WORSHIP ANDROGYNY THE PAGAN SEXUAL IDEAL PETERJONES
As in ancient Greece. Plato in his Symposium characterizes heterosexual relationships as “vulgar” and homosexual relationships as “heavenly,” and a whole elitist society was built around homosexual pederast
lFrom JETS 43/3 (September 2000) 443–469 ANDROGYNY: THE PAGAN SEXUAL IDEAL PETER JONES*
Buy the Book Here: ANDROGYNY: THE PAGAN SEXUAL IDEAL PETER JONES
Gender Inclusive and Egalitarian Churches of Christ
Skillman Church of Christ: authority based on "scholars."
Gal328 Gender Justice in Church of Christ
Mike Cope Women Worship Leaders
Doug Hurley Your Sons and Daughters shall Prophesy at ACU
See Ken Cukrowski Women in Ministry at ACU
See Ken Cukrowski claiming that the old and new testaments authorizes women prophets.
Jeff Walling Women in Ministry
Russ Adcox Women in Ministry
Wiley Clarkson one of Ken Cukrowski's disciples
Carroll D. Osburn Women and Change Agenda
John Mark Hicks Women in the Assembly: Prophesying
Rubel Shelly Homosexuals and Women justice
1. Rubel Shelly Women in God's Service
2. Rubel Shelly: Women in God's Service: Jesus Life and Service
Al Maxey Miriam as Musical Worship Minister
Cyprian: God abrogated idolatry--the mother of all public amusements, whence these prodigies of vanity and lightness came.
Cyprian letters 1:8
That Jupiter of theirs is not more supreme in dominion than in vice, inflamed with earthly love in the midst of his own thunders...now breaking forth by the help of birds to violate the purity of boys. And now put the question: Can he who looks upon things be healthy-minded or modest? Men imitate the gods whom they adore, and to such miserable beings their crimes become their religion.Mystical Eroticism Pg 59.The worship of Aphrodite in Greece and Astartis (Ishtar) in Mesopotamia involved ritual prostitution. Under Canaanite influence, this same abominable practice was introduced into Israel.. 1 Kings 15:12; 1 Kings 22:47; 2 Kings 23:7
Let the temperate meal resound with psalms;15 and as your memory is tenacious and your voice musical, undertake this office, as is your wont. You will provide a better entertainment for your dearest friends, if, while we have something spiritual to listen to, the sweetness of religious music charm our ears.
. . . being a gay man or lesbian entails far more than sexual behavior alone . . . [it entails] a whole mode of being-in-the-world.1 Paiens unt tort e Chrestianes unt dreit Chanson de Roland
2 I. INTRODUCTION
Like the ancient pagan Sodomites pounding on the door of Lot’s house millennia ago, the modern gay movement is gathering at the doors of our churches, our academies, and our once traditionally “Christian” culture, demanding entrance and full recognition. Notable scholar David A. J. Clines, professor of OT at Sheffield University, for one, appears ready to lay down the welcome mat. He wrote in 1998: “. . . [though] queer theory has yet to show its face at the SBL [Society of Biblical Literature],
3 gayness is challenging . . . all that we hold dear. When we begin to redraw the alterity map, the boundaries between same and different . . . we find ourselves having to think through everything, and not just sexuality, from scratch.”
4 Clines, who not long ago was known for his conservative theological position, illustrates how far acceptance of the gay movement has come in recent years, even among those from strongly Biblical backgrounds. This movement has come a long way fast. It will not go away soon, I believe, because it is so intimately tied to deep changes in modern society, in particular those associated with philosophical postmodernism.
5 Because
1 J. Michael Clark, “Gay Spirituality,” in Spirituality and the Secular Quest (ed. Peter H. Van Ness; New York: Crossroads/Herder, 1996) 335.
2 Translation: “Pagans are wrong, Christians are right.” The classical theological notion of the antithesis can thus be dated at least to eleventh-century France.
3 Since it is already ubiquitous in the sister organization, the American Academy of Religion, the appearance of “Queer theory” amongst the Bible scholars of SBL is surely only a matter of time, as Clines suggests.
4 D. J. A. Clines, “From Salamanca to Cracow: SBL International Meetings,” in On the Way to the Postmodern, Volume 1 (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998) 169.
5 Significantly, one of the original theorists of postmodernism, Michel Foucault—see his The History of Sexuality , Vol. 1, “An Introduction” (trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Vintage, 1978); Vol. 2, “The Use of Pleasure” (trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Vintage, 1985); and Vol. 3, “The Care of the Self ” (trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Vintage, 1978–86)—was self-consciously and ideologically gay.
* Peter Jones is professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in California, 1725 Bear Valley Parkway, Escondido, CA 92027-4128.
JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY 444
in the postmodern hermeneutic all meaning is socially generated, queer commentary has little methodological difficulty finding a place in the contemporary religious and theological debate.
6 In cooperation with feminist Biblical interpretation, which has “destabilized normative heterosexuality” by alleging “sexist” bias,
7 queer readings merely seek to take one more step in the hermeneutics of suspicion and expose the “heterosexist bias” of the Bible and Bible interpreters. Identifying exegesis as an exercise in social power, queer theorists reject the oppressive narrowness of the Bible’s male/ female binary vision and boldly generate textual meaning on the basis of the “inner erotic power” of the gay interpreter.
8 What could be more postmodern? Employing such a widely accepted methodology, and with “straight” Bible scholars now ready “to redraw the alterity map,”
9 gay theology appears to have a bright future everywhere. The theoretical progress is mirrored in popular society, where resistance to the gay life-style is more and more impugned as anti-democratic and un- American.
10 But the urgency of the situation for Bible-believing scholars is not merely the pressing need for a scholarly ethical response to an unfortunate moral aberration. The contemporary appearance of a homosexual movement says something about the particular times in which we live, granted both that pagan spirituality is enjoying a popular revival and that throughout the Bible Sodom and Gomorrah have always served as the symbol for endtime pagan idolatry, ultimate moral disintegration, and eschatological divine
Wikipedia verifies that The dress of the whore of Babylon is similar to the Jerusalem High Priest (Exodus 28:6).Several Old Testament prophets referred to Jerusalem as being a spiritual harlot and a mother of such harlotry (Isaiah 1:21; Jeremiah 2:20; Jeremiah 3:1–11; Ezekiel 16:1–43; Ezekiel 23, Galatians 4:25). Some of the these Old Testament prophecies as well as the warnings in the New Testament concerning Jerusalem are in fact very close to the text concerning Babylon in Revelation, suggesting that John may well have actually been citing those prophecies in his description of Babylon.
For example, in Matthew 23:34–37 and Luke 11:47–51, Jesus himself assigned all of the bloodguilt for the killing of the prophets and of the saints (of all time) to the Pharisees of Jerusalem, and, in Revelation 17:6 and 18:20,24, almost identical phrasing is used in charging that very same bloodguilt to Babylon. This is also bolstered by Jesus' statement that "it's not possible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem." (Luke 13:33).[50]
Rev. 11:8 And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city,
which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt,
where also our Lord was crucified.
Rev. 14:6 And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven,
having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth,
and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people,
Rev. 14:7 Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him;
for the hour of his judgment is come:
and worship him that made heaven, and earth,
and the sea, and the fountains of waters.
Rev. 14:8 And there followed another angel,
saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen,
that great city,
because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.
Rev. 18:21 And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone,
and cast it into the sea, saying,
Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down,
and shall be found no more at all.
Rev. 18:22 And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters,
shall be heard no more at all in thee;
and no craftsman, of whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee;
and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee;
Rev. 18:23 And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee;
and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee:
for thy merchants were the great men of the earth;
for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.
Rev. 18:24 And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints,
and of all that were slain upon the earth.
6 Ken Stone, “Homosexuality and the Bible or Queer Readings?” a paper read to the Gay Men’s Issues Group at the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting (November 21, 1999). See the blending of homosexuality and postmodern hermeneutics in the work of Michel Foucault cited above.
7 Ibid. Stone makes the point with insistence.
8 The term comes from another paper read at the same AAR group by Timothy R. Kochs, “Cruising as Methodology: Homoeroticism and the Scriptures.” Kochs mentioned his indebtedness to Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Re˘ection (ed. James B. Nelson and Sandra P. Longfellow; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1994) 75–79. 9 See Clines above.
10 A simple search on the internet reveals that the web sites of many leading colleges feature student gay and lesbian groups while there is no mention of Christian groups. The example of present-day Holland shows where the gay movement is going in western society. Rev. Alan Morrison, Diakrisis International
(March 28, 2000) describes his pastoral experiences working in a parish in Holland with the following story: “The official policy in schools—whether in Biology, Social Studies or Sex Education, is that a homosexual lifestyle is equally as valid as a heterosexual one. I recently had a meeting with a teenager, at her request, who is really searching, and she wanted answers to many spiritual matters. It was most interesting to speak with her about homosexuality. Although this particular girl is a welcome exception, these kids have been completely brainwashed to believe that anyone who believes that homosexuality is wrong is an undesirable person. Billboard advertisements over here are just as likely to show a male couple engaged in deep kissing as a male-female couple. Sodomy is perfectly legitimate and normal. In fact, one finds these days the not-so-subtle implication that there is almost something more noble and pure about being in a homosexual relationship. I wonder how long it will be before the refusal to accept homosexual relationships as a normal alternative to heterosexuality becomes outlawed, so that people like you and me will be treated at best as suffering from a ‘personality disorder,’ at worst as being criminal deviants?”
ONE SHORT ANDROGYNY: THE PAGAN SEXUAL IDEAL 445
judgment. 11 The subject, in its spiritual, religious, and even eschatological dimensions, needs to be treated and debated among us, not simply as an unfortunate social deviation or ephemeral social fad, but as a cutting-edge component of a rising, all-encompassing religious world view that is diametrically opposed to the world view of Christian theism. One fruitful way to approach this pressing issue is to consider the religious roots of homosexuality.
12 The recent radical changes in our society, include, simultaneously, both the liberation of sex and the rediscovery of pagan mystical spirituality. Is such a pairing pure coincidence or is it the result of a necessary organic relationship? Has there always existed an ineluctable connection between pagan religion and pagan sex? For instance, while radical pagan feminists speak of the need of a “change of [religious] consciousness,” such spiritual transformation is always proposed by way of a radical recalibration of our perceptions of sexuality. In other words, sexuality appears central, not peripheral, to the spiritual quest. This, I believe, will become more and more evident in the homosexual movement, namely, that this particular sexual life-style will be the promoter of a particular kind of religion. Thus, while sexual liberation in its popular, successful, government-financed versions strategically associates itself with “civil rights,” pro-choice civic values, and politically-correct tolerance, often studiously avoiding any obvious religious dimension, its ultimate legitimization— since all human beings are religious—proceeds from the age-old dogmas of paganism, which, unlike their modern equivalent, never tried to hid behind a thin veil of temple-state separation. If everything is indeed political, as the radicals often proclaim, everything is also spiritual, and thus the spiritual is also sexual. Charles Pickstone, a pagan believer in Anglican orders, affirms this in his recent book The Divinity of Sex : “. . . sex is the spirituality that reveals the sacramental richness of matter.”
13 The thesis of this paper is that to understand the contemporary sexual revolution, we need to see the “new sexuality”—particularly in this paper in its homosexual expression—as an integral expression of age-old religious
11 See the paper given by Eriks Galenieks at the November 1999 meeting of ETS entitled, “Sodom and Gomorrah from an eschatological Perspective.” Galenieks stresses the use of the imagery of “fire and brimstone” as a cipher of judgment in Deut 29:23; Ps 11:6; Luke 17:29 (where the judgment on Sodom anticipates “the day when the Son of Man is revealed”); and especially in Revelation (9:17–18; 14:10; 19:20; 20:10; 21:8). He also rightly sees the connection with the rise of idolatry (see Deut 29:20–28). However, homosexuality in this eschatological complex of ideas ought surely to be given a place, since, according to Paul (Romans 1:23–27), homosexual perversion always ˘ows directly and logically from idolatry.
12 Obviously there are issues of biology, psychology, and sociology that need to be part of a fullscale discussion that cannot be raised within the scope of this paper. A helpful book from a medical and psychological perspective is Jeffrey Satinover, Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996). I am not suggesting that every homosexual is aware of this deep religious connection. 13
Charles Pickstone, The Divinity of Sex: The Search for Ecstasy in a Secular Age (New York:
St. Martin’s, 1997), reviewed by John Attarian in Culture Wars (March 1998) 46ff. In the words of Attarian, Pickstone “forsakes Christianity’s transcendent God for a neopagan pantheism, with the distinction between Creator and Creation collapsed, and sex the religious experience of choice.” JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
446 paganism. 14 In our response, we cannot follow Lot, who would have sacrificed his daughters to placate the aggressors. Nor can we claim personal moral superiority. In the clamor for acceptance and recognition, we must always hear the cry of divine image-bearers, however marred and broken. However, we must not shrink back from seeking to do justice to the whole Christian, Biblical dimension of the problem. In a time of moral confusion and politically correct intimidating “tolerance,” we owe such clarity to our culture, to our sons and daughters, and to God, Creator and Redeemer, for whom all things exist.
II. THE MODERN REVIVAL OF PAGANISM
In order to make this connection, some attempt must be made to deny paganism. The Lutheran theologian Carl Braaten defines the contemporary revival of paganism—what he calls “neopaganism”—as the belief in “a divine spark or seed [which] is innate in the individual human soul. Salvation consists in liberating the divine essence from all that prevents true self-expression. The way of salvation is to turn inward and ‘get in touch with oneself.’ ” 15 In a different but complimentary way, I would suggest that the essence of paganism can be usefully described as monism, the belief that one principle defines and unites all of reality. Thus all is one, humanity is one divine reality, and all religions are ultimately many expressions of the one monistic truth. At the heart of this theoretical religious paganism lies a particular and powerful mystical experience of oneness. Indeed, it is often claimed in today’s syncretistic age that at the core of all religions, beyond and behind their distinctive doctrines, is the same mystical encounter.
Louis Dupré , T. L. Riggs Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Yale University, does indeed make such a claim. After noting the universality of the “mystical drive” to union with the divine, Dupré wonders whether “all religions, which meet in this drive, are, at least in their mystical expression, identical.” 16 He seems to have little doubt about the answer: “If different traditions share a state in which distinctions disappear [emphasis mine],
Pickstone is retracing the steps of Ezra Pound who left the theism of Presbyterianism to seek spiritual freedom in Paris in the 1920s. He believed that sex, creativity, and mysticism were part of the spiritual quest, that “one comes to the divine through the senses,” and was engaged in a life of debauchery in order to test his theory—yet his “quest” ended in failure. See E. Fuller Torrey,
The Roots of Reason, Ezra Pound, and the Secret of St. Elizabeth’s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984) 115, cited in Peter C. Moore, Disarming the Secular Gods: How to Talk So Skeptics Will Listen (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1989) 45.14 In my book Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America (Mukilteo, WA: Wine, 1997) 177–196, I argue that radical feminism has deconstructed formative heterosexuality and sexual roles, but that homosexuality provides the reconstructive model, or the pure form of pagan sexuality. I am developing this latter point much further in this present article.
15 Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, eds., Either/Or: The Gospel or Neo-Paganism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) 7.
16 Louis Dupr é , “ Unio Mystica : The State and the Experience,” in Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue (ed. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn; NewYork: Continuum, 1996)
ANDROGYNY: THE PAGAN SEXUAL IDEAL 447
should we not conclude that in its highest form all mysticism is identical.” This conclusion is affirmed in spite of major outward “doctrinal differences,” since beyond the level of doctrine is the spiritual unio mystica . Dupré determines that “. . . to the extent that the state of union is held to consist of an ecstatic, intrinsically transient experience, [then] the conclusion that mysticism is identical in all religions is indeed inescapable .” 17 A leading history of religions “Christian” scholar, Huston Smith, believes that the present work of the Spirit is producing an “invisible geometry to shape the religions of the world into a single truth.” 18 In a similar vein, the late Joseph Campbell combined Jungian psychology and New Age spirituality in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces to express the notion that all human civilizations have the same monomyth with only minor differences in details.19
According to pagan esoterism, spiritual understanding through intuition and meditation is the only way to salvation. This comes through a nonrational, mystical experience of seeing oneself as the center of a circle that has no boundaries, where all distinctions are eliminated. As the great modern gnostic C. G. Jung said, “The self is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” 20
From the center of one’s own limitless universe, the self is sovereign. The unitive experience, essential to this worldview, is engendered through drugs, time-honored (Hindu) meditation or otherwise induced trance. Meditation, rightly practiced, enables the mind-soul to be disconnected from the limitations of the body and to be in direct contact with cosmic spiritual unity. In the words of a leading neo-pagan mystic, “The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare to state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two [illusion and reality].” 21
17 Ibid., emphasis mine. Jennifer Woodhull, “Meditation, Prayer and the Still Point Within,” in The Meditation and Prayer Catalog (1999) 2, states that the 12 major religions and more than five hundred movements and sects are all born of the “same spark.” She describes this experience of unio mystica as “the soundless still point of the sacred.” The Theosophical Society pronounces valid the ideas about God in all the world’s religions—all but one, Biblical/Christian monotheism. As the Society’s brochure states: “Esoteric Philosophy [read proto-New Age thinking] reconciles all nations, strips every one of its outward human garments, and shows the root of each to be identical with that of every other great religion. It proves the necessity of a Divine Absolute Principle in Nature. It denies Deity no more than it does the sun. Esoteric Philosophy has never rejected God in Nature, nor Deity as the absolute and abstract End. It only refuses to accept any of the gods of the so-called monotheistic religions, gods created by man in his own image and likeness, a blasphemous and sorry caricature of the Ever Unknowable.”
18 Alan Morrison, The Serpent and the Cross: Religious Corruption in an Evil Age (Birmingham, UK: K&M, 1994) 568.
19 Pamela Johnson, “The Dark Side of the Force: Joseph Campbell, Star Wars and Hollywood’s New Religion,” World (May 3/10, 1997) 23–24.
20 See Miguel Serrano, C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships (trans. Frank MacShane; New York: Schoken, 1968) 50, 55, cited in David L. Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (New York: Harper and Row, 1974) 10.
21 Ken Wilbur, The Spectrum of Consiousness , cited in Tony Schwartz, What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America (New York: Bantam, 1995) 339.
JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
448 This Eastern monism with a Western spin is in direct and total contradiction with Christian theism and the civilization it has engendered. 22 There is no neutral ground. This is true of sexuality as well. Both monism and theism have their particular views of sexuality, and here, too, there is no neutral ground. As one homosexual activist recently said, “Traditional family values suck.” 23 The vehemence of the above statement indicates how closely theology and sexuality are held, as well as the determination on the part of some to deconstruct heterosexuality as the norm of human society. Not surprisingly, this element of deconstruction, indeed, destruction of “traditional” sexuality, has accompanied the recent appearance of paganism and deconstructive postmodernism in the West. This can be illustrated by the vertiginous increase in divorce, the phenomenal growth of pornography, the “liberation” of sex from monogamy, and the rising practice and public acceptance of homosexuality. This is all known and well documented. However, within the specific limits of this paper, I wish to describe the religious pagan sexual ideal as androgyny—which seems to be more and more proposed as the reconstructive model for our deconstructed world.
In what follows I will first provide a certain documentation and description of a phenomenon that consistently marks pagan spiritual practice: the association of the androgynous priest with the pagan cultus throughout time and space. I will present this evidence without any claim to complete or exhaustive systemization. In the second place, I will attempt a theological explanation.
III. THE ANDROGYNOUS PRIEST/SHAMAN AS
THE EMBODIMENT OF PAGAN SPIRITUALITYThroughout time and across space, the pagan cultus consistently, though not exclusively, holds out as its sexual representative the emasculated, androgynous priest. Mircea Eliade, a respected expert in comparative religions,
22 For the neo-pagan version, see the seven defining points enumerated by Ken Wilbur, outlined in Schwarz, What Really Matters 354:
First, Spirit, or God, or a Supreme Reality exists.
Second, it is found within one’s self.Third, most of us don’t recognize this Spirit because we live with an illusory sense of separateness from others and from the universal ground of all being.
Fourth, the path to liberation requires building a broader identity in which the wholly separate sense of self is surrendered.
Fifth, if this path is followed to its conclusion, it leads finally to rebirth, or enlightenment—in the form of either a direct experience Spirit within or oneness with God.
Sixth, this experience marks the end of suffering.
And seventh, the natural outgrowth of such enlightenment is a life grounded in compassion and directed toward sel˘ess service.
23 This was one of the epithets hurled by homosexual rights demonstrators at Gary Bauer of Family Research Council when he gave a talk in Livonia, Michigan, on October 22, 1998, according to World (December 19, 1998) 15.
ANDROGYNY: THE PAGAN SEXUAL IDEAL 449
argues that androgyny as a religious universal or archetype appears virtually everywhere and at all times in the world’s religions. Much evidence exists to support his judgment. 24
The clearest textual testimony in ancient times comes from nineteenthcentury BC Mesopotamia. Androgynous priests were associated with the worship of the goddess Istar from the Sumerian age (1800 BC ). 25 Their condition was due to their “devotion to Istar who herself had ‘transformed their masculinity into femininity.’ ” 26 They functioned as occult shamans, who released the sick from the power of the demons just as, according to the cult myth, they had saved Istar from the devil’s lair. “. . . as human beings,” says a contemporary scholar, “. . . they seem to have engendered demonic abhorrence in others; . . . the fearful respect they provoked is to be sought in their otherness, their position between myth and reality, and their divinedemonic ability to transgress boundaries.” 27
The pagan religions of ancient Canaan appear to maintain a similar view of spirituality and sexuality. The goddess Anat preserves many of the characteristics of Istar. 28 Like the Syrian goddess Cybele, Anat is headstrong and submits to no one. 29
She is both young and nubile but also a bearded soldier, so that many commentators conclude that she is either androgynous or bi-sexual. 30 She thus symbolizes the mystical union, which was celebrated by her worshipers as a ritual enactment of the hieros gamos [sacred spiritual marriage]. 31 The OT gives some indication that Canaanite religion included homosexual androgyny, against which Israel was constantly put on guard. 32 Livy describes initiation into the Bacchanalia of 186 BC as involving homosexual rape, simillimi feminis mares. Walter Burkhart, professor of Classical
Anath: This Canaanite Goddess' name means 'to answer' and may be related to the Akkadian word ettu meaning 'active will.160' She was a major deity all over the western parts of the Near East, including Egypt where she was later considered to be the same Goddess as Libyan Neith. Titles for her include Belet'net 'virgin Anath,' 'Nethebely161 'the destroyer,' and Yebemet-limm 'widow of the nation(?)'162. Her worship extended from the 2nd millenium BCE deep into the Hellenistic Age, when it began to be forced underground. Like the original Athena, she ruled battle, the hunt, and the passage of souls from one world to the next. She was also a Death Goddess who wore the goatskin aegis -- or at least, the Egyptians attributed Neith's aegis to her. This sacred garment has been described as a cloak, apron, breastplate, or shield. In Anath's case, it shifted in function as religious ceremony changed. Originally it was probably a garment worn by each Libyan woman when she came of age, made of cloth and marked with snakes and Moon symbols, or made of many braids of string.Later it was remade, parts of its feminine symbolism removed and turned into a garment worn during animal sacrifices. Then it was decorated with severed penises, representing both types of death men experience, loss of erection and the ending of their lives.
As Anath's image was melded into that of the Minoan Bird Goddess, the penises became snakes again, and the aegis a cloak. The result helped to effectively concealed Athena's ancient Libyan origins while unwittingly reintroducing some of the older symbols. The sacred rite in which Anath's consort, represented by the last of the grain harvest, died during the ritual of the last sheaf's reaping and division into food and seed was cut out altogether. Such drastic action was required to further match her to Libyan Athena, who consorted with no man unless she wished to conceive a child by other than parthenogenetic means. Conversely, Anath was never associated with giving birth unless she had taken an animal form.
Anath was a famous warrior and powerful protector, a sort of 'ultimate woman' in a way somewhat analogous to Athena's early Greek role163. She was worshipped by many Israelites, who considered their god her consort, and was frequently mentioned in Ugaritic texts. The Phoenicians also adored her, naming settlements for her. One of them was called Panorma by the Greeks, connecting her to their 'universal mountain mother' Gaea or Rhea. [ZOE]
"Boeotia was the main center for the propagation of the Dionysiac cult throughout Greece. Herodotus gives us a description of the Festival of dionysus as practiced in his country. He points out that Melampus, son of Amytheon, introduced the name of dionysus to Greece and probably got his knowledge of the worship of this god 'through Cadmus of Tyre and the people who came from Phoenicia to the country called Boeotia'. Although Herodotus was ever ready to find an oriental origin for Greek religion, similar cult practices can be seen in the Dionysiac cult and Ugaritic religious literature of the second millennium B.C. An essential rite of the Bacchic orgies was the practice of omophagia, the dismemberment of the sacrificial victim and the eating of raw flesh. A text from Ugarit reveals that the goddess--
"Anath (Ishtar-like) came upon her divine brother Baal (Tammuz)
"unawares when he was beating his timbrel and perhaps singing.
"The goddess ate her brother's flesh 'without a knife and drank his blood without a cup'.
"The timbrel also was the sacred musical instrument peculiar to the bacchic festivals." M. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled
Aeschylus Suppliant Maidens reads: Aesch. Supp. 104 "So let him look upon human outrageousness--in what way it shoots up men in their wooing of us, sprouted from thoughts of evil intent, having a frenzied purpose as its irresistible spur, and deluded, turning its thoughts to folly.
hubris A. wanton violence, arising from the pride of strength or from passion, insolence, freq. in Od., mostly of the suitors
in wantonness or insolence,
2. lust, lewdness, opp. sōphrosunē, Thgn.379, X.Cyr. 8.4.14.
II.2. an outrage on the person, esp. violation, rape,
gamos
III. hieros gamos. ritual marriage,
cf. “gameō” 1: also tois methēmerinois gamois, i.e. prostitution, D.18.129; Panos anaboa gamous, i.e. rape,
Such piteous strains [Melos] of woe I utter in my pain, now shrill, now deep,
li^gus II. after Hes., mostly of sad sounds, also of music,
“ligeia lōtou kharis” E.Heracl.892 (lyr.); aulou l. ēkhon, v.l.
for glukun in Mosch. 2.98.—Poet. word (“Mousai ligeiai” Pl.Phdr.237a).
Barus a Laded Burden
blended with falling tears--Alas, alas! groans appropriate to funeral wails; though I live, I chant my own dirge. I invoke Apia's hilly land--for well, O land,
Acts 20:27 For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God.You understand my barbarous speech--,
and many times I lay my hands upon my Sidonian veil and tear its linen fabric to shreds.Sacrifices in satisfaction of vows are given freely to the gods when all fares well, if only there be escape from death. Alas, alas, perplexing troubles! Where will this wave of trouble bear me away?
Acts 20:28 Take heed therefore unto yourselves,
and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers,
to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood. \
Acts 20:29 For I know this, that after my departing
shall grievouswolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock.
-Lukos oresteroi [homosexual. snake, wolf] to be struck dumb, of things that are not, 'pigeon's milk',
of vain expectation,oin humenaioi, of an impossibility, Id.Pax1076, 1112, cf. Il.22.263; hôs lukoi arn' agapôsin, of treacherous or unnatural love, of getting a thing peri phrear choreuei, of those engaged in vain pursuits, ib.21.Lukos VI. nickname of paiderastai, AP12.250 (Strat.), cf. Pl.Phdr. 241d.-Humenai-oô ,
A. sing the wedding-song, A.Pr.557 (lyr.).
2. wed, take to wife, kouras Theoc.22.179 : prov., prin ken lukos oin humenaioi
2. wed, take to wife, “kouras” Theoc.22.179: prov., “prin ken lukos oin humenaioi” Ar.Pax1076 (hex.).
-Humenai-os u^, o(, (Humēn) II. = Humēn, Hymen, the god of marriage, addressed in wedding-songs, freq. in Trag. and Com. (lyr.), “Humēn ō Umenai' anaz” E.Tr.314; Humēn ō Humenai' Humēn ib.331; “Humēn Humenai' ō” Ar.Pax1335; “Humēn ō, Humenai' ō” Id.Av.1736,1742; Dor. “Human ō Humenaie” Theoc.18.58; hence the two are used as one word, “humēn humenaion aeidōn” Opp.C.1.341.
The hieros gamos was the ultimate expression of what is termed 'temple prostitution' where a man visited a priestess in order to receive gnosis - to experience the devine for himself through the act of lovemaking. The word describing the priestess was hierodule which means 'sacred servent'. Pistis (Faith) is Sophia or Wisdom: Her daughter is called 'Eve of life' or Zoe, the 'holy spirit'. i.e. prostitution
For what they worship as true, they veil as mythical. But if these things are true, they ought not to be called myths, but to be proved not to be shameful; and if they are false, they ought not to be objects of wonder; nor ought people so inconsiderately to hold the most contrary opinions about the same thing, as if they were playing in the market-place with boys or really ill-disposed men, not engaged in discussion with men of sense, and worshippers of the Word, though despisers of this artificial plausibility.
Nor are these Thracian orgies, from which the word Worship (threskia) is said to be derived; nor rites and mysteries of Orpheus,whom the Greeks admired so much for his wisdom that they devised for him a lyre which draws all things by its music.
DICAEOPOLIS
Peace, profane men! Let the basket-bearer come forward, and thou Xanthias, hold the phallus well upright.
Amos 8:1 Thus hath the Lord GOD shewed unto me: and behold a basket of summer fruit.
Amos 8:2 And he said, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A basket of summer fruit.
Then said the LORD unto me,
The end is come upon my people of Israel; I will not again pass by them any more.
Xanthias, walk behind the basket-bearer and hold the phallus well erect; I will follow, singing the Phallic hymn; thou, wife, look on from the top of the terrace. Forward!
Oh, Phales, [god of generation, worshipped in the form of a phallus] companion of the orgies of Bacchus, night reveller, god of adultery, friend of young men, these past six years I have not been able to invoke thee.
CHORUS
Here is a man truly happy. See how everything succeeds to his wish. Peacefully seated in his market, he will earn his living; ....without being accosted on the public place by any importunate fellow,
A BOEOTIAN By Heracles! my shoulder is quite black and blue. Ismenias, put the penny-royal down there very gently, and all of you, musicians from Thebes, pipe with your bone flutesneither by Cratinus, shaven in the fashion of the debauchees, nor by this musician, who plagues us with his silly improvisations, Artemo, with his arm-pits stinking as foul as a goat, like his father before him. You will not be the butt of the villainous Pauson's jeers, nor of Lysistratus, the disgrace of the Cholargian deme, who is the incarnation of all the vices, and endures cold and hunger more than thirty days in the month.
24Besides the seminal work of Eliade in a number of publications referenced below, see the more recent work of Arlene Swidler, ed., Homosexuality and World Religions (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1993).
25Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998) 28. For what follows of this older period, I am greatly indebted to this study. Nissinen’s work is supported by Helmer Ringgren, Religions of the Ancient Near East (trans. John Sturdy; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973) 25, who speaks of naked “eunuchs” associated with the cult to the Sumerian goddess Inanna (another name for Istar) that includes a hieros gamos rite. These priests dressed up and wore make-up like a woman, and expressed their “otherness” via their androgyny. Physically they were men but their appearance either was feminine or had both male and female characteristics. 26Nissinen, Homoeroticism 30.
27Ibid. 32.
28Neal H. Walls, The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth (SBLDS 135; Atlanta, GA: Scholars, 1992) 83.
29Ibid. 107. On Cybele, see below.
30Ibid. 86.
31Nicholas Wyatt, “The c Anat Stela from Ugarit and Its Ramifications,” Ugarit Forschungen 16 (1984) 331.
32This is developed by Nissinen, Homoeroticism 37–44. I find his arguments persuasive. Leviticus (18:3, 30; 20:23) presents sexual activity between two men as an example of the repulsive ways of the Canaanites, which the people of Yahweh should avoid. Also, in Deuteronomy there are a few gender-related commandments that can readily be seen against the background of ancient Near Eastern worship. These would include the exclusion of eunuchs [emasculated priests?]
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Philology at the University of Zurich, comments upon this testimony: “Scholars at one time gave advice not to believe in slander of this sort, but we can hardly be sure. Parallels from initiations elsewhere are not difficult to find.”33 In other words, Burkhardt recognizes that there was something going on related to the cultic nature of the event, not simply a frenzied lack of control.34 Examples of “religious” androgyny can be found in various forms in Syria and Asia Minor in the third century BC,35 but its clearest and closest expression in that area comes from the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Christian era. It is well documented that the Great Mother under the names of Atargatis or Cybele had androgynous priests, called Galli, who castrated themselves as a permanent act of devotion to the goddess.36 A particular version of the goddess is worshipped under the name of Artemis
from the people of Yahweh (Deut 23:2; cf. cf. Isa 56:3–5) and the command against cross-dressing [equally a pagan cultic common place, as we noted above] (Deut 22:5). Since the context refers to pagan worship activities like child sacrifice to Moloch (18:21; 20:1–5) and the calling of ghosts and spirits (20:6, 27), “religious” homosexual androgyny may well be implied. Further proof is (a) the use of the term tôebâ, translated “abomination” or “detestable custom,” which evokes the notion of pure and impure worship; (b) the reference to both male and female “shrine” prostitution in Deut 23:18; (c) the mention of the “quarters of male shrine prostitutes in the temple of the Lord and where women did weaving for [the goddess] Asherah.” According to Richard J. Pettey, Asherah: Goddess of Israel (American University Studies VII, Vol. 74; New York: Peter Lang, 1990) 25ff., Asherah shows similarities to . For other work on Asherah, see Tilde Binger, “Asherah in Israel [New Translation of Khirbet el-Kom Inscription],” JSOT 9 (1994) 3–18; John Day, “Asherah in the Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitic Literature,” JBL 105 (1986) 385–408; William G. Dever, “Asherah, consort of Jahweh: New Evidence from Kuntillett Arjrűd,” ASORB 255 (1984) 21–37; Judith M. J. Hadley, “The Fertility of the Flock: The Depersonalization of Astarte in the Old Testament,” in On Reading Prophetic Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1996) 115–133; Othmar Keel, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997); Saul M. Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Jahweh in Israel (SBLM 34; Atlanta: Scholars, 1988); Mark S. Smith, “God Male and Female in the Old Testament: Yahweh and His Asherah,” TS 48 (1987) 333–340
Pausanias Attica and Anagyrus a sanctuary of the Mother of the gods. At Cephale the chief cult is that of the Dioscuri, for the in habitants call them the Great gods.[2] At Prasiae is a temple of Apollo
Catullus 63 The worship was orgiastic in the extreme, and was accompanied by the sound of such frenzy-producing instruments as the tympana, cymbala, tibiae, and cornu, and culminated in scourging, self-mutilation, syncope from excitement. and even death from hemorrhage or heart-failure (cf. Lucr. 2.598ff.; Varr. Sat. Men. 131 Büch.ff.; Ov. Fast. 4.179ff.). The worship of the Magna Mater, or Mater Idaea, as she was often called (perhaps from identification with Rhea of the Cretan Mt. Ida rather than from the Trojan Mt. Ida), was introduced into Rome in 205 B.C. in accordance with a Sibylline oracle
[9] mater: Cybele was the Magna Mater Idaea of the Romans, as well as mater deorum; cf. intr. note; Hymn. Cyb. “mētera moi pantōn te theōn, pantōn t' anthrōpōn”
[9] mater: Cybele was the Magna Mater Idaea of the Romans, as well as mater deorum; cf. intr. note; Hymn. Cyb. “mētera moi pantōn te theōn, pantōn t' anthrōpōn”
[9] tubam Cybelles: as the blare of the tuba is the summons and incitement to warriors, so is the beat of the tympanum to the votaries of Cybele; the phrase is further explained by tua initia .[9] mater: Cybele was the Magna Mater Idaea of the Romans, as well as mater deorum; cf. intr. note; Hymn. Cyb. “mētera moi pantōn te theōn, pantōn t' anthrōpōn”
[13] pecora: cf. Ov. Ib. 457 “pecus Magnae Parentis” (of the Galli)
Gallus , i, m., = Gallos Strab., A. [select] Galli , ōrum, m., the priests of Cybele, so called because of their raving, a priest of Cybele, Mart. 3, 81; 11, 74; cf. Quint. 7, 9, 2: “resupinati cessantia tympana Galli,” Juv. 8, 176.—And satirically (on account of their emasculated condition),
2. (Acc. to II. A., of or belonging to the priests of Cybele; hence, transf.) Of or belonging to the priests of Isis, Gallic: “turma,” the troop of the priests of Isis, Ov. Am. 2, 13, 18.
"Asherah (symbolized by errect poles with fertility symbols pouring out the top): She is the Queen of Heaven, in other languages and ages identified as Ashtoreth, Athirat, Astarte, and Ishtar. Yahweh, the Hebrew God elevated to become the sole deity , was Her consort.
Her "male" priestesses were known as kelabim, the faithful "dogs" of the Goddess,
- who practiced divinatory arts,
- danced in processions,
- and served as hierodules, qedeshim,
- in the company of other priestesses.
Elements of the goddess worship were largely erased in a cultural purge c. 630 BCE by King Yosiah, at the behest of Yahweh's priests, who required supremacy.
Since the Hebrew term, qedeshim, “sacred ones,” parallels the way the Syrian priests (galli ) were described as “holy” (hieroi ), there does seem to be reason to conclude, with Nissinen, that “the qedeshim were thought of as men who had assumed an unusual gender role and thereby expressed their life-long dedication to the deity” (Homoeroticism). Ringgren, Religions 167, mistakenly says that this was the only kind of homoeroticism prohibited by Scripture, for he fails to see the “theological” connection between androgynous homosexuality, “religious” or not, and pagan monism. In other words, there does seem to be some similarity between the assinnu of Mesopotamia and the qedeshim of Canaan. Egyptian goddess worship (Ishtar, Astarte, Isis or Anat) is also evident in Jeremiah 7:18 and 44:17–25—see Robert P. Carroll, Jeremiah: A Commentary (OT Library; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986) 213 and 734–735.
33Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (London: Harvard University Press, 1987) 105.
34Richard Seaford, “In the Mirror of Dionysus,” in The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece (ed. Sue Blundell and Margaret Williamson; London/New York: Routledge, 1998) 133, shows that transvestism functions as a right of passage into the cult of Dionysus. In the cult “females may be like males and males like females” (131). This is because “liminal inversion of identity [is] required for mystic initiation.” Such “confusion” is also seen not merely between male and female but also between “human (or god) and animal, and between living and dead” (132L).
To Bacchus [Dionysus], on the eve of his feast, every Egyptian sacrifices a hog before the door of his house, which is then given back to the swineherd by whom it was furnished, and by him carried away.In other respects the festival is celebrated almost exactly as Bacchic festivals are in Greece, excepting that
the Egyptians have no chorals.
They also use instead of phalli another invention,consisting of images a cubit high, pulled by strings, which the women carry round to the villages.A piper goes in front, and the women follow, singing hymns in honour of Bacchus. They give a religious reason for the peculiarities of the image.35Ibid. 31. See Nissinen, Homoeroticism 149, n. 73.
36See Lucian, De Syria Dea 50–51.50. On certain days a multitude flocks into the temple, and the Galli in great numbers, sacred as they are, perform the ceremonies of the men and gash their arms and turn their backs to be lashed. Many bystanders play on the pipes the while many beat drums; others sing divine and sacred songs. All this performance takes place outside the temple, and those engaged in the ceremony enter not into the temple.
51. During these days they are made Galli. As the Galli sing and celebrate their orgies, frenzy falls on many of them and many who had come as mere spectators afterwards are found to have committed the great act. I will narrate what they do. Any young man who has resolved on this action, strips off his clothes, and with a loud shout bursts into the midst of the crowd, and picks up a sword from a number of swords which I suppose have been kept ready for many years for this purpose. He takes it and castrates himself and then runs wild through the city, bearing in his hands what he has cut off. He casts it into any house at will, and from this house he receives women's raiment and ornaments. Thus they act during their ceremonies of castration.
ANDROGYNY: THE PAGAN SEXUAL IDEAL 451
at Ephesus where Paul established a church (Acts 19).37 [Acts 19:37 For ye have brought hither these men, which are neither robbers of churches, nor yet blasphemers of your goddess. ] In Syria, Cybele is called Rhea,38 whose feminized itinerant priests imitated the deeds of the mythological Attis39 in trance-like ecstasies.40 The rites of initiation into the Cybele or Rhea cults included baptism in the blood of a slaughtered bull or ram. This took place in a pit or taurobolium. At the end of the ceremony sometimes certain “powers” of the sacrificial bull, no doubt the animals’s genitals, were offered to the Mother of the gods, again a powerful symbol of male emasculation before the female divinity.41 The obvious intentions and results of such cultic mythology and practice were the feminization and emasculation of men under the occultic power of the goddess.42 In other words, even in death the ideal male is emasculated, like the Galli in life. Though there is no evidence of a specifically emasculated Isaic priesthood, the yearly festival to Isis included men dressing in women’s clothing.43 In this period, another example can be found in the worshipers of Aphrodite in
Hippolytus on the Nasseni (serpent worship)
But if, he says, the mother of the gods emasculate Attis, [Or, "Apis." See Diodorus Siculus, iii. 58, 59. Pausanias, vii. 2O, writes the word Attes. See also Minucius Felix, Octav., cap. xxi.] and herself has this (person) as an object of affection, the blessed nature, he says, of the supernal and everlasting (beings) alone recalls the male power of the soul to itself.
For (the Naassene) says, there is the hermaphrodite man. According to this account of theirs, the intercourse of woman with man is demonstrated, in conformity with such teaching, to be an exceedingly wicked and filthy (practice). [forbidden]
For, says (the Naassene), Attis has been emasculated, that is, he has passed over from the earthly parts of the nether world to the everlasting substance above, where, he says, there is neither female or male, [ Gal. iii. 28, and Clement's Epist. ad Rom., ii. 12.] but a new creature, [ 2 Cor. v. 17, Gal. vi 15.] a new man, which is hermaphrodite. As to where, however, they use the expression "above," I shall show when I come to the proper place (for treating this subject). But they assert that, by their account, they testify that Rhea is not absolutely isolated, but-for so I may say-the universal creature; and this they declare to be what is affirmed by the Word.
- Attis, eager and hurried, reached the Phrygian grove,
- The goddess's dark places, crowned with woodland.
- And there, exalted by amorous rage, his mind gone,
- He cut off his testicles with a sharp flint.
- While the ground was still spotted with fresh blood
Quickly took in his snowy hands a tambourine
- Such as serves your initiates, Cybele, instead of a trumpet,
- And shaking the hollow calf-hide with delicate fingers,
- Quivering, she began to sing to the troop this:
- Go together, votaresses, to the high groves of Cybele.
- Go together, wandering herd of the lady of Dindymus.
- Quick into exile, you looked for foreign places
- And, following me and the rule I had adopted,
- You bore with the salt tide and the violence of the high sea
And emasculated your bodies from too much hatred of Venus:
- Delight the lady's mind with your errant haste.
- Overcome your reluctance: together
- Go to the Phrygian shrine of Cybele, to her groves
Where the voice of cymbals sounds, the tambourines rattle,
- Where the Phrygian piper sings with the deep curved pipe,
- Where Maenads wearing ivy throw back their heads,
- Where they practice the sacred rites with sharp yells.
- Where they flutter around the goddess's cohort:
- It is there we must go with our rapid dances."
- As Attis, the counterfeit woman, sang this to her companions,
- The choir howled suddenly with tumultuous tongues.
- The tambourine bellows, the cymbals clash again;
- The swift troop moves off to Ida with hurrying feet.
- Crazy, panting, drifting, at her last gasp,
- Attis with her tambourine leads them through the opaque groves
- Like an unbroken heifer refusing the yoke:
- The swift votaresses follow their swift-footed leader.
- When they reach Cybele's shrine, feeble and worn,
- From too much toil they take their rest without bread (Ceres).
- Sleep covers their eyes with a heavy blanket;
- Their rabid madness subsides to a girlish quiet.
37According to Livy, Natural History 35:132, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesis was controlled by castrated male priests called Megabizes—see “Artemis,” ISBE (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982–87) 1:306–308. Clinton Arnold, Ephesians: Power and Magic: The Concept of Power in Ephesians in the Light of its Historical Setting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 20–27, shows some deep connections with Cybele and powerful personifications of the Magna Mater of magic. A different view of Artemis, based on epigraphical evidence, sees her as “Artemis the pure,” a virgin huntress, quite different from the Magna Mater, who spurned marriage and relations with men, and whose devotees maintained perfect chastity—see S. M. Baugh, “A Foreign World: Ephesus in the First Century,” in Women in the Church: A Fresh Analysis of 1 Timothy 2:9–15 (ed. Andreas J. Köstenberger, Thomas R. Schreiner, and H. Scott Baldwin; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995) 29–30. However, the rejection of marriage and normal heterosexuality may not be as far removed from Cybele and the Galloi as first meets the eye, even if the epigraphical evidence does not go into much detail on this score.
Monica Sjoo and Barbara Moor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Discovering the Religion of the Earth (San Francisco: Harper, 1987) 126, argue that sexual perversion and perverse spirituality [of which they approve] go back a long way. They claim that Artemis was a lesbian, and thus only worshipped by women (208).
38See the account of Lucian of Samosata (second century AD), cited in Marvin W. Meyer, ed., The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987) 134.
39Metamorphoses 26, cited in Meyer, Ancient Mysteries 143.
40A verse from Erucius, a Roman poet just before the time of Christ confirms this practice:
“I, the priest of Rhea [Eve, Zoe], long-haired
castrato, Tmolian dancer, whose
High shriek is famed for carrying power,
Now, at last, rest from my throes
And give the Great Dark Mother on
The banks of the Sangarius all:
My tambourines, my bone-linked scourge,
My brazen cymbals, and a curl
Of my long-haired heavy perfumed hairIn dedication, Holy Rhea.” Translated by Robin Skelton, The Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Epigrams (London: Penguin, 1981) 186–187.
41See Meyer, Ancient Mysteries 128–130, for a fourth-century AD description of this rite.
42Doubtless, the Cybele myth is reproducing the cult myth of Isis: see Robert Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 78–79.
43Ibid. 115.
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Scythia. The ennares were hermaphrodite shamans who wore women’s clothes and received the gift of divination from the Goddess.44 At the beginning of the fifth century AD the cult of the goddess Cybele continued to have success. Augustine in his City of God45 vividly describes the “games” offered in honor of Tanit, the celestial “virgin” and mother of the gods, where obscene actors role-played disgusting acts “in the presence of an immense throng of spectators and listeners of both sexes.” He also describes the public display of homosexual priests (galloi).46
"[Ankhises to Aphrodite:] 'Yet by Zeus who holds the aegis I beseech you, leave me not to lead a palsied life among men, but have pity on me; for he who lies with a deathless goddess is no hale man afterwards." -Homeric Hymn 5 to Aphrodite
"The Skythians [C7th BC] who pillaged the temple [of Aphrodite-Ashtarte in Syria], and all their descendants after them, were afflicted by the goddess with the 'female' sickness (enares) [or loss of virility]: and so the Skythians say that they are afflicted as a consequence of this and also that those who visit Skythian territory see among them the condition of those whom the Skythians call 'Hermaphrodites'." -Herodotus 1.105
"Kallimakhos [C3rd BC grammarian], too, says that Aphrodite hid Adonis in a c-bed, since the poets mean by this allegory that constant eating of lettuce produces impotence. So also Euboulos [C4th BC politician?], in the Defectives, says: 'Don't put lettuce on the table before me, wife, or you will have only yourself to blame. For in that plant, the story goes, Kypris [Aphrodite], once laid out Adonis when he died; therefore it is dead men's food." Athenaeus 2.69b-d
NB Men made permanently impotent by disease were called "hermaphrodites" by the Greeks, the same term used to describe individuals with both male and female genitalia.
I have taken the time to include some of the more unsavory details of pagan worship in order to show the similarity of the sexual practices common to them. Even though separated by many centuries, a historical and “theological” connection between the Mesopotamian assinnus, the Canaanite qedeshim, the Scythian ennares, and the Syrian galli is not difficult to imagine. They took on the same androgynous appearance, engaging in the same ecstatic behavior, including self-mutilation, were associated with occultic spirituality, and so in many ways occupied a similar liminal relationship to “normal” society. Such parallels suggest a profound and necessary connection growing out of the same ideological pagan root.47
Later in the second and third centuries of the Christian church, the gnostics were credited by their adversaries with mystery celebrations involving carnal knowledge. The charge is credible because “Christian” Gnosticism was the attempt to Christianize pagan spirituality, even to the point of adopting some form of androgyny. Hippolytus (AD 170–236) reports that one particular gnostic sect, the Naasenes, who worshipped the Serpent (Naas in Hebrew) of Genesis, attended the secret ceremonies of the mysteries of the Great Mother in order “to understand the ‘universal mystery.’ ”48 Like modern syncretists who are encouraged to cross over into other religions,49 the gnostics believed religious truth was one, to be found everywhere, and so they crossed over into pagan spirituality as a matter of religious principle. The most explicit testimony is from Irenaeus who says: “They prepare a bridal chamber and celebrate mysteries.”50 A homosexual encounter is perhaps insinuated in the “Secret Gospel of Mark.”51 At the very least, the final logion 114 of the Gospel of Thomas appears to be an invitation to spiritual andro-
44Monica Sjoo and Barbara Moor, The Great Cosmic Mother 126.
45Augustine, City of God vii: 26.
46“They were seen yesterday, their hair moist, their faces covered in make-up, their limbs ˘accid, their walk effeminate, wandering through the squares and streets of Carthage, demanding from the public the means to subsidize their shameful life.” Ibid., cited in Robert Turcan, The Cults 58.
47Joscelyn Godwin, Mystery Religions in the Ancient World (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), dismisses these galli as “fanatics,” “a parody of continence,” failing to note both the widespread character of this phenomenon and its deep theological pagan significance, which the Gnostic Naasenes and Julian the Apostate had no difficulty seeing—see below.
48Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 5:9:10.
49Paul Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Towards a Pluralistic Theology of Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987) 226.
50Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.21.3. Clement repeatedly says the gnostics celebrate sexual intercourse as mysteries, see Stromateis 3.27.1, 5; cf. 3.10.1; 3.30.1.
51Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973) 115–117, 185, 452. See also R. M. Grant, “The Mysteries of Marriage in the Gospel of Philip,” VC 15 (1961) 129–140.
ANDROGYNY: THE PAGAN SEXUAL IDEAL 453
gyny.52 All this would justify the judgment of Burkert that “certain Gnostic sects seem to have practiced mystery initiations, imitating or rather outdoing the pagans . . .”53
There is good reason to believe that a form of ancient Gnosticism, namely Hermeticism, survived and in˘uenced the Medieval West through the mystical spirituality of alchemy.54 This variant Egyptian version of gnosis saw in Hermes the divine interpreter whose secrets enable Man to pass through various levels of reality, thus making esoteric transmutations possible. The spiritual alchemist became an initiate, one “who knows,” as the ancient gnostics “knew.”55 Like Hermes, the alchemical Mercurius was understood as a kind of divine “other” who would intervene by affecting the resolution of opposites.56 While no explicit sexual perversion is promoted, joining of the opposites or union was frequently imaged as a hieros gamos, a holy marriage, the fruit of which is called “the Philosopher’s Stone.”57 This “fruit” is sometimes called “the child of the work” which is presented as the Hermetic Androgyne, under the rubric “Two-in-One.”58 At the very least we have to reckon here with a spiritualized form of what Elide calls “ritual androgynisation.”59
In the same “illuminist” tradition, Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), a great mystic and proto-theosophist, believed Adam was androgynous and that the sexes appeared as a result of the fall. For this monistic mystic, the ideal human state was androgyny. According to Eliade, Böhme delivered these notions not from the Qaballah but from alchemy, for he makes use of alchemical terms.60 One of his spiritual successors, Franz von Baader (1765– 1841), postulated that the androgyne had existed at the beginning (Adam) and would appear again at the end of time.61
One notable inheritor of the esoteric movements of alchemy and hermeticism in the modern world is Theosophy. It is not without interest that Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society towards the end of the nineteenth century, may well have had a dominatrix lesbian relationship with her successor Annie Besant. Besant began public life as the wife of an Anglican minister, became first a birth-control propagandist, and then an occultist.62 Her possible lesbianism is suggested by the great authority on
52See below.
53Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults 3.
54Antoine Favre, “Renaissance Hermeticism and the Concept of Western Esotericism,” in Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times (New York: SUNY, 1998) 109–122.
55Karen-Claire Voss, “Spiritual Alchemy,” in Gnosis and Hermeticism 150.
56“ ‘Transmutation’ is the key word,” says the Encyclopedia Britannica article on “Alchemy” (New York: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1980): 432.
57Ibid. 157.
58Ibid. 160.
59Eliade, The Two and the One (New York: Harper, 1969) 112.
60Ibid. 279. In particular he calls the “philosopher’s stone” Rebis, literally “two things,” which Eliade understands as “the ‘double-being’ or the Hermetic androgyne.” Eliade goes on, “Rebis was born as the result of the union of Sol and Luna.”
61Eliade, “Androgynes,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 1 (ed. Mircea Eliade; New York: Macmillan, 1987) 279.
62James Webb, The Occult Underground (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974/1990) 94.454 JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
modern esotericism, James Webb, who cites Besant’s “irreplaceable and fully authoritative biographer Arthur Nethercot.”63 Later theosophists such as Aleister Crowley, promoter of the occultist pagan Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as Charles Leadbeater, whom Blavatsky called her “bishop,” were noted homosexual pederasts.64 There is good reason to think that such activity was not the expression of personal weakness, but the consistent expression of pagan spirituality.65
In 1923 Feder Mühle, a businessman who became involved in Spiritualism, founded the Gottesbund Tanatra in Görlitz, Silesia—home of Jacob Böhme. Members wore the God’s Eye badge and believed that homosexuals “were vocationally mediums.”66 They also, with a certain logical consistency, held that heterosexual intercourse impaired the mediumistic talent. This small detail of Germanic occultic history is significant. Since leading contemporary homosexuals make the same claims,67 without any apparent dependence on the theories of Mühle, such parallel thinking would suggest an organic connection between homosexuality and shamanistic religious activity.68 We do see such an organic connection in ancient religions that persist today. The Siberian shamans, known as Chukchi, and the shamans of Central Asia engage in ecstatic rituals and dress as androgynes.69 Among the Ngadju Dyak, a pagan people-group lost in the dense bush of southern Borneo, the basir, “asexual priest-shamans . . . true hermaphrodites, dressing and behaving like women,” have a priestly function.70 This behavior also characterizes Amazonian shamans, Celtic priests [ancient and modern], and Indian hijras. The hijras, who go back into the mists of Hinduism, are a religious community of men who “dress and act like women and whose culture centers on the worship of Bahuchara Mata, one of the many versions of the Mother Goddess worshipped throughout India.”71 In another
The development both of religion and of the arts can be traced back in a continuous line to the hunting era. The group ritual of the primeval tribesmen were the origin not only of all religious ceremonial, but also of the drama and of poetry and music, while magic gave birth to the visual arts.""Awed by the mysteries of his own spirit no less than by those of nature, primitive man was likely to attribute to divine influence any abnormal emotional state, whether above or below the usual level. Medicine men customarily went into states of trance in which they were believed to be in communication with the gods,
and many tribes supposed lunatics and sexual deviants to be divinely possessed. (Parkes, Henry Bamford, On Gods and Men, p. 30).
And fitting the Cain Abel Story:
"In the evolution of primitive religion the adoption of rituals based on imitative magic seems normally to have preceded the elaboration of corresponding mythologies. But once the ritual had become established, it was likely to be interpreted by means of a tale about the gods, which then came to be regarded as the raison d'etre, the original magical purpose being gradually forgotten." (Parkes, p. 44)
Pastoral religion, moreover, remained relatively free from degrading rituals.
Worshipping chiefly divinities of the sky and the weather, and seeing them definitely in masculine forms, pastoral peoples did not usually deify the processes of sexual reproduction or regard human sacrifice as more than an extreme and unusual expedient; and their gods, being nomadic rather than fixed to particular localities, and not normally represented by means of images, could be universalized and spiritualized more easily than the peasant deities." (Parkes, p. 48).
63Ibid.
64Scott Lively and Kevin Abrahams, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (Keizer, OR: Founders Publishing Corporation, 1995) 3. On Crowley, see Eliade, “Androgynes” 280. E. Michael Jones, Dionysus Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution Out of the Spirit of Music Revolution (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994) 165, reports that Crowley, the son of Plymouth Brethren Christians, was bi-sexual and a serious user of cocaine. During a session with cocaine, says Jones, Crowley came to a mystical awareness of himself as the Beast of Revelation.
65Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 42–43, argues that homosexuality changed in the nineteenth century. “The sodomite was considered a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species . . . homosexuality appeared as . . . a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul.” Whatever the merits of this historical judgment, in this passage Foucault does clearly associate homosexuality with spirituality.
66James Webb, The Occult Establishment (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1976) 32.
67See below.
68It is true that gays are now tracing their spiritual connections through history, but I have not noticed this particular connection being made.
69Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972) 125. See also Nissinen, Homoeroticism 34.
70Eliade, Shamanism 352.
71See Serena Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India (Belmont, CA: 1990) xv; cited in Nissinen, Homoeroticism. According to Tal Brooke, Avatar of Night (Berkeley, CA: End Run Publishing, 1999) 331, Sai Baba, a leading Hindu guru and Goddess-worshipper (see pp. 193 and 200), with whom Brooke was closely associated before his Christian conversion, was androgynous, and practiced homosexuality with a number of disciples in his inner circle.ANDROGYNY: THE PAGAN SEXUAL IDEAL 455
form of Hindu spirituality, Tantric Yoga, androgyny is also the goal, where the two contrary principles of Shiva and Shakti are jointed. Eliade explains: “When Shakti, who sleeps in the shape of a serpent (kundalini), at the base of his body, is awoken by certain yogic techniques, she moves . . . by way of the chakras up to the top of the skull, where Shiva dwells, and unites with him.”72 The yogin, through powerful techniques of sexual-spiritual meditation, is thus transformed “into a kind of ‘androgyne.’ ”73 In Buddhism also the true human, the archetype, is androgynous.74 These yogic practices and mystical teachings concerning androgyny are doubtless as old as the Mesopotamian and Syrian examples discussed above.
In American Indian religious practice homosexual transvestite males— berdaches—have always functioned as shamans.75 Amongst the Navajo, the nadle, a feminized male, serves as reconciler of conflict. According to Navajo myth, the original hermaphodite went to the underworld to be associated with the dead and the devils of the lower world.76 Among the Zuńi, Awonawilona (“he-she”) is a powerful, positive mythological figure.77 Similar figures are to be found in African and Australian Aboriginal cultic practice. 78 ”Some African societies,” observes an ethnographer, “have developed intermediary genders of men-women and women-men who, like their Native American counterparts, are seen as sacred and as spiritually powerful individuals.”79 Other examples of spiritual/physical androgyny include the homosexual priests of the Yoruba religion in Cuba and “young gay witches in Manhattan.”80 In light of the above, one would surely have to agree with the argument of a recent book tracing the history of gay male spirituality: “gender-variant men have fulfilled a sacred role throughout the millennia.”81 Emily Culpepper, an ex-Southern Baptist, now a lesbian pagan witch teaching at the University of Redlands in Southern California, agrees. She
72Eliade, The Two and the One 118.
73Ibid.
74Lama Surya Das, Awakening the Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World (New York: Broadway, 1997) 140, cf. 384. Regarding homosexuality, Das notes that in the past, Buddhism “looked askance at . . . homosexual sex. Yet most contemporary Dharma teachers feel [such] behavior . . . within bounds and karmically workable” (209).
75Robert M. Baum, “The Traditional Religions of the Americas and Africa,” in Arlene Swidler, ed., Homosexuality and World Religions 1–46, which provides a systematic and well-documented discussion of this phenomenon plus a very useful specialized bibliography.
76Eliade, “Androgynes” 277.
77Ibid.
78See Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980) 285–289. See also Robert M. Baum, “The Traditional Religions of the Americas and Africa” 19–32. Though the data for Africa is less abundant, Baum looked at fifty different African societies.
79Baum, “Traditional Religions” 21.
80See Randy P. O’Connor, Blossom of Bone: Reclaiming the Connections Between Homoeroticism and the Sacred (San Francisco: Harper, 1994).
81Baum, “Traditional Religions” 15. See also Edward Carpenter, “On the Connection between Homosexuality and Divination, and the Importance of the Intermediate Sexes Generally in Early Civilizations,” Revue d’ethnographie et de sociologie 11/12 (1910) 310–316, and Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk (London, 1914); Walter Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1986).456 JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
sees gays and lesbians, in her words, as “shamans for a future age.”82 She reserves a spiritual role for homosexuals, for a shaman is “. . . a charged, potent, awe-inspiring, and even fear-inspiring person who takes true risks by crossing over into other worlds.”83 A fuller definition leaves little to the imagination: “The power and effectiveness of shamans—witches, sibyls, Druids—emerges from their ability to communicate with the non-human: extra-terrestrial and subterranean forces, and the spirit-world of the dead.”84 This, the reader will recall, is exactly the claim of the Mesopotamian assinnu/ kurgarru and the Syrian galli—that they had contact with the spirit realm of the Underworld and of the Dead.
Culpepper left the Church and repudiated Christianity. Others stay in and say essentially the same thing. In more familiar but strangely comparable terms, Virginia Mollenkott, calling herself “an evangelical lesbian feminist,” speaks for gays and lesbians when she says, “We are God’s Ambassadors.” 85 Indeed, Mollenkott claims she “was told” by her “guardian angel, a Spirit Guide, the Holy Spirit or Jesus [she is not sure]”: “A great shift is occurring in the world, and you are a part of that shift.”86 For Rosemary Radford Ruether, a leading “Christian” feminist theologian, “Androgyny is her model for a human species liberated from ‘dualistic’ gender into ‘psychic wholeness.’ ”87 Similarly, Judy Westerdorf, a United Methodist clergy woman, triumphantly declared to the delegates at the pagano-“Christian” feminist Re-Imagining Conference in Minneapolis (1993) that “the Church has always been blessed by gays and lesbians, . . . witches . . . [and] shamans.”88 No doubt without much awareness of these elitist theories and the deep, spiritual stakes involved, the media has shaped the sexual fantasy-world of America’s youth. The “gay” and mainstream presses are now documenting a disturbing trend. Young people are declaring themselves “homosexual” at
82Emily Culpepper, “The Spiritual, Political Journey of a Feminist Freethinker,” in After Patriarchy: Feminist Transformations of the World Religions (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991) 164.
83Ibid.
84Sjoo and Moor, The Great Cosmic Mother 131.
85Virginia Mollenkott, Sensuous Spirituality: Out From Fundamentalism (New York: Crossroads, 1992) 42, 166.
86Ibid. 19, 24. This “shift” includes her “shift” from biblical heterosexuality to pagan homosexuality, and from Biblical to monist spirituality, which now includes such techniques as meditation, on the New Age A Course in Miracles, and the use of Tarot Cards and I Ching (a form of Chinese divination—see ibid. 16). And again the bond between a particular spirituality with a particular sexuality is suggested. A sign of the times is the portrait of Jesus painted for the National Catholic Reporter. Artist Janet McKenzie used a black woman as a model, saying: “My goal was to be as inclusive as possible,” according to The Daily Record (London, December 11, 1999). This inclusiveness was not only sexual. Jesus is presented against a pale pink background [the homosexual motif is strongly suggested] whose details include a yin-yang circle representing perfect balance, and a feather symbolizing American Indian spirituality. Describing herself as a “devout atheist,” with an interest in many faiths, McKenzie has devoted much of her work to images of strong, spiritual women. The new, iconic Jesus for many Roman Catholics turns out to be an ambiguous male whose deep essence derives from a strong woman of pagan spirituality.
87Steichen, Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991) 302.
88“A Report,” Good News (January, 1994) 2. For a recent, scholarly sympathetic evaluation of modern witchcraft, see Helen A. Berger, A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States (South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1999).ANDROGYNY: THE PAGAN SEXUAL IDEAL 457
earlier and earlier ages. Others are embracing bi-sexuality, as an expression of personal freedom and autonomy. Observers note “a growing trend [in contemporary youth culture] . . . to refuse to define their sexuality. . . . Youth today want more representations of a ˘uid sexuality that rejects definitions of ‘gay’ or ‘straight.’ ”89 The popular press documents the success of what it calls the “gender blur.”90
Though promoted as an issue of civil rights, the homosexual/androgynous revival is not merely contemporary civics or chic theory. The close connection between pagan esoteric spirituality and androgynous sexuality, evident across time and space,91 demands that we not ignore the spiritual dimensions underlying the contemporary scene. In the light of the above evidence, it should not be surprising to note that the revival of pagan religion in our day is accompanied by a powerful reappearance of pagan sexuality. In other words, homosexuality may be less a modern question of biological destiny or civil rights than a necessary practical outworking of age-old pagan spirituality.92 It is becoming more and more manifest that a particular religious commitment is always accompanied by a particular sexual theory and practice. But this is not to suggest some scarlet, conspiratorial thread connecting the dots. The connection is logical, theological, and inevitable. A monistic view of existence will work itself out in all the domains of human life, and especially in the domain of sexuality.93 What, then, is the relationship?
IV. THE RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE OF ANDROGYNY
As we have noted, at the heart of pagan monism is a mystical, unitive experience, a state in which distinctions disappear and opposites are joined. Androgyny, on the sexual level, re˘ects and confirms such an experience. Not everyone engaging in such activity thinks about the ultimate spiritual
89Lambda Report (January-February, 1998) 5. See an article on Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook in The Washington Blade (February 13, 1998), where sexual ˘uidity is the subject.
90Deborah Blum, “The Gender Blur,” Utne Reader (September-October 1998) 45. 91In 1576 the European explorer Pedro de Magalhaes de Gandavo noted the presence of transgendered warriors among the Tupinanmba Indians (see Baum, “Traditional Religions” 14), and the Roman Catholic missionary, Father Marquette, gave a well-informed description of the Illinois berdache in 1673 (see Baum, p. 15).
92This can be seen in the apparently innocuous statement of a contemporary homosexual academic who affirms “the fact that human sex is not a strictly binary category”—see Martti Nissinen, Homoeroticism 12. From the fact of physical and sexual perversions, Nissinen actually argues for moral and spiritual relativism.
93C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (Bollingen Series XX; trans. R. F. C. Hull; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) 244–245, identifies this same phenomenon, though not directly associated with sexuality. He states: “Anyone familiar with the spirit of alchemy and the views of the Gnostics in [the writings of the church father] Hippolytus will be struck again and again by their inner affinity.” But he notes that the alchemists “could have known nothing of Hippolytus, as his Philosophumena, long believed lost, was discovered only in the middle of the nineteenth century in a monastery on Mount Athos.” It is interesting that in this same context, Jung states his indebtedness to the alchemists as those “who first put me on the track of a psychological interpretation” (ibid. 249).
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stakes.94 However, the link is explicitly established by influential pagan theorists in both the ancient and the modern world. Their explanations, though separated by vast distances and great periods of time, are strikingly similar and consistent, and thus independently testify to the coherent connection this paper seeks to clarify.
In the ancient gnostic texts such connections can be detected. The Church Father Hippolytus documents how and why the “spiritual” gnostics did not hesitate to imitate pagan spirituality and sexuality in one form or another. He explains the gnostic Naasene participation in the cult of the Goddess. “Because they claimed that everything is spiritual,” the Naasenes did not become Galli physically but rather spiritually: “they only perform the functions of those who are castrated” by abstaining from sexual intercourse. 95 So, concludes Hippolytus, the Naasene gnostics imitate the Galli, the castrated priests of Cybele. “For they urge most severely and carefully that one should abstain, as those men (the Galli) do, from intercourse with women; their behavior otherwise . . . is like that of the castrated.”96 The mythological story of a castration of Attis thus led the Naasenes to conclude that the image of emasculation was a symbol of salvation.97 Attis cut off his testicles in order “break with the baser and material world and gain access to immortal life, where there is no longer either male or female.”98 These “Christian” gnostics sought, through a deep form of spiritual androgyny, a close association with paganism’s understanding of salvation.
Of what does such “salvation” consist? The gnostic Gospel of Truth enunciates the theory: “It is within Unity that each one will attain himself; within knowledge he will purify himself from multiplicity into Unity. . . .”99 The Gospel of Thomas develops the practical consequences: “Simon Peter said to them: ‘Let Mary go away from us, for women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said: Lo, I shall lead her, so that I may make her a male, that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself a male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’ ”100
Though on the surface less radical, and thus promoted as a Gospel on a par with the four canonical Gospels,101 the Gospel of Thomas is similarly
94After a lecture on this theme, a homosexual thanked me for showing him [for the first time] where his sexual drive was taking him spiritually and religiously.
95Refutation of All Heresies 5:2, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971) 57.
96Ibid. Some modern, apparently innocuous, arguments for the ordination of women come perilously close to this form of gnostic reasoning, when it is argued, for instance, that the headship of the husband over the wife is not carried over into church life, so that in the church a wife could be the pastor of her husband. Comments C. P. Venema, “. . . does a married member of the church become a spiritual ‘eunuch’ when it comes to the life and fellowship of the church, the married relationship no longer relevant to relationships within the church?” in “Gathering Or Scrounging for Grounds?” The Outlook (March 1992) 15.
97Refutation of All Heresies 5:4. This clearly helps explain logion 114 of the Gospel of Thomas, which Hippolytus cites as one of the Naasene sources a few lines earlier (5:2).
98Hippolytus, 5:2.
99Gospel of Truth 25:10–16.
100Gospel of Thomas 1.
101Robert Funk, Roy Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
ONE ANDROGYNY: THE PAGAN SEXUAL IDEAL 459
driven by the androgynous pagan ideal. This Saying 114, being the last, doubtless represents the goal of the gospel, which is promised in the first—to “not experience death.”102 Here, apparently, is the road to salvation—the mystical attainment of an androgynous or sexless state. Saying 114 should be understood in the light of Saying 22: “And when you make the male and the female into a single one so that the male shall not be male and the female shall not be female . . . then you shall enter the kingdom.” Both these sayings suggest the “neutralization” of sexuality so that the ideal for gnostics is to become, in this life, spiritually and ritually androgynous.103 Thomas is not a macho attack on women.104 It is a rejection of creational sexuality, a radical refusal of sexual differentiation, as presented in the Genesis account.105
To become a true disciple, Mary must become a liberated gnostic, untrammeled by the sexual distinctions of the original creation. She must become autonomous, and move beyond the bondage of her sex. As a spiritual androgyne, she attains mystical union with the All. Having already noted the alchemical goal of a mystical/unitive hieros gamos, it is not difficult to follow the logic of a professor at a well-respected Catholic university106 who lends to the mystical pursuit of the alchemists a sexual twist. Professor Frederica Halligan perceives in the alchemists’ quest for “gold” a blueprint for the planet’s future.
Halligan notes that the second of the seven stages of alchemistical meditation, called solutio, involves both a transformation of sexual energy and the destruction of the individual ego [the self]. This is a powerful mystical experience of pure monistic spirituality. For this Roman Catholic scholar, monism seems to present no problem. But the process is far from over.
The seventh stage, conjunctio [“joining”], is a “new reality,” the final bringing together of all the opposites, producing “gold,” i.e. spiritual gold, “a tremendously deepened sense of the oneness of all. . . . Unitive consciousness is awareness of the essential oneness with the Divine, that is, mystic consciousness. . . . the unification of all the opposites within oneself.”107 Halligan’s final definition of the conjunctio is clear: “Beyond gender differences now, the mystics of both Eastern and Western traditions describe the bliss of abiding love.”108
102Gospel of Thomas 1.
103 B. Gaertner, The Theology of the Gospel According to Thomas (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961) 256. Bertil Gaertner was an early authority on this gospel, teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary for a number of years.
22 Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, "These nursing babies are like those who enter the (Father's) kingdom."
They said to him, "Then shall we enter the (Father's) kingdom as babies?"
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."
104Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979) 66.
105For a careful exegesis of Genesis 1–3, see Raymond C. Ortland, Jr., “Male-Female Equality and Male Headship: Gen 1:3,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (ed. J. Piper and W. Grudem; Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1991) 95–112.
106Fredrica R. Halligan, “Keeping Faith With the Future: Toward Final Conscious Unity,” in The Fires of Desire (New York: Crossroads, 1992) 171–194. Halligan is clinical psychologist and Assistant Director of the counseling Center at the Roman Catholic Fordham University.
107Ibid. 188–189. That Halligan’s interpretation is correct is shown by the comment of Eliade, The Two and The One 103: “It would be purposeless to insist, after the fundamental labors of C. J. Jung, on the importance of the androgyne in the opus alchemicum.”
108 Ibid. 192. Karen-Clair Voss, “Spiritual Alchemy” 160–161, also connects the notion of androgyny with alchemical spirituality. She says: “If we think of the Stone as the fruit of two elements
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Mircea Eliade, both a remarkable researcher of the phenomena of pagan spirituality as well as one of the architects of the new spirituality,109 explains the spiritual meaning of androgyny as “a symbolic restoration of Chaos, of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the Creation.”110 The androgynous being thus sums up the very goal of the mystical, monistic quest, whether ancient or modern: “in mystical love and at death one completely integrates the spirit world: all contraries are collapsed. The distinctions between the sexes are erased: the two merge into an androgynous whole. In short, at the center one knows oneself, is known, and knows the nature of reality.”111 Or again, according to Eliade, androgyny in many traditional religions functions as “an archaic and universal formula for the expression of wholeness, the co-existence of the contraries, or coincidentia oppositorum . . . symboliz[ing] . . . perfection . . . [and] ultimate being. . . .” 112
The androgyne is thus the physical symbol of the pagan spiritual goal, which is the merging of two seemingly distinct entities, the self and God, and a mystical return to the state of godhead prior to creation. The joining of the opposites is the dissolution of creational distinctions and thus the destruction of creation’s hold upon human identity. Such joining brings a “liberating” recognition that the real self is “uncreated.” The solution to our
extracted from out of the chaos of the beginning of the work, which subsequently underwent processes that resulted in their becoming whole again, this is certainly one explanation for the meaning of the ‘Child of the Work,’ as it appears under the image of Hermetic Androgyne and the rubric ‘Two-in- One’. . . . Ultimately the alchemist discovers that the Child is his or her true Self.” C. G. Jung had this same view of alchemy which he expressed in his Mysterium Coniunctionis 153– 154: “[T]he artificers . . . in the symbolical realm are Sol and Luna, in the human the adept and his soror mystica, and in the psychological realm the masculine consciousness and the feminine unconscious. . . . The two vessels are again Sol and Luna.” Voss, “Spiritual Alchemy” 174, sees a connection between this observation and the statement of Mircea Eliade in his study of tantric texts: “The Sun and the Moon must be made one . . . we are dealing with the coincidentia oppositorum achieved on every level of Life and Consciousness”—see Forge and Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 118.109See David Cave, Mircea Eliade’s Vision for a New Humanism (New York: Oxford, 1993) 3, who shows that the visionary impulse behind Eliade’s work was his “hope for a new humanism.” Eliade emphasized “mystical” experience and believed that religion was not a matter of knowledge but experience (8), and just as Goethe wished to go to India, so did Eliade, who spent 1928– 31 there and wrote his doctoral dissertation of yoga and Indian spirituality (9). According to Cave, Eliade left India with a “cultural mission . . . persuaded of the viability of archaic and Oriental spirituality for the Western world.”
110Mircea Eliade, “Androgynes,” The Encyclopedia of Religion 277. This understanding is reproduced on a popular level, in the contemporary vision of a new age of “Aquarian” spirituality, which includes the transformation of male/female distinctions into unitive androgyny. Shirley MacLaine’s “higher self ” is androgynous. MacLaine wonders aloud if “the point of life itself ” is to “balance both the masculine and feminine in ourselves. . . . Then we will have spiritualized the material and materialized the spiritual” to express ourselves “for what we truly are—androgynous, a perfect balance.” Barbara Marx Hubbard, a leading New Age mystic, assures her readers that in the coming “planetary awakening . . . you will be androgynous.” See Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Revelation: A Message of Hope for the New Millennium (Novato, CA: Nataraj, 1995) 165.
111Ibid. 154.
112Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (New York: Harper and Row, 1975) 174–175, and Patterns of Comparative Religion (New York: New American Library, 1974) 420–421.
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angst, according to a feminist author, is healing through the sacred marriage, the hieros gamos. This is the marriage of the ego and the self, which gives birth to “a divine child.” “A woman gives birth to herself as a divine androgynous being, autonomous, and in a state of perfection in the unity of the opposites. She is whole.”113
This sacred marriage expresses what occurs, in particular, on the moral plane. The pagan monist assumes guiltless responsibility for all his actions, whether “good” or “evil,” and thus, in an exercise of personal, autonomous power, joins the opposites of good and evil. The early American monist Ralph Waldo Emerson welcomed this spiritual option with enthusiasm. “ ‘If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to this or that.”114 The deliberate act of power which defiantly declares evil good and good evil ˘ies in the face of the Creator’s designs and in so doing jumps into the waiting arms of the Tempter. One may well wonder if this joining of the opposites is a possible implication of the Serpent’s word, “. . . knowing good and evil.”115
The psychoanalyst C. G. Jung proposed a similar interpretation. Under the in˘uence of Philemon, a familiar spirit, Jung wrote his famous “Seven Sermons to the Dead.”116 Using colorful imagery, Jung disavows Christianity and endorses pagan spirituality. Employing the pseudonym of Basilides, a famous second century gnostic heretic, Jung addresses the spirits of dead Crusaders who had failed to find salvation in “Jerusalem.” He succeeds in converting them to the gnostic god, Abraxas, who is “both good and evil, . . . a terrible hidden god that humans cannot perceive. Abraxas is behind the sun and night, . . . the creator and destroyer of the world, truth and evil, light and darkness, . . . the ‘hermaphrodite of the earliest beginning,’ . . . the operation of all the gods and devils, and is ‘the world, its becoming and
113Maureen Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness (Boston & London: Shambala, 1990) 160.
114Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance (1847), cited in Eugene Narrett, “ ‘Proud Ephemerals’: Signs of Self Made Men,” Culture Wars (December 1999) 4. Apparently Paul Tillich attempted to do this and failed. After a life of sexual infidelity, he declared to his wife Hannah at the beginning of his stay at the hospital at the onset of death: “My poor Hannachen, I was very base to you, forgive me.” Much earlier in his life a Japanese Zen master, sitting with him in earnest confrontation, described him as “not one of the enlightened yet.” He was not yet enlightened because he still made the distinction between “good” and “evil.” Said Hannah Tillich: “The Zen master had banned good and evil in his world, acquiring physical immobility and perfect quietude. He listened with the inner ear and would not permit demons to enter his five orifices. He was not tortured by nightmarish dreams. He had found the dissolution of his ‘koan.’ Paulus lived in fear. His nervous body was tense; his desires—many. His fingers would fiddle with a pebble from the beach, a silver coin, or a paper clip. He breathed unevenly and sighed heavily, an ever guiltridden Christian in distress.” See Hannah Tillich, From Time to Time (New York: Stein and Day, 1973) 24 and 223.
115Genesis 3:5—see E. Michael Jones, Degenerate Modern Modernity As Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993) 121, for the documentation of this principle working itself out in modern thought.
116Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (New York: Random House, 1997) 161.
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PASSING.'" 117 Jung ends his sermon with a call to look to the god within rather than to the Christian God of the Bible. Later, he would represent this experience as a series of concentric circles within a larger circle, and for the rest of his life he “pointed to the Indian mandala (circle) as the best symbolic representation of wholeness or completeness in an individual, or as the supreme God in which all opposites are contained.”118 In this regard, it is appropriate to recall the definition of the mystical goal believed to be in all religions, given by Yale professor, Louis Dupré, “a state in which all distinctions disappear.”119
On the sexual plane, the homosexual androgyne, according to Jung, arrms his power by willingly assuming his physical proclivities and thus joining what God has put asunder. Indeed, for Jung, spiritual androgyny symbolizes “the integration of the opposites or the state of the individuation of the autonomous individual.”120 Therefore homosexuals are—though some unconsciously or only partially—true pagan monists, who have succeeded in translating spiritual theory into physical reality.121
Jung himself suggested that homosexuality preserved an archetype of the androgynous original person.122 That is why homosexuals can propose themselves to society as “shamans.” In the monistic tradition, the same religious claim is made for homosexuality as is made for androgyny.123 Since both androgyny and homosexuality function religiously in traditional paganism, they are clearly related.124 The same emphasis is found in Karl Heinrichs (1825–1895), often considered the “grandfather” of the modern “gay rights” movement. Ulrichs rejected all psychological and behavioral explanations of homosexuality and adopted a psycho-spiritual one. He believed a homosexual was a man’s body inhabited by a woman’s soul (vice versa for a
117Ibid. Within the larger quote, taken from Noll, are shorter quotes he takes from Jung’s original sources.
118Ibid. 162.
119Louis Dupré, “Unio Mystica” 7.
120Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts 294.
121This is why the Christian attempt to “love the sinner and hate the sin” (as Augustine put it) is so often rebuffed. Pagan spirituality demands that one love one’s sin, for there is no such thing as “sin.” For personal integration/individuation, one must embrace one’s antinomies and contradictions in a powerful mystical experience of oneness.
122See Mollenkott, Sensuous Spirituality 165, who is not sure whether Jung’s educated guess is accurate, but she is “certain that healthy les-bi-gay people have a lot to teach society about sex roles. . . . ” 123Judy Grahn, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (Boston: Beacon, 1984) 44, cited in Culpepper, “The Spiritual, Political Journey of a Feminist Freethinker,” in After Patriarchy (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991) 158. Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance (San Francisco: Harper, 1988) 232, gives special spiritual functions to homosexuals. The image of an androgynous/feminized sixteen year-old adolescent Christ looks a lot like a Greek kouros. See also Sjoo and Moor, The Cosmic Mother 67–68. These feminist writers argue that the further back one goes the Great Mother is gynandrous—so the present-day lesbian is the closest to ancient women, often in homosexual relationships.
124The Wiccan scholars, Sjoo and Moor, The Cosmic Mother 67, affirm the spirituality of lesbianism: “the further back one goes the Great Mother is gynandrous—so the present day lesbian is the closest to ancient women.” See also Lively and Abrams, The Pink Swastika 10.
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lesbian). Notice the “spiritual” terminology. He called homosexuality a “third sex,” that is, a true expression of androgyny.
The more theoretical explanation of the phenomenon finds popular expression in our contemporary culture. Recently a gay leader at a Pagan Spirit Gathering in 1985 made the spiritual claim: “We feel there is a power in our sexuality . . . [a] queer energy that most cultures consider magical. It is practically a requirement for certain kinds of medicine and magic.” 125 Another gay pagan confirms the spiritual dynamic: “It is simply easier to blend with a nature spirit, or the spirit of a plant or an animal, if you are not concerned with a gender-specific role.”126 One is clearly not concerned with any of the other creational distinctions either. The separation between humans, animals, and plants has been eliminated and at that point full-blown, monistic union ensues. “Blending” is another way of speaking of spiritual union with the All.
Eliade, in explaining the religious function of the asexual priest-shaman— true hermaphrodites, who dress and behave like women—notes that is precisely because “they combine the two cosmological planes—earth and sky— and also from the fact that they combine in their own person the feminine element (earth) and the masculine element (sky). We here have ritual androgyny, a well-known archaic formula for the . . . coincidentia oppositorum.”127 This interpretation is confirmed via different terminology and conceptuality in the massive work on the Goddess by the Wiccan scholars, Monica Sjoo and Barbara Moor:
