life; and how the chiefs were offended at the idea of their being placed on an equality with themselves. But the offence, it seemed, was not on any ground of immorality; but–and this is corroborated by the customs of scores of other tribes–arose simply from the fact that the young men were associated with the women, and shared their modes of life, and were not worthy therefore to rank among the warriors. In their own special way they held a position of some honour.
“Among the Illinois Indians,” says Westermarck (vol. ii., p. 473), “the effeminate men assist in [i.e., are present at] all the juggleries and the solemn dance in honour of the calumet, or sacred tobacco-pipe, for which the Indians have such a deference. . . . but they are not permitted either to dance or to sing. They are called into the councils of the Indians, and nothing can be decided without their advice; for because of their extraordinary manner of living they are looked upon as manitous, or supernatural beings, and persons of consequence.”
- 23
[paragraph continues] “The Sioux, Sacs, and Fox Indians,” he continues, “give once a year, or oftener, a feast to the Berdashe, or I-coo-coo-a, who is a man dressed in women’s clothes, as he has been all his life.” And Catlin (N.A. Indians, vol. ii., p. 214) says of this Berdashe:–“For extraordinary privileges which he is known to possess, he is driven to the most servile and degrading duties, which he is not allowed to escape; and he being the only one of the tribe submitting to this disgraceful degradation is looked upon as medicine and sacred, and a feast is given to him annually; and initiatory to it a dance by those few young men of the tribe who can–as in the illustration–dance forward and publicly make their boast (without the denial of the Berdashe) that” [then follow three or four unintelligible lines of some native dialect; and then] “such and such only are allowed to enter the dance and partake of the feast.”
In this connection it may not be out of place to quote Joaquin Miller (who spent his early life as a member of an Indian tribe) on the prophetic powers of these people. He says (“Life among the Modocs,” p. 360) “If there is a race of men that has the gift of prophecy or prescience I think it is the Indian. It may be a keen instinct sharpened by meditation that makes them foretell. many things with such precision, but I have seen some things that looked much like the fulfilment of prophecies. They believe in the gift of prophecy thoroughly, and are never without their seers.”
In this connection we may quote the curious remark of Herodotus, who, after mentioning (i. 105) that some of the Scythians suffered from a disease of effeminacy (Θήλεια νόσος), and were called Enarees, says (iv. 67) that “these Enarees, or Androgyni, were endowed by Venus with the power of divination,” and were consulted by the King of the Scythians when the latter was ill.
The Jesuit father Lafitau, who published in 1724, at Paris, an extremely interesting book on the manners and customs of the North American tribes among whom he had been a missionary, 1 after speaking of warlike women and Amazons, says (vol. I, p. 53):–“If some women are found possessing virile courage, and glorying in the profession of war, which seems only suitable to men; there exist also men so cowardly as to live like women. Among the Illinois, among the Sioux, in Louisiana, in Florida, and in Yucatan, there are found youths who adopt the garb of women and preserve it all their lives, and who think themselves honoured in stooping to all their occupations; they never marry; they take part in all ceremonies in which religion seems to be concerned; and this profession of an extraordinary life causes them to pass for beings of a superior order, and above the common run of mankind. Would not these be the same kind of folk as the Asiatic worshippers of Cybele, or those Easterns of whom Julius Firmicus speaks (Lib. de Errore prof. Relig.), who consecrated to the Goddess of Phrygia, or to Venus Urania, certain priests, who dressed as women, who affected an effeminate countenance, who painted their faces, and disguised their true sex under garments borrowed from the sex which they wished to counterfeit.”
The instance, just quoted, of the Enarees among the Scythians, who by excessive riding were often rendered impotent and effeminate, is very curiously paralleled in quite another part of the world by the so-called mujerados (or feminised men) among the Pueblo-Indians of Mexico. Dr. W. A. Hammond, who was stationed, in 1850, as military doctor, in New Mexico, reported 1 that in each village one of the strongest men, being chosen, was compelled by unintermitted riding to pass through this kind of metamorphosis.” He then became indispensable for the religious orgies which were celebrated among the Pueblo-Indians in the same way as they once were among the old Greeks, Egyptians, and other people. . . . These Saturnalia take place among the Pueblos in the Spring of every year, and are kept with the greatest secrecy from the observation of non-Indians.” 1 And again, “To be a mujerado is no disgrace to a Pueblo-Indian. On the contrary, he enjoys the protection of his tribes-people, and is accorded a certain amount of honour.”
Similar customs to those of the American Indians were found among the Pacific islanders. Captain James Wilson, 2 in visiting the South Sea Islands in 1796-8, found there men who were dressed like women and enjoyed a certain honour; and expresses his surprise at finding that “even their women do not despise these fellows, but form friendships with them.” While William Ellis, also a Missionary, in his Polynesian Researches, 3 (vol. i., p. 340), says that they not only enjoyed the sanction of the priests, but even the direct example of one of their divinities. He goes on to say that when he asked the natives why they made away with so many more female than male children, “they generally answered that the fisheries, the service of the temple and especially war were the only purposes for which they thought it desirable to rear children!”
But one of the most interesting examples of the connection we are studying is that of Apollo with the temple at Delphi. Delphi, of course, was one of the chief seats of prophecy and divination in the old world, and Apollo, who presided at this shrine, was a strange blend of masculine and feminine attributes. It will be remembered that he was frequently represented as being very feminine in form–especially in the more archaic statues. He was the patron of song and music. He was also, in some ways, the representative divinity of the Uranian love, for he was the special god of the Dorian Greeks, among whom comradeship became an institution. 1 It was said of him that to expiate his pollution by the blood of the Python (whom he slew), he became the slave and devoted favorite of Admetus; and Müller 2 describes a Dorian religious festival, in which a boy, taking the part of Apollo, “probably imitated the manner in which the god, as herdsman and slave of Alcestis, submitted to the most degrading service.” Alcestis, in fact, the wife of Admetus, said of Apollo (in averse of Sophocles cited by Plutarch): οὑμὸς δ`ἀλέκτωρ αὐτον ἦγε πρὸς “μύλην”. When we consider that Apollo, as Sun god, corresponds in some points to the Syrian Baal (masculine), and that in his epithet Karneios, used among the Dorians, 1 he corresponds to the Syrian Ashtaroth Karnaim (feminine), we seem to see a possible clue connecting certain passages in the Bible–which refer to the rites of the Syrian tribes and their occasional adoption in the Jewish Temple–with some phases of the Dorian religious ritual.
“The Hebrews entering Syria,” says Richard Burton, 2 “found it religionised by Assyria and Babylonia, when the Accadian Ishtar had passed West, and had become Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth, or Ashirah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phœnician Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-goddess who is queen of Heaven and Love. . . . She was worshipped by men habited as women, and vice versâ; for which reason, in the Torah (Deut. xxii. 5), the sexes are forbidden to change dress.”
In the account of the reforming zeal of King Josiah (2 Kings xxiii.) we are told (v. 4) that “the King commanded Hilkiah, the high priest, and the priests of the second order, and the keepers of the door, to bring forth out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels that were made for Baal, and for the grove, and for all the host of heaven; and he burned them without Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron. . . . And he brake down the houses of the sodomites, that were by the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove.”
The word here translated “sodomites” is the Hebrew word Kedeshim, meaning the “consecrated ones” (males), and it occurs again in 1 Kings xiv. 24; xv. 12; and xxii. 46. And the word translated “grove” is Asherah. There is some doubt, I believe, as to the exact function of these Kedeshim in the temple ritual, and some doubt as to whether the translation of the word given in our Authorised Version is justified. 1 It is clear, however, that these men corresponded in some way to the Kedeshoth or sacred women, who were–like the Devadasis of the Hindu temples–a kind of courtesan or prostitute dedicated to the god, and strange as it may seem to the modern mind, it is probable that they united some kind of sexual service with prophetic functions. Dr. Frazer, speaking 2 of the sacred slaves or Kedeshim in various parts of Syria, concludes that “originally no sharp line of distinction existed between the prophets and the Kedeshim; both were ‘men of God,’ as the prophets were constantly called; in other words they were inspired mediums, men in whom the god manifested himself from time to time by word and deed, in short, temporary incarnations of the deity. But while the prophets roved freely about the country, the Kedeshim appears to have been regularly attached to a sanctuary, and among the duties which they performed at the shrines there were clearly some which revolted the conscience of men imbued with a purer morality.”
As to the Asherah, or sometimes plural Asherim, translated “grove,”–for which the women wove hangings–the most generally accepted opinion is that it was a wooden post or tree stripped of its branches and planted in the ground beside an altar, whether of Jehovah or other gods. 1 Several biblical passages, like Jeremiah ii. 27, suggest that it was an emblem of Baal or of the male organ, and others (e.g., Judges ii. 13, and iii. 7) connect it with Ashtoreth, the female partner of Baal; while the weaving of hangings or garments for the “grove” suggests the combination of female with male in one effigy. 2 At any rate we may conclude pretty safely that the thing or things had a strongly sexual signification.
Thus it would seem that in the religious worship of the Canaanites there were male courtesans attached to the temples and inhabiting their precincts, as well as consecrated females, and that the ceremonies connected with these cults were of a markedly sexual character. These ceremonies had probably originated in an ancient worship of sexual acts as being symbolical of, and therefore favorable to, the fertility of Nature and the crops. But though they had penetrated into the Jewish temple they were detested by the more zealous adherents of Jehovah, because–for one reason at any rate–they belonged to the rival cult of the Syrian Baal and Ashtoreth, the Kedeshim in fact being “consecrated to the Mother of the Gods, the famous Dea Syria.” 1 And they were detestable, too, because they went hand in hand with the cultivation of ‘familiar spirits’ and ‘wizards’–who of course knew nothing of Jehovah! Thus we see (2 Kings xxi.) that Manasseh followed the abominations of the heathen, building up the high places and the ‘groves’ and the altars for Baal. “And he made his son pass through the fire, and observed times, and used enchantments, 2 and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards, and wrought much wickedness. . . . and he set a graven image of the ‘grove’ in the house of the Lord.” But Josiah, his grandson, reversed all this, and drove the familiar spirits and the wizards out of the land, together with the Kedeshim.
So far with regard to Syria and the Bible. But Dr. Fraser points out the curious likeness here to customs existing to-day among the Negroes of the Slave Coast of West Africa. In that region, women, called Kosio, are attached to the temples as wives, priestesses and temple prostitutes of the python-god. But besides these “there are male Kosio as well as female Kosio, that is there are dedicated men as well as dedicated women, priests as well as priestesses, and the ideas and customs in regard to them seem to be similar. 1 “Indeed,” he says, “the points of resemblance between the prophets of Israel and of West Africa are close and curious.” 2 It must be said, however, that Dr. Frazer does not in either case insist on the inference of homosexuality. On the contrary, he rather endeavours to avoid it, and of course it would be unreasonable to suppose any invariable connection of these “sacred men” with this peculiarity. At the same time the general inference in that direction is strong and difficult to evade.
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Throughout China and Japan and much of Malaysia, the so-called Bonzes, or Buddhist priests, have youths or boys attached to the service of the temples. Each priest educates a novice to follow him in the ritual, and it is said that the relations between the two are often physically intimate. Francis Xavier, in his letters from Japan (in 1549), mentions this. He says that the Bonzes themselves allowed that this was so, but maintained that it was no sin. They said that intercourse with woman was for them a deadly sin, or even punishable with death; but that the other relation was, in their eyes, by no means execrable, but harmless and even commendable. 1 And, as it was then, so on the whole it appears to be now, or to have been till very lately. In all the Buddhist sects in Japan (except Shinto) celibacy is imposed on the priests, but homosexual relations are not forbidden.
And to return to the New World, we find Cieza de Leon-who is generally considered a trustworthy authority–describing practices and ceremonials in the temples of New Granada in his time (1550) strangely similar to those referred to in the Hebrew [paragraph continues] Bible:–“Every temple or chief house of worship keeps one or two men, or more, according to the idol–who go about attired like women, even from their childhood, and talk like women, and imitate them in their manner, carriage, and all else.” 1 These served in the temples, and were made use of “almost as if by way of sanctity and religion” (casi come por via de santidad y religion); and he concludes that “the Devil had gained such mastery in that land that, not content with causing the people to fall into mortal sin, he had actually persuaded them that the same was a species of holiness and religion, in order that by so doing he might render them all the more subject to him. And this (he says) Fray Domingo told me in his own writing–a man of whom everyone knows what a lover of truth he is.”
Thus, as Richard Burton remarks, 2 these same usages in connection with religion have spread nearly all over the world and “been adopted by the priestly castes from Mesopotamia to Peru.”
It is all very strange and difficult to understand. Indeed, if the facts were not so well-established and so overwhelmingly numerous, it would appear incredible to most of us nowadays that the conception of “sacredness” or “consecration” could be honestly connected, in the mind of any people, with the above things and persons. And yet it is obvious, when one sums up the whole matter, that though in cases Cieza de Leon may have been right in suggesting that religion was only brought in as a cloak and excuse for licentiousness, yet in the main this explanation does not suffice. There must have been considerably more at the back of it all than that: a strange conviction apparently, or superstition, if one likes to call it so, that unusual powers of divination and prophecy were to be found in homosexual folk, and those who adopted the said hybrid kind of life–a conviction moreover (or superstition) so rooted and persistent that it spread over the greater part of the world.
Is any explanation, we may ask, of this strange and anomalous belief possible? Probably a complete explanation, in the present state of our knowledge, is not possible. Yet some suggestions in that direction we may perhaps venture to give. Before doing so, however, it may be as well to dwell for a moment on the further and widely prevalent belief in the connection between homosexuality and sorcery.
…Chapter II. As Wizard or Witch [See Foreward to Xibalba Bible]
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Online LGBT CLASSICS INDEX
Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk, by Edward Carpenter, [1914], at sacred-texts.com