I think the ritual/mythological cycle and deity characteristics most commonly presented in literature about Wicca are both hetero-normative.  The main two deities are the God and the Goddess, both gender-binary descriptions who enact an incestuous mating, death and birth cycle with each other.  The two deities are modelled somewhat on a nuclear family, but in the cycle, the father impregnates his regenerated mother and then dies and is reborn to the mother, after which the mother then immediate regenerates as a young virgin girl.  I’m not making value judgements about the morality of the cycle itself, though it sounds quite harsh when stated so plainly (as do many myths if condensed tersely), but will instead try to draw attention to what’s missing for me as someone interested in sharing his spiritual life in a group context.

I have failed to find much queer-friendly symbolism in Wicca, despite some enthusiastic searching, but don’t think it’s so much a deliberate exclusion as a focus on self-similarity in the creators of the religion.  Gardner was presumably straight and sexually interested in women, and created a God who had those characteristics alongside a Goddess who served very well as the all encompassing recipient of that love.  Sexual diversity was not an interest of his, and he would probably have been quite hostile to its inclusion, given some of the things he wrote, and some of the things written about him by people who knew him well.  There are credible accounts by people around at the time that gay people were not welcome in Wicca during its early years.

Things have changed when it comes to welcoming gay, lesbian and bisexual people, in some groups.  I have deliberately excluded trans people and those who are genderqueer, for reasons that will become apparent below.  GLB people are now welcome, but the roles, deities and mythical cycle have not changed, and queer people in Wicca (along with some of their straight colleagues) can find the model restrictive and exclusive of the diversity reflected in the world around them.  How covens deal with this depends on the coven, but it’s not unusual for gay and bisexual men to be asked to embody a role consistent with the deity and ritual/mythological cycle, essentially meaning that they are expected to take part in ritual drama in which they portray the straight god lusting after and winning the straight female Goddess.  Lesbian and bisexual women are expected to embody the Goddess in this cycle.  This is neither empowering nor diverse, and I personally take issue with it on the grounds that it’s actually quite disempowering for GLB folk seeking a safe, affirming place for spiritual sharing.

In my opinion, sharing spirituality is about bringing your own spiritual life to the table, each person bringing a flavour that makes a dish that all can savour and enjoy.  If I am supposed to put mine aside, and pretend to enjoy the dish because that’s how we always used to cook it before you were welcome at the table, then there really is a problem.  It’s not a sharing, but rather force-feeding of something that does not relate to me or come from me.  It’s not sustaining for my spiritual life, and denying myself is not going to lead to greater spiritual fulfilment or happiness.  It’s not that the dish is vile – it’s that the sharing isn’t one unless I can bring myself to it, and not the ‘myself’ that is made up of the assumptions of others, but rather the ‘myself’ that actually exists as itself.

That the gods are described as the gods of nature makes it even worse, because we are ostensibly portraying nature, and I don’t have a place in it.  This is unhelpful and inaccurate, and unworthy of a religion that ostensibly venerates nature.  I am certain that a little bit of thought can diversify this, but not without pretty significant changes in the structure itself, given the binary nature of the primary deities.  Athropomorphisation is part of the issue, but even without this, simplifying and distilling ‘nature’ to a not particularly diverse set of behaviours is as problematic in a Pagan context as it is in other religions.

Druidry and Wicca essentially draw from the same mythological cycle, primarily due to the merging of their respective calendars several decades ago, and the ritual cycle is extremely similar, though perhaps less obviously a gender binary of two.  In Druidry there are more deities, but Father Sky and Mother Earth are very similar to the Wiccan ones in many respects, and are perhaps the most important deities, particularly given the Druidical focus on the solstices and equinoxes.  There does seem to be conflation into God and Goddess in some groups and people, but this varies depending on the cosmological model applied by people/groups.  Monists will conflate more often than polytheists or pantheists, so cosmology is an important factor here.

So I think perhaps my answer is that they are both friendly to gays, but I’m not sure that either is particularly queer, which is a significant distinction.  I have yet to encounter a particularly queer myth/ritual enactment that was queer in either religion, and I have yet to encounter a role in a ritual or myth for a queer person that was reflective of that queer status.  Any role not reflective of a strongly hetero-normative model would most likely be a supporting role, in support of this model and ritual/mythological cycle, which is not the same as creating a central myth/ritual concept that includes queer identities.

For trans and genderqueer people, this situation is even more pronounced, as all of the models are heavily gendered, and Wicca’s practice of conducting rituals naked is potentially problematic, as many trans folk find it very difficult to be naked around other people whilst transitioning.  The reasons for this are pretty obvious, but probably not to be underestimated in their ability to turn trans people away from Wicca in a group context.  In Druidry this would perhaps be easier, as I believe that naked rites are much less common, and suspect that declining to participate at a rare occasion involving ritual nudity would be rather easier.

I have more experience of Wicca than Druidry, so my answers to this question are slanted towards Wicca, primarily because I feel like I can answer the questions and address the issues more accurately.  I would certainly be interested in the views of other queer people (particularly trans folk, who are probably under-represented in their views), as well as the views of people heavily involved in Druidry, who can comment on a broader experience base than mine, and hope this is found to be interesting and worthy of discussion by members of all of these communities.  That the question came from a seeker is not unimportant, so I would ask that anyone commenting please do so with sensitivity, as people trying to make important decisions about the direction of their spiritual lives may well read comments to this article.

“…there is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground…”
Bulwer-Lytton, 1871, The Coming Race

The “occult” novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) had a tremendous impact on nineteenth century occult thought. Christopher Knowles & Joseph Michael Linsner (2007) call him, the “Stephen King of his era” whilst Joceyln Godwin (1994) considers his novel Zanoni to be the most important literary influence on Victorian esotericism. It is from Zanoni for example, that occultists borrowed the concept of “the Dweller on the Threshold” – the ordeal of facing the embodiment of fear before the adept can gain admittance to higher spheres.

The theosophist C. Nelson Stewart (Bulwer Lytton as Occultist, 1927) says that:

“If one were asked to name the book which more than any other provided a matrix for the building-up of modern theosophical philosophy in the English language, Zanoni seems the inevitable choice. Indeed, not only does a glance through the earlier literature published by the Theosophical Society never fail to reveal it as an oft-quoted book, but the advertisement pages show it being sold and translated as a kind of text-book.”

Various esoteric groups of the period claimed Bulwer-Lytton as an adept, and some contemporary authors (for example, Greg Bishop, in Wake Up Down There!: The Excluded Middle Anthology ) have asserted that Bulwer-Lytton was both a theosophist and a member of the Golden Dawn. According to Christopher McIntosh (1998) Bulwer-Lytton was proposed and voted an Honorary Grand Patron of the Soc. Ros (Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia) in 1871, but this occurred without his knowledge. When he found out about this preferment, Bulwer-Lytton wrote to John Yarker expressing his annoyance, and Yarker sent an apologetic reply. “As far as is known Lytton never attended a meeting of the Soc. Ros.” (see also Godwin, 1994, p218 for further discussion). Westcott, in his 1916 pamphlet The Rosicrucians, Past and Present, at Home and Abroad states that:

“The late Lord Lytton, the author of “Zanoni” and “The Strange Story” who was in 1871 Grand Patron of our Society, took very great interest in this form of Philosophy, although he never reached the highest degree of knowledge: for public reasons he once made a disavowal of his membership of the Rosicrucians, but he had been admitted as a Frater of the German Rosicrucian College at Frankfurt on the main: that College was closed after 1850.”

For this post, I’m going to focus on Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel The Coming Race in order to highlight the emerging occult discourse which united the scientific advances in thermodynamics, social evolution and occult adeptship with the perfection of the will.

The Coming Race
The Coming Race (available online) explores themes which resonate closely with thermodynamics. The narrator, an independently wealthy American traveler, accidentally finds his way into a subterranean world populated by a race of beings who call themselves the “Vril-ya.” The “Vril-ya” have established a technological utopia, powered by “Vril” – an “all-permeating fluid” which is mastered through the training of the will, and which confers upon them tremendous powers of healing and destruction alike. The Vril-ya are ruled by a benevolent dictator, and their philosophy of society is presented as “no happiness without order, no order without authority, no authority without unity.” The Vril-ya have learned to master the passions that motivate crime or greed, and have a “natural instinct” for obedience. Their women are taller than the men, yet are “the most amiable, conciliatory, and submissive wives.” They are caucasian in appearance, with blue eyes and “hair of a deep golden auburn”.

The Coming Race makes many references to contemporary scientists and theories such as the luminiferous ether, and the heated debate over Darwin’s theories. Faraday is quoted in chapter 7:

“I have long held an opinion,” says that illustrious experimentalist, “almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action.”

Vril and the Will
The narrator of The Coming Race, in describing vril mentions magnetism, galvanism, mesmerism, electro-biology and “odic force” as “the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest” – that these forms have “one common origin” and are convertible into one another and mutually dependent. Vril, directed through a vril-staff, can be used to heal, power machines, or for destructive purposes. Bulwer-Lytton explained Vril to his friend John Forster: “I did not mean Vril for mesmerism, but for electricity, developed into uses as yet only dimly guessed, which I hold to be a mere branch current of the one great fluid pervading all nature.”

Bulwer-Lytton’s concept of Vril develops out of a recurrent theme in his earlier works; the notion of the all-prevasive, connecting power of electricity is explored in Zanoni where the eastern sage Mejnour “professed to find a link between all intellectual beings in the existence of a certain all-pervading and invisible fluid resembling electricity, yet distinct from the known operations of that mysterious agency.” Similarly, in A Strange Story (1862) the physician Allen Fenwick performs experiments on inducing electrical currents via the exercise of will.

In a previous post in this series (Polarity and the spirited body – II) I examined some of the links between the capacity for mediumship and the notion of “passivity” (in particular, feminine passivity). In Isis Unveiled Madame Blavaksty makes a crucial distinction between occultism and spiritualism in that: “Mediumship is the opposite of adeptship; the medium is the passive instrument of foreign influences, the adept actively controls himself and all inferior potencies” and “One common vital principle pervades all things, and this is controllable by the perfected human will. The adept can stimulate the movements of the natural forces in plants and animals in a preternatural degree. Such experiments are not obstructions of nature, but quickenings; the conditions of intenser vital action are given. The adept can control the sensations and alter the conditions of the physical and astral bodies of other persons not adepts; he can also govern and employ, as he chooses, the spirits of the elements. He cannot control the immortal spirit of any human being, living or dead, for all such spirits are alike sparks of the Divine Essence, and not subject to any foreign domination.” (my italics) For Blavatsky then, the crucial distinction between spiritualism and “true occultism” is that Occultism is based on the “power” of a trained and perfected human will, awakened, strengthened, the “absolute ruler within his body” as opposed to the “passivity” of spirit mediumship. Again, this theme of developing the will in order to restrain the senses and “purify desires” is one than runs throughout Zanoni. In The Coming Race it is the use of the will which enables the advanced magical technology of the Vril-ya – not only does it have curative and destructive properties and powers all aspects of the Vril-ya’s industrial civilisation, it also enables the transmission of thoughts between individuals, and the rapid ascquisition of knowledge.

As Alex Owen (2004) says, the occultism of the late nineteenth century was “characterised by the will to both know and control the natural world” and that “total self-mastery and an indomitable will are the foremost prerequisities for magical Adeptship” (p6). She notes the relationship between the notion of self-mastery and the “bourgeois individualism” associated with the nineteenth century and points out that in this period, “occultism emerged at a time of growing uneasiness over what many perceived as the loss of personal integrity and authority in the face of an homogenizing mass society.” I would say that the occult concern with the will reflected wider cultural tropes concerning will-power, self-discipline, and correct behaviour. The Theosophical Society (and other esoteric movements in the nineteenth century) emerged during a period of social upheaval which saw the rise of various “social purity” movements (and there was a good deal of cross-over in membership of, for example, the Theosophical Society and various social purity campaigns in both the UK and USA). These movements stressed the importance of self-governance and moral regulation, often phrased in terms of developing “good character” which entailed practices of self-restraint and conformance to public virtues. “Character” was the visible, outward marker of inner, moral qualities, and the exercise of will-power in achieving self-control was central to this project. Hence social progress was rooted, ultimately, in the development of moral character. The idealisation of these virtues can be seen in theosophical accounts of the conditions for an aspiring occult “chela” – which stress the absolute necessity for “mental and physical purity” as well as courage, and a “calm indifference” to the vagaries of the world. Adepts were similarly idealised as being entirely selfless, and incapable, due to their evolved nature, of any kind of unchaste or immoral action (a belief which was severely strained through the successive scandals erupting around Charles Leadbeater from 1912 onwards). I think its clear from Blavatsky’s writing that for her, at least, occultism and morality were inextricably intertwined (see Tantra’s Metahistory III: The Left-hand Path – II for further discussion of Blavatsky’s view of Occultism & morality). An editorial in Lucifer (1889) reporting on the activities of one Hiram E. Butler (whose work had been favourably reviewed the year before) and his Boston-based “Esoteric Society” makes the following assertions: “The practice of mesmerism has always been discountenanced by the Theosophists, yet the literature on the subject has been utilized by Butler and his confederates, who have been teaching a bastard sort of mesmerism to their dupes, calling it ‘spiritual development’. The mesmeric force is simply sex-magnetism. In this simple statement is the secret of spiritualistic ‘mediumship’ as well as ‘mesmerism’ and ‘black magic’. It is also the secret of the invariable fall into vice and sexual degradation of fools who dabble in such things, whether they call it ‘mediumship,’ ‘mesmerism,’ ‘mental healing.’ or what not. … The whole thing is very, very vile, and the less people have to do with those subjects in that way the better for them. True occultism has nothing to do with the filfthy subject. … The ‘Esotericism’ of these specimens of Boston culture is identical with the voodooism of the negroes. It is called tantrika in India and is filfthy in the extreme.”

It might seem that I am straying somewhat from the focus of this series – the representations of gender polarity in relation to various “forces” and their wider cultural contexts – but I think that examining the emerging emphasis on the will in nineteenth-century occultism, together with notions of individual/social progress and evolution forms an important “bridge” to later occult theories of the body as an ecology of manageable forces – subject to laws and capable of being directed via correct “training” and discipline. Although initially, such “mastery of forces” is seen as a facility only available to occult adepts, the idea that one can manage and control the body’s energies, like other “occult powers” (such as astral projection) are subject to increasing democratisation throughout the twentieth century.

The Coming Race – with its themes of utopianism, racial superiority, enlightened vegetarianism and technological prowess was an alluring vision of the future, and ran to five editions in the first year of its publication. Like Zanoni, it too was highly influential on nineteenth century occultism – and in particular on Madame Blavatsky and other prominent Theosophists. Blavatsky writes: “The name vril may be fiction [but] the force itself is doubted as little in India as the existence itself of their Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret works.” (quoted from Barkun, 2003) Similarly, in Isis Unveiled she names Vril as but one name amongst “an infinite confusion of names to express one and the same thing” – equating Vril to different forms of “sacred fire” as well as “the Akasa of the Hindu adepts; the Astral light of Eliphas Levi; the nerve-aura and the fluid of the magnetists; the od of Reichenbach …. galvanism; and finally electricity” (1,125, 128-129). She also asserts (in The Secret Doctrine that Bulwer-Lytton derived the idea of Vril from ancient Indian writings dealing with “those terrible engines of destruction known to the Mahabharatan Aryans.” SB Liljegren’s monograph (1955) shows how much of a debt Madame Blavatsky’s writing owes to Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, particularly The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Zanoni.

Unsurprisingly, Vril is a popular topic circulating throughout theosophical writing from the late nineteenth century onwards, particularly when authors wished to make a link between occult forces and scientific discoveries – one example being that Bulwer-Lytton’s concept of Vril is a “foretelling” of the discovery of radium, or of atomic energy. As a trope, it allows the linkage between ancient “occult secrets” and contemporary scientific discovery, with the promise that in the future, humanity will have evolved enough (both morally and spiritually) to understand and utilise such forces wisely. Theosophists tended to be optimistic (no less than contemporary occultists) that orthodox science was on the brink of validating their beliefs and theories. The concept of Vril itself (guaranteed one kind of immortality by John L. Johnston’s “liquid life” beef extract – Bovril from 1886) was frequently claimed by occultists to have originated in “ancient writings” (a claim started by Madame Blavatsky) and often equated with akasa (often translated as a variant of “astral force”) particularly because the manipulation of this “force” was restricted to adepts. For example, W.J Colville, in Studies in Theosophy: Historical and Practical says:

“This subtle, all-pervading force is amenable to the control of a high order of intelligence only, and while universally present in nature, cannot be manipulated and utilized except by persons in whom the lower principle (homo) is subservient to the higher principle (vir.)”

Imagining utopia?
The idea of an advanced race preparing to replace humanity – the Vril-ya (descended not from apes, but from frogs) – also neatly dovetailed into theosophical theories of race and racial progression – which also reflected wider cultural concerns such as the enthusiasm for eugenics, education and moral improvement. Theosophist theories of racial development and progress were complex, and some Theosophists, such as Susan E Gay (see this post for related discussion) evisaged a future race that would reproduce via parthenogenesis. In The Coming Race, the narrator explains that the letter V “nearly always denotes excellence or power” and that “vril” equates to civilisation and the Vril-ya, “the civilised nations” as vril is the basis of their society and power (it has also been suggested that “vril” is a contraction of ‘virility’). This language was related to Indo-Germanic or Aryan racial theories (Bulwer-Lytton dedicated The Coming Race to Max Muller). Some scholars have suggested that Blavatsky saw in the Vril-ya a confirmation of her notion of “ascended masters”.

Anne Besant made a great deal of use of the theme The Coming Race in her writings. In one lecture (later published in 1917) entitled “The Coming Race” she makes an exhaustive analysis of racial types and features – including the notion that different races have different nervous systems: “If a Chinaman or a Japanese is wounded in battle, he has much more chance of recovery than one of the Aryan Race. The Red Indian, again, of America, who is also a fourth Race Man, will bear a wound that would kill any of you by shock, not by bleeding but by nervous shock, and he will recover from a wound which would kill a fifth Race man.” (see previous post). She proposes that the “Coming Race” will be typified by compassion, brotherhood and wisdom, and is particularly emerging in America, Australia, and New Zealand. Signs of “The Coming Race” include the birth of children with a “nervous system so delicately poised that it is always in danger of jar and injury.” She laments the conditions of cities such as London, but rather than wanting to “abolish” them says that “For, mind, that which is destructive to a delicate nervous system is the necessary stimulus for the evolution of a nervous system of lower and coarser type.” For those of a finer nervous organisation – and their children – she says the “best policy is to leave London for the country, and surround themselves and the children of the Coming Race with sweeter and better environments.” There is much advice in this essay how to prepare oneself for the advent of “the Coming Race” – by avoiding meat, alcohol, practising meditation and cultivating selflessness – ” the training of the life into expressions along higher lines.”

Sources
Michael Barkun A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (University of California Press, 2003)
Annie Besant, The Coming Race (Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, 1917)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, David Seed (editor) The Coming Race (Wesleyan University Press, 2005)
Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Univ. Michigan Press, 2001)
Jox Dixon Divine feminine: theosophy and feminism in England (John Hopkins University Press, 2003)
Joceyln Godwin The Theosophical Enlightenment (SUNY, 1994)
Christopher Knowles, Joseph Michael Linsner Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heros (Weiser Red Wheel, 2007)
SB Liljegren, Bulwer-Lytton’s Novels and Isis Unveiled (Harvard University Press, 1955)
Christopher McIntosh, The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology and Rituals of an Esoteric Order (Samuel Weiser, 1998)
Leslie George Mitchell Bulwer Lytton: the rise and fall of a Victorian man of letters (Hambledon Continuum, 2003)
Alex Owen The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Betsy van Schlun. Science and the Imagination: Mesmerism, Media and the Mind in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature (Galda+Wilch Verlag, 2007)

Online sources
Wikipedia entry Vril (accessed 11/05/2011)
Sir Edward G. D. Bulwer-Lytton: A Brief Biography
Image of Bulwer-Lytton from www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/mclenan/41.html (scanned by Philip V Allingham)

“On my visit this Morning to Tynah and his Wife, I found with her a person, who altho I was certain was a Man, had great marks of effeminacy about him and created in me certain notions which I wished to find out if there were any foundations for. On asking Iddeah who he was, she without any hesitation told me he was a friend of hers, and a class of people common in Otaheite called Mahoo. That the Men had frequent connections with him and that he lived, observed the same ceremonies, and eat as the Women did. The Effeminacy of this persons speech induced me to think that he had suffered castration, and that other unnatural and shocking things were done by him, and particularly as I had myself some Idea that it was common in this sea. I was however mistaken in all my conjectures except that things equally disgusting were committed.”
William Bligh, The Log of the Bounty, 1789

At the end of the opening post in this series, I said I’d be taking a look at some Eighteenth Century accounts of shamanism and gender-variance. Before doing so however, I want to examine some broader transformations in the period which will, I hope, serve to place these accounts in context – specifically, discourses relating to sex, gender, and human varieties (i.e. race). These transformations were inextricably linked to encounters with the peoples of the New World, and these encounters (recorded or “imagined”) played a formative role in the establishment of European boundaries of normative sex and gender. As Mark Johnson (2009) points out: “Central to the changing terms and shifting ground of homosexual transgression in the West has been the figure of the gender-variant other, a recurrent and repeated leitmotiv of ethnological and sexological imaginings since the Enlightenment.”

For this post, I’m going to briefly focus on the relationship between climate and temperament – both in the New World and the Mediterranean which came to the fore in the eighteenth century.

In the first post in this series, I noted the linkage made between climate and effeminacy. Roxanne Wheeler, in her book The Complexion of Race explains the dominant conception of human variety as being rooted in the biblical account of creation – a theory of shared human origins now referred to as monogenesis – which led to assumptions that all peoples were originally born with white skins, and that variations were due to climate and lifestyle – and that the scientific term used to designate different groups of people was variety rather than race. She argues that religion and clothing were significant markers of similarity and difference, and that: “Climate and humoral theory, in one form or another, provided the most important rubric for thinking about human differences in the eighteenth century, in regard to both complexion and civil society”. Climactic theories of human variations became much more influential in the eighteenth century, with treatises such as Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748) and Samuel Smith’s Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787). Montesquieu asserted that peoples in hot climates were prone to lively and excitable passions, which led to a state of constant arousal and immoral behaviour. This, together with physical weakness and lassitude, entailed that the people were lazy and easily enslaved due to a lack of “strength of spirit”. Smith opines that all races came from a single creation, and that all subsequent racial difference is a result of climate. Savages – all of whom are, unless “urged by some violent passion” always indolent. Moreover, idleness is the cause of savagery, and a people can degenerate, into a darker race, if they live in a hot climate.

The inherent idleness of savage peoples was a recurrent theme throughout the period:

“They are, without doubt, both in Body and Mind, the laziest People under the Sun. A monstrous Indisposition to Thought and Action runs through all the Nations of ‘em: And their whole earthly Happiness seems to lie in Indolence and Supinity.”
Peter Kolb, Present State of the Cape of Good-Hope (1731)

Sarah Jordan, in The Anxieties of Idleness points out that the British saw industriousness as a virtue – and rationalised their entitlement to empire on the basis that they possessed the industriousness to make proper use of the land. African idleness became a justification for slavery. Similar views were made in regard to India. Thomas Salmon’s New Geographical and Historical Grammar (1772) says that “the warmth of these Eastern climates has doubtless ever contributed to the indolence and effeminacy of its inhabitants; and it may be doubted whether they ever had the industry and active spirits of the inhabitants of Europe, who found the necessity of labour for their support, which the Asiatics had less occasion for, through the luxuriancy of their soil.”

Similarly, Alexander Dow’s Dissertation Concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan (1770) associates Indian hygiene and avoidance of alcohol as signs of idleness. “Habit makes the warm bath a luxury of a bewitching kind.” and “The prohibition of wine is also favourable to despotism. It prevents that free communication of sentiment which awakens mankind from a torpid indifference to their natural rights.”

The idea that climate could lead to degeneration and indolence for the colonisers as well as the colonised became a source of anxiety, and there were concerns that the British in India, for example, would succumb to the effeminising influences of the country, which intensified in the nineteenth century. Climactic theories persisted well into the nineteenth century – for example, in Richard Burton’s infamous concept of the Sodatic Zone which I will examine in more depth in due course.

Italian Vices
The influence of climate was not exclusively reserved for explaining the oddities of the New World. As I noted in my last post on Pan, the British were both attracted and repulsed by the erotic possibilities of Italy.

Paula Findlen’s engaging account (2009) of An Historical and Physical Dissertation on the Case of Catherine Vizzani, edited and published by John Cleland in 1751 provides some useful clues. This book, as Findlen explains, claimed to describe “The Adventures of a young Woman, born at Rome, who for eight years passed in the Habit of a Man, was killed for an Amour with a young Lady; and being found, on Dissection, a true Virgin, narrowly escaped being treated as a Saint. With some Curious and Anatomical Remarks on the Nature and Existence of the Hymen.” Despite the lurid possibilities of a tale of sex between women, cross-dressing and the pecularities of the Italians, the book was not apparently, a success. At the end of the volume, Cleland expresses the climatic view of Italy: “In a warm country like theirs, where Impurities of all Sorts are but too frequent, it may well happen that such strange Accidents may, from Time to Time, arise as highly to excite both their Wonder and their Attention.” The climatic values: laxity of morals, indolence, and religious transgressions were also applied to Italy (and France, to a lesser extent), and the popularity of the Grand Tour led to increased anxieties about about the effects on British moral values.

The anonymous author of Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England (1729) proferred the view that Italy was the “mother and nurse of sodomy” and linked the growth of sodomy to the growing popularity in England of Italian opera. Similar anxieties were expressed concerning the popularity of masquerade balls (for a brief discussion, see this article I wrote for The Bent Pentacle).

In the next post I’ll look at eighteenth century notions of sex and gender.

Sources
Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Roworth and Catherine M. Sama Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour (Stanford University Press, 2009)
Mark Johnson Transgression and the Making of ‘Western’ Sexual Sciences in Donnan, Magowan (eds) Transgressive sex: subversion and control in erotic encounters (Berghahn Books, 2009)
Sarah Jordan, The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth Century British Literature and Culture (Bucknell University Press, 2004)
Thomas Laqueur Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1992)
Robert P. Maccubbin (ed) ‘Tis nature’s fault: unauthorized sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
G.S. Rousseau Perilous enlightenment: pre- and post-modern discourses : sexual, historical (Manchester University Press, 1991)
Rousseau, Porter (eds) Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester University Press, 1987)
Lee Wallace, Sexual encounters: Pacific texts, modern sexualities (Cornell University, 2003)
Roxanne Wheeler The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000)

“Star and nerve-tissue are parts of the system-stellar and nervous forces are correlated. Nay more; sensation awakens thought and kindles emotion, so that this wondrous dynamic chain binds into living unity the realms of matter and mind through measureless amplitudes of space and time.”
Edward Youmans, 1869, The Correlation and Conservation of Force

This post will examine the arrival of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century and consider its wider cultural impact – in particular how it was used to reinforce gender regimes. Scientific pronouncements in the nineteenth century were tremendously influential, not only due to the link between science and technological advancement and achievements, but also due to the belief that the universe was inherently lawful. Faced with changes in religious belief and social unrest both at home and abroad, many diverse groups in Victorian culture had a vested interest in articulating a universal set of laws applicable to any facet of society, and led to an increased enthusiasm for classification, codification and the quantifiable measurement of various “social forces” and ailments. The nineteenth century drive to classify and regulate bodies, be they individual or social – is apparent in a diverse range of disciplinary practices, from mental health, the regulation of labour, the various “social hygiene” movements and the emergence of sexology, to the classificationary regimes applied to the management of colonial subjects such as fingerprinting, eugenic interventions, or the classification of entire Indian tribes as “hereditary criminals”.

(NB: I have also argued in the ordering-machine series that this impetus to order and categorise the world – to produce a total knowledge system – also underwrote much of nineteenth century occult theory.)

The birth of energy physics
Nineteenth-century physics saw several important developments which would have far-reaching consequences. During the early decades of the century, several breakthroughs occurred which moved physics towards a grand, unified theory. In 1806 Sir Humphrey Davy announced that electrical force was responsible for the molecular structure of matter. Advances such as Joseph Fourier’s mathematical theory of heat, the wave theory of light (which proposed that light was propograted by the vibrations of ether); Faraday’s experiments in the early 1830s established the relationships between magnetism and electricity all contributed towards the unification and convertability of “forces”. In 1824, Sadi Carnot provided an analysis of the circulation of heat between hot and cold bodies in terms of the operation of steam engines – allowing the emergence of a unified approach to heat, electricity, and magnetism:

“The concept of energy provided the science of physics with a new and unifying framework and brought the phenomena of physics within the mechanical view of nature, embracing heat, light, and electricity, together with mechanics, in a single conceptual structure”.
(Harman, 1982)

The term “thermodynamics” was coined by Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in 1854. In 1865, Rudolph Clausius stated the two laws as:

(1) “The energy of the universe is constant. The first law implies that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. In a closed system, though energy may change forms, the total energy is always conserved.”

and

(2) “The entropy of the universe tends towards a maximum. “Entropy” is the term given to the measure of disorder in a system. The second law thus implies that in a closed system, energy always changes to increasingly less orderly, less usable forms.”

The two laws of thermodynamics had an extraordinary impact on nineteenth century culture, giving rise to, as Anson Rabinach points out, “a new vision of social modernity”. Its universal principles were widely applied to the rethinking of work in terms of labour power, to economics, medicine, psychology, etc. Freud took the energetic model into his expositions of sexuality; Marx too was heavily influenced by the idea of labour power as a quantifiable force. The universal power of energy appealed to materialists, romantics, and those seeking the scientific validation of scripture alike.

the Human Motor
“The animal body therefore does not differ from the steam engine as regards the manner in which it obtains heat and force”
von Helmholtz, (quoted in Rabinbach, p61)

As nineteenth century physics advanced, it generated new metaphors for the body, so that the view of the previous century of the body as l’homme machine – in which the body was essentially mechanistic and engineered, was replaced by that of the “Human Motor” – an engine regulated by internal principles (including internal, self-motivation), with its own internal fuel reservoir, and converting that fuel into heat and thence into physical work. There was a great effort to quantify, measure and intrumentalise the body’s energies, in the hope of achieving perfection. As a motor, the human body was frequently compared to a steam engine, sometimes with the brain acting as an “engineer” – and “nerve force” came to occupy a kind of middle ground between the insubstantial mind, and the forces of nature. The anatomist John Cleland pondered the possibility that “thought and physical energy are mutually convertible.” Other scientists were skeptical though, and preferred to avoid the relationship between mind and matter. Thomas H. Huxley famously declared that “We are conscious automata” arguing that changes in consciousness were caused by “molecular changes in brain-substance”.

Nerve force, from the 1860s onwards, seemed to hold out the promise for a new approach to health rooted in the scientific principles of thermodynamics. Health required the careful management and expenditure of energy, and those who spent their forces unwisely, suffered nervous exhaustion (the language of nerve force often uses financial metaphors). Nerve force was understood in terms of electricity, and bodily activities produced discharges of nerve force in the same way that a Leyden Jar discharges electricity. George Beard (see this post) drew a direct parallel between the nervous system and Edison’s electric light. Thinking was quickly judged to be the greatest drain on body energies, often to the extent that other activities were excluded – such as loving relationships or sports. Herbert Spencer asserted that “instense mental application … is accompanied by a cessation in the production of sperm-cells” and conversely, that “undue production of sperm-cells involves cerebral inactivity.” Pleasures too, had to be strictly regulated and moderated, on order to balance the energy cost involved. Degeneration and dissipation was also a threat, and anti-masturbation tracts often used the laguage of the energy economy, arguing that it contravened the need to conserve body energy for both self and nation.

The second law’s emphasis on dissipation and increase in entropy was, for some, a confirmation of the religious notion of divine purpose. In the 1850s, Lord Kelvin, in a series of public lectures and debates, raised the possibility of a cataclysmic cooldown – heat death” – which would eventually cause all life and evolution to cease. This was a shock to those who held the belief that progress was eternal. Kelvin and his colleagues viewed this “heat death” as the irreversible loss of energy that would reduce the Earth to a cold, lifeless rock and used the Second Law to argue against Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection. Victorian anxieties over “heat death” and degeneration can be seen in HG Wells’ (1874) The Time Machine. The laws of thermodynamics were also combined with Darwinian evolutionary theory. Thomas H. Huxley’s writings on race (for example, Man’s Place in Nature) make an equivalence between evolution and social progress and empire, but also makes use of the second law in therorising how “unfit races” (i.e. savages) will inevitably disappear.

thermodynamics and gender
The “human motor” was implicitly male and caucasian (there was a widespread belief that heat led to low energy levels and as a consequence, idleness – and other vices – and that idleness was particularly associated with “primitive races” – I’ll be looking at this idea more closely in the series on shamanism and gender-variance). The principle of the first law of thermodynamics – energy conservation – was used to explain that the “energy” women expended in reproduction meant that they lacked the reserves for any other purpose. Herbert Spencer (1873) for example, claimed that there was a “somewhat earlier arrest of individual evolution in women than in men, necessitated by the reservation of vital power to meet the cost of reproduction.” Patrick Geddes’ and J. Arthur Thompson’s The Evolution of Sex (1889) argued that maleness and femaleness were differentiated down to the level of cellular metabolism. Men were thus active, energetic and variable, whilst women were sluggish, passive and conservative. Geddes was not in favour of women’s suffrage: “What was decided among the prehistoric protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament.” Similarly, in 1891, the psychologist Harry Campbell proclaimed that women were not only “less intellectual” than men, but that the “emotional and intellectual portions” of men and women are “somewhat in inverse ratio.” Although there were dissenters, notably the botanist Lydia Becker and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who declared in 19870 “I find nothing in physiology which indicates that the woman’s intellect is organically inferior to the man’s intellect” and stressed the importance of environmental influences; the belief that thermodynamics and biology “proved” the inevitability of the “seperate spheres” of women and men was the dominant one. Darwin, Galton, and the influential physician Henry Maudsley for example, asserted that differences between the sexes were innate, and that education and environment have little effect (if any). The argument was extended further in biological terms, with the notion that women’s nervous systems were less well developed than men’s, as were their brains (see previous post). Also, it was frequently asserted that women’s (and savages) purported ability to withstand discomfort “stoically” was an indication of their “lower development”.

The law of energy conservation was also used to argue against women’s education. It was frequently asserted that, since the human body had a finite supply of energy which had to be carefully regulated, educating women would place them under undue “mental strain” which would be injurious to their health. A physician, T.S. Coulson, in discussing the dangers of education for women asserted: “If you use the force of your steam-engine for generating electricity, you can not have it for sawing your wood.” referring to the view that women’s bodies were biologically and energetically concerned with reproduction and nuturance, and nothing else. Similarly, William Acton (1857) argued that women were indifferent to sex and that this was entirely natural, in order to “prevent the male’s vital energies from being overly expended at any one time” whilst other medical men, such as Henry Maudsley, defined women entirely in terms of their “reproductive functions”. Not only was education a danger for women as individuals, but it also threatened the future development of the race, and there were frequent claims that women’s intellectual advancement would lead to them becoming “unsexed”, and uninterested in continuing the human species.

In the next post in this series I will examine how these ideas influenced occult thought – with particular reference to the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

Sources
Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Univ. Michigan Press, 2001)
Barri J. Gold ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (The MIT Press, 2010)
Peter Harman, Energy, Force, and Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics (Cambridge University Press, 1982)
Patricia Murphy, In Science’s Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women (University of Missouri Press, 2006)
Anson Rabinach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Basic Books, Inc. 1990)
Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Harvard University Press, 1991)

On Liminal Nation last year there was a discussion regarding the perceived relationship between gender liminality and magic – particularly shamanism. This is a huge area, with no easy answers (although plenty have been supplied, admittedly) but what piqued my interest here was not so much that there is a relationship between people who have been identified as existing outside of the regulatory gender binary and a predisposition towards shamanism (or other magical practices) – but how the two became linked as ethnographical and scientfic categories.

It’s not uncommon to see in popular texts this relationship between gender-variance and a predisposition towards shamanic/magical practice being treated as a transcultural universal (much in the same way that the term Shaman itself) – sometimes to the extreme that any person who identifies as LBGTQI (and any other permutation) is said to be potentially “shamanic” – and occasionally, with the subtext that LBGTQI persons are likely to be better at being shamans/magicians than straight folks. Occasionally, I’ve seen this argument put forwards as a new and radical idea. Equally, there is the simplistic idea that the “presence” of gender-liminal or gender-variant sacred specialists is an indicated that such cultures are, (or were) generally more relaxed or affirmative towards LGBTQI persons than, say, contemporary Euro-American culture.

So I’m interested in how this (presumed) relationship between shamanism and gender-variance came about. I initially thought that the mid-nineteenth century – with the rise of both sexology (and the consequent categorisation of sexual behaviour and identities) and the growth of the tendency to label religious specialists as hysterical or neurotic would have been a key moment, but I’ve actually found that many of the tropes that we commonly emcounter in contemporary discourse on shamanism – such as initiations, gender-variance, trance states and creativity for example, can all be found in eighteenth century writings. I do find it interesting that a great deal of contemporary writing on shamanism and its relation to sexuality still draws on eighteenth and nineteenth-century scholarship, much of which was inherently hostile to either shamanism or gender-variance – which I mentioned in passing in my observations on The Golden Bough in January, 2010.

For this series of posts then, I’m going to examine the historical development of the relationship between shamanism and sexuality as western categories and how they were related to wider cultural issues and trends. I’ll start with a bit of scene-setting; examining some aspects of European attitudes to native peoples and sexual practices prior to the first wave of “shamanic discovery” in the eighteenth century.

Noble and Ignoble Savages
Historical records which explicitly make a relationship between the religious practices of “primitives”, “unnatural vices” and gender variance can be found from the sixteenth century onward, as this collection of documents – Native Americans/Gay Americans 1528-1976 indicates. Similarly, accounts which made an explicit link between “hermaphrodites”, sodomy and ceremonial specialisation amongst the native peoples of South America go back to the sixteenth century – and the sodomy trope was, as Michael Horswell (2005) argues, used by the Spanish to justify their conquest and conversion of the Incas. Horswell’s work shows that in sixteenth century Spanish texts, a link between sodomy, effeminacy, cross-dressing and hot climates (which recurs, as I will discuss in later posts, throughout eighteenth and nineteenth century writings) was already being established:

“all the rest were sodomites, especially those who lived on the coasts and in warm lands; so much so that young men paraded around dressed in women’s clothes in order to work in the diabolical and abominable role”
(quoted in Horswell, p73)

It is also from the Spanish in the sixteenth century that the first mentions of bradaje – later anglicised into berdache can be found:

“I saw a wicked behavior (diablura), and it is that I saw one man married (casado) to another, and these are effeminate, impotent men (unos hombres amarionados impotents). And they go about covered like women, and they perform the tasks of women, and they do not use a bow, and they carry very great loads. And among these we saw many of them, thus unmanly as I say, and they are more muscular than other men and taller; they suffer very large loads.”
quoted in Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Warfare, Homosexuality, and Gender Status Among American Indian Men in the Southwest in Foster, 2007

Emerging European notions of “the savage” were complex. It’s not unusual to find savage peoples compared to the idealised figures of Classical mythology, and elsewhere, indiscriminately labelled as cannibals. Savages were portrayed as lacking property, religion, laws, morality or self-restraint – any feature, in fact, which Europeans thought of as essential to civilisation.

Marc Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Novvelle France (1609) praised the Indians of New France:

“Also we must say of them that they are truely noble [emphasis added], not having any action but is generous, whether we consider their hunting or their employment in the wars, or search out their domestical actions, wherein the women do exercise themselves, in that which is proper unto to them, and the men in that which belongeth to arms, and other things befitting them, such as we have said, or will speak of in due place.”
(quoted in Ellingson, p22)

Ter Ellingson (2001) argues that Lescarbot’s work – which establishes the idea of the “Noble Savage” is a typical example of a European attempting to understand a different culture in terns of familiar social frameworks – that Lescarbot’s assertion of savage “nobility” was not the kind of romantic idealism one might associate with Rousseau or Hobbes, but the simple conclusion that because all the native hunted, they were – legally speaking – noble, because for Europeans, hunting was a privilege which distinquished nobles from commoners.

Travel accounts were augmented by the reports of missionaries, for example the account of Louis Hennepin (1640-1701) recounting his experiences of the Mississipi Valley:

“Nothing can be imagin’d more horrible than the Cries and Yellings, and the strange Contorsions of these Rascals, when they fall to juggling or conjuring; at the same time they do it very cleverly. They never cure anyone, nor predict anything that falls outm but purely by chance: mean time they have a thousand Fetches to bubble [i.e., cheat] the poor people, when the accident does not answer their Predictions and Remedies; for as Isaid, they are both Prophets and Quacks.”
(quoted in Flaherty, 1992, p31)

Accounts of shamans trying to hinder the missionaries’ work of conversion also began to appear, as well as the disappearance of shamanic practitioners in the face of advancing conversion. Neil S Price (2001, p4) notes that the idea that Shamanism represented a collective and widespread pattern of belief first arose when Christian missionaries in Siberia began to treat shamanic practices as a “pagan religion” which could be overthrown.

One of the first uses of the Germanicized term schaman can be found in the 1692 book North and East Tartary by Nicolas Witzen. Witzen’s book was an account of his travels across Russia and the tribal peoples he encountered, and their “schamans” or “priests of the Devil.” It was very common during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to see accounts of native people’s religion explained in terms of devil worship or necromancy. As long as authors were careful to discuss savage peoples within the boundaries of the devil rhetoric, then they were able to discuss aspects of native practices such as trances, healing or the use of narcotic substances. Samuel Purchas’ 1613 work Purchas His Pilgrimage can be seen as an early attempt at comparative religion, in that Purchas reviews accounts of religious beliefs all over the world in his attempt to establish the supremacy of Anglian Christianity. Purchas’ work provides an early account of a shamanic trance, and also makes reference to reports of “women-men” in California and Peru:

“Every Temple or principall house of adoration kept one man or two or more, which went attired like women, even from the time of their childhod and spake like them, imitating them in everything. Under pretext of holiness and Religion, their principall men, on principall daies, had that hellish commerce.”
(quoted in Flaherty, 1992, p35)

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, accounts of native peoples’ religious practices took an increasingly skeptical turn as the popularity of explaining any religious phenomena in rational terms developed.

In the next post I’ll take a look at some Eighteenth century accounts of shamanism.

Sources
Ter J Ellingson, The myth of the Noble Savage (University of California Press, 2001)
Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1992)
Thomas Foster (ed), Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (New York University Press, 2007)
Gyrus, War & the Noble Savage: A Critical Inquiry into Recent Accounts of Violence amongst Uncivilised Peoples (Dreamflesh Press, 2009)
Michael J Horswell, Decolonizing the sodomite: queer tropes of sexuality in colonial Andean culture (University of Texas Press, 2005)
Neil S Price (ed), The Archaeology of Shamanism (Routledge, 2001)

This seems to have happened at the PantheaCon event in San Francisco in mid-February, 2011, when the Come As You Are (CAYA) coven’s Amazon Priestess Tribe held a public ritual at this event, but instituted a controversial door policy.  The group is part of the feminist Pagan tradition called Dianic Wicca by its founder, Z Budapest, and is women-centric, but the problem arose when attendees of the conference queued to go to the ritual, in celebration of the goddess Lilith, and were turned away at the door for being male, defined by the door check as anyone who was not female now and born female.    The conference does allow those holding rituals to choose to advertise their rituals as targeted at, and limited to, certain groups, but in this case the organisers decided to institute a door policy which only allowed for “women born as women”.

So let’s ask what gender is doing in this context, and what values are being encoded.

First, men are excluded.   In this context, male = not welcome, which isn’t exactly a public relations triumph for Dianic Wicca at a public conference.  One can only assume that trans men would be unwelcome, as they identify as men, and men were being turned away.  In this context, gender is doing exclusion, and it also denies men the opportunity to learn from the ritual and what the organisers were trying to convey.  At best, it leaves those who queued with a bad memory of being turned away at the last minute, after queuing and thus missing attendance at a different event.  More importantly, it misses an opportunity to share the goals and interpretations of Dianic Wicca with the men who attended the conference, which could have been a way to inform and engage with a wider circle of people than normally attending events organised by this tradition, creating opportunities for discourse that could benefit the community at large.  Personally, I think this is the purpose of most large conferences, anyway, as events that bring the community together, rather than divide us.

The next group of people excluded are male-to-female transsexuals.  This perhaps caused the most controversy following the conference, mainly because of what it says about Dianic attitudes towards trans people.  It is my understanding that trans women identified and disqualified themselves from attending the ritual when they became aware of the door policy, though we must of course understand that it is entirely possible for a trans woman to pass inspection by a gynaecologist, so without a DNA test of all participants, it’s impossible to say for certain if a trans woman was present.  Given that transsexuals are recognised by the modern medical establishment as being what they claim, people trapped in the wrong sex, it is difficult to understand the vigorous objections of Dianics to trans folk.

The issue of what this encodes from a Dianic perspective is a serious one, because Dianic Wicca says that trans women are not women, but men, and discriminates against them as such.  Z Budapest took time to make clear what she thought of trans women in the context of refusal to admit them on The Fruit of Pain blog:

“This struggle has been going since the Women’s Mysteries first appeared. These individuals selfishly never think about the following: if women allow men to be incorporated into Dianic Mysteries,What will women own on their own? Nothing! Again! Transies who attack us only care about themselves.
We women need our own culture, our own resourcing, our own traditions.
You can tell these are men, They don’t care if women loose the Only tradition reclaimed after much research and practice ,the Dianic Tradition. Men simply want in. its their will. How dare us women not let them in and give away the ONLY spiritual home we have!
Men want to worship the Goddess? Why not put in the WORK and create your own trads. The order of ATTIS for example,(dormant since the 4rth century) used to be for trans gendered people, also the castrata, men who castrated themselves to be more like the Goddess.
Why are we the ONLY tradition they want? Go Gardnerian!Go Druid! Go Ecclectic!
Filled with women, and men. They would fit fine.
But if you claim to be one of us, you have to have sometimes in your life a womb, and overies and MOON bleed and not die.
Women are born not made by men on operating tables.”

While Z Budapest is not the leader of the CAYA coven, she did found the Dianic Wiccan tradition, and is the author of the movement’s founding documents.  CAYA noticed that the door policy was causing some debate within the community, and made a public statement about the issues on their website:

CAYA defends Amazon Priestess Tribe’s membership as invitation-only and restricted to the female-born body, celebrating rites related to menstruation.  It makes it clear that there is ongoing debate about the door policy, gender and inclusiveness within the Amazon Priestess Tribe.  The issue here is that it reveals very publicly that many people involved in the movement still see trans women as unwelcome, with some encouragement by the founder of Dianic Wicca, leaving their clarification far short of welcoming trans people on their own terms.  This denies trans women equal treatment in their self-assigned gender, questioning the validity of their self-assignment, and raises questions about the participation of women with other medical issues around female fertility and menstruation, or indeed post-menopausal women.  This is particularly ironic, given the roots in second-wave feminism of Dianic Wicca, in which women were insisting on inclusion in society on their own terms.

Making this kind of statement at a public conference means that any trans woman who waited in a queue to attend a rite and were turned away, had to face public rejection of their gender, and may have had to out themselves suddenly as transsexual at the head of a queue.  This kind of insensitivity and public rejection is not conducive to the kind of community spirit that a Pagan conference is supposed to be designed to foster, and is causing people to question rituals at public conferences which are not open to all (paying!) attendees.  It also serves as a public statement by CAYA, the Amazon Priestess Tribe and indeed Dianism, that trans women are unwelcome, and any statement by any of these parties which falls short of strongly rejecting that position, in fact serves to affirm it.

One of the more important aspects of this exclusion is that it marginalizes trans women, who are already struggling with their acceptance in society, and it silences a voice that speaks of a type of experience by a woman, which may provide important perspectives in discourses about womanhood and femininity.  This seems antithetical to the goals of feminism, and seems particularly at odds with feminist Paganism.

The third set of people who would have been excluded is that of intersex people.  Personally, I see how intersex people are handled as a barometer for how liberal a group is, and how much attention it has been paying to the liberation movements of the last century or so.  Under the definition above, which is that attendees must be women, this excludes those people who are not male or female, but rather something in between.  As a society, we do not yet have a clear place for these people, and the difficulty of fitting them into the heavily gendered society in which we live highlights where we are applying gender boundaries in our society.  The definition of women applied here does not accept intersex people as women, and applies a strict gender binary of woman and not-woman, and excludes them.

One of the more important points this raises, is that of self-definition versus definition by other groups, and it is one of the most contentious.  If a transsexual identifies as a given gender, who is an organiser of a public ritual to say that the transsexual person does not have a right to do so?  Is there a place in a public Pagan space to answer the statement “I am a woman” with “No, you are not”?

PantheaCon was a public conference.  People paid to attend, and then queued to be assigned a gender arbitrarily  at the door by a stranger, and then were allowed to enter or told they could not, based on this assignment.

Is this defensible?  And to be honest, is this even defensible in private?  Could the organisations in which you celebrate and explore your spirituality accept an intersex person on their own terms?  How do you feel about that?

Any organisation devoted to exploring spiritual questions cannot succeed in this endeavour by ignoring diversity in the areas of sex, gender and sexuality, or by relegating them to involvement on anything less than their own terms.  Not only is separate not equal, but as the liberation movements taught us, but inclusion by someone else’s rules is not affirming of who we are, and is rather the perpetuation of a model than disempowers those whose contribution is minimised or ignored.  More importantly, the value of that answer is greatly reduced by its inability to take all of us into that answer, and in fact should probably be used to evaluate whether or not that process of seeking is legitimate.  I am part of the whole, and believe that the answers to spiritual questions which deny my existence, or the existence of others, must by their very nature be incorrect.  Until we start thinking in these terms in our religious and spiritual traditions, we will continue to pursue blind alleys, and to inflict what we find at the end of these alleys on people who do not deserve to be treated this way.  Perhaps inclusion and compassion would make a good starting point for the re-evaluation of spiritual and religious discourse?

I also include links to the various blogs that have been written on this subject.  I found them to be quite thought-provoking reading, and hope that more people will read them:

Wild Hunt Blog (1)

Wild Hunt Blog (2)

Guardian Op Ed

Femme Guy

Foxfetch – towards a transcentric Paganism

Pantheon on trans issues

Witch Mom Blog

Kenaz Filan

Cultural Inappropriation

CAYA’s public statement

Circle of Cerridwen wiki

Fruit of Pain blog (1)

Fruit of Pain Blog (2)

Spiritualism emerged during a period of general optimism, radical questioning of ideas, and an urge towards democracy. Spiritualists believed that any person could be a medium, regardless of class or gender. They also stressed not only the continued existence of departed relatives in the afterlife, but also that those who had “crossed over” retained all of their individual characteristics and wished to maintain their relationships with the living. Moreover, the spirits continued to learn and make their own progress towards moral perfection in the afterlife. Spiritualism’s rationale of progress in both life and the afterlife held out a salvific hope for all peoples. Spiritualism also participated in the wider cultural equation of science and progress, inviting people to become “investigators” observing first-hand demonstrations rather than merely accepting orthodox religious doctrine on faith. Spiritualists believed spirit communications were scientific – as scientific as the marvels of the telegraph. Spiritualism also spoke of a “new dispensation” – the idea that spirit communication was ushering in a new era of social progress and moral perfection (in America, this was influenced by the Civil War). Spiritualists became involved in a number of social reform movements – in particular, women’s rights. As the suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton stated in their History of Woman Suffrage:

“the only religious sect in the world that has recognised the equality of women is the spiritualists.”

The dominant view of (“respectable”) Victorian womanhood was underwritten by the “natural” assumption that women were innately passive and fragile, whilst men were rational, active, and possessed will-power. Man’s sphere was the public world, woman’s sphere the home, and domestic life. This view was upheld both by religious authorities, and by scientists, doctors and educationalists. Whilst clerics invoked Biblical proofs, scientists turned to biology. Victorian science, although it portrayed itself as objective and disinterested, was underwritten by cultural prejudices and by “common sense”, and this is particularly obvious for pronouncements on women’s abilities. In the nineteenth century, the “common sense” assertion that men were rational and intellectual, and women were emotional and intuitive was reinforced through scientific pronouncements that irrefutably demonstrated a biologically determined difference between the sexes. Darwin, for example, makes this distinction very clear in The Descent of Man (1871):

“The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture,music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison.”

Scientific proofs that men were rational and women emotional (and deficient in the capacity for logical thought) indirectly supported the view that women and men were complementary to each other (and therefore, women should not attempt to “compete” with men). The anthropologist J. McGrigor Allan, in 1869, asserted that: “In reflective power, woman is utterly unable to compete with man.” and that woman “is content, in most instances, to let others think for her … and discover the most proper person to do so.” Allan believed that efforts to educate women would be useless, that “Any encroachment of one sex on the physical and mental characteristics of the other, is unnatural and repulsive…” and pointed to differences in biology which “predisposes men for intellectual and women for reproductive work.” adding that “the history of humanity is conclusive as to the mental supremacy of the male sex.” One element of the “proof” of women’s mental inferiority came from comparisons of brain size. Allan explained that “the female skull approaches in many respects that of the infant, and still more that of the lower races.” Gustav Le Bon (1879, La Psychologie des Foules) concurred:

In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely.

Le Bon also weighed in against the idea that women could be educated and were capable of competing in male activities:

A desire to give them the same education, and, as a consequence, to propose the same goals for them, is a dangerous chimera… The day when, misunderstanding the inferior occupations which nature has given her, women leave the home and take part in our battles: on this day, a social revolution will begin, and everything that maintains the sacred ties of the family will disappear.

Influential physicians such as Henry Maudsley argued that not only should women’s education be limited to their “foreordained” work as mothers and nurses of children, but that excessive mental strain would lead to “physical degeneration” and lead to future racial decay.

Passivity and power
The prescriptive image of Victorian femininity presented women as passive, gentle creatures, submissive and displaying domestic, moral virtues. “Womanly decency” was an ideal in which gender and class intersected. Spiritualist literature often portrayed women in terms of this ideal. It was woman’s passivity – her innate “finer feelings” which, for spiritualists, allowed women to become effective mediums. As Alex Owen (2004) explains:

“Passivity became, in the Spiritualist vocabulary, synonymous with power. And here lay the crux of the dilemma. For the very quality which supposedly made women such excellent mediums was equally construed as undermining their ability to function in the outside world.”

Some spiritualists believed that one did not choose to become a medium – one was effectively chosen by the spirits – and the development of a medium’s abilities was guided by the spirits, rather than the individual.In spiritualist discourse, the very qualities which made women appear to be deficient (when set against the norms of masculine qualities) rendered them as effective mediums – the delicate constitutions and heightened nervous sensitivity; the passivity and impressionability which women had, became the markers of a successful capacity for contacting spirits. (NB: This theme of passivity as a primary qualification for mediumship was one of the reasons why Madame Blavatsky disassociated herself from the spiritualist movement). William B, Potter’s 1865 work Spiritualism as it is for example, continually stresses the importance of sustaining a “passive or negative relation to the intelligences who seek to impress us…”.

Such passivity – although natural for women, led to suspicions of “unmanly behaviour” for male mediums. The poet Robert Browning, for example, dismissed the celebrated medium DD Home as “effeminate” and a “sot” and later lampooned all mediums (and especially Home) in a poem entitled “Mr. Sludge, the Medium.” Medical detractors of spiritualism often linked it to hysteria – and hysteria in men was thought to be be indicative of, as John Russell Reynolds put it (A System of Medicine, 1879) a sign that men were “either mentally or morally of feminine constitution” Medical pronouncements of the symptoms of hysteria portrayed such women in terms of degeneracy, waywardness and wilfulness – some directly equating spiritualism with “emotional incontinence”. An American physician, Frederick Marvin, describing the condition of “utromania” (a disease brought on by a misangled womb) stated that sufferers were susceptible to “embrace some strange ultra ism – Mormonism, Mesmerism, Fourierism, Socialism, often Spiritualism” (quoted in Owen, 2004, p149).

Also, spiritualism had other radical elements, particularly in America, where the so-called “free love” movement caused much public scandal. “Free Love” was not a call for sexual permissiveness in the contemporary sense, but the belief that sexual relations should be governed by mutual love, rather than traditional notions of marriage. Advocates of free love often argued that women should have the right to refuse their husband’s sexual advances and called for a liberalisation of divorce laws. At the 1865 Chicago Spiritualist Convention, a free love marriage ceremony was held which ended with the assertion that “Man has no right to woman .. by the linking of your hands we infer your hearts are already united, and that you only ask public recognition of the marriage already registered in heaven” (quoted in McGarry, 2008, p98). Spiritualism was to some extent influenced by the writings of Swedenborg, which stressed the centrality of the marriage of souls on both earth and in heaven. Some spiritualists believed that for each person there was a unique soulmate who would be revealed via the world beyond, whilst others stressed the desirability of finding one’s spiritual counterpart in the present – even if that meant overcoming the bonds of state marriages, which in the words of one woman spiritualist (see McGarry, p98) was “little more than an honorable servitude.” Although most spiritualists were not advocates of “free love” – many free love advocates were spiritualists. The majority of free love advocates did not seek to abolish marriage as an institution – because they believed in its sacrality as spiritual union – they agitated for the ending of oppressive marriages and the equality of wife and husband.

Scholars such as Alex Owen and Ann Braude have argued that women mediums gained a degree of agency by speaking on behalf of spirits – by becoming conduits for the spirit world – in much the same way that women came to be valued as telegraph operators. Mediums became themselves a form of media – able to transmit sounds and sights from great distance. Women mediums took the stage as “inspired” public speakers (in a period where the spectacle of women speaking in public was both a novelty and an outrage), and, through lecturing and writing were able to take on positions of leadership. Equally, they were encouraged and fortified by the affirmative messages from spirits they received. The spirits became a powerful source of alternative authority and, when believers accepted the veracity of a message, they tended to accept the power of medium. As Ann Braude says: “more women stepped beyond conventional female roles because of Spiritualism than they would have without it.” (Braude, 2001, p201) and: “Trance speaking was a transitional phase that enabled both individual women and women as a group to break through limitations on their role. It embodied a combination of feminine qualities with a departure from the feminine role that had a strong appeal to men and women in the 1850s.” ((Braude, 2001, p98).

Alex Owen locates the paradoxical and fragile nature of women’s agency as mediums:

“Although a medium was bound by prescriptive notions of femininity, she was also able to use them for her own ends. It meant, in effect, that she could both subscribe to the idea and undermine it. Mediumship operated as both acquiescence and resistance, conformity and transgression, representation and its refusal. The medium attained power because of qualities which were associated with powerlessness, but such power allowed her to move beyond the confines of the ordained female role and into new or forbidden territory.”(Owen, 2004, pp223-224)

This recalls Judith Butler’s formulation of agency as located within the productive reiterability of regimes of discourse/power rather than a possession of an autonomous subject. There is some thought-provoking discussion of the relationship between agency and possession in Mary Keller’s The Hammer and the Flute. Using the strategic term ‘Instrumental agency’, Keller questions an assumption which is often made in analyses of possession and women – that agency is ” a measure of autonomous, teleological progress.” Keller, in a similar manner to Alex Owen, points towards women’s agency in possession arising out of the interplay between the transgressive and the normative – that one can simultaneously transgress a tradition whilst embodying or re-enacting it.

In the next post in this series I’ll examine the influence of thermodynamics and look at some late nineteenth-century occult representations of polarity which draw on magnetism & electricity.

Sources
Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Indiana University Press, 2001)
Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult and Communication Technologies 1859-1919 (Cornell University Press, 2010)
Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G.S Rousseau and Helen Showalter, Hysteria Beyond Freud (University of California Press, 1993)
Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)
Mary Keller, The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession (The John Hopkins University Press, 2002)
Molly McGarry, Ghosts of futures past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (University of California Press, 2008)
Patricia Murphy, In Science’s Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women (University of Missouri Press, 2006)
Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago University Press, 2004)
Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Harvard University Press, 1991)

Having abandoned everything, O Goddess, the aspirant should make great effort to seek out the company of women.
Brihannila Tantra

One of the most contested topics in contemporary tantric studies is the question of how much agency women had within historical tantric practice. Although many new age and occult representations of tantra speak of it as a “cult of the divine feminine”, more skeptical commentators stress that despite the fact that tantric texts frequently valorise women, tantra is predominantly a masculine practice, in which women are little more than passive objects and sources of power for the benefit of male adepts. As Hugh Urban points out in his recent book The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of South Asian Studies – the debate has tended to fall into two simplistic-oppositional camps – oppressive domination vs. autonomous freedom – poles which say more about the bias and agendas of scholars and commentators, rather than actual religious tradition. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and Judith Butler, Urban calls for a more complex approach to the question of agency and gender/power relations. This is a debate which has interested me for some time – ever since I read the work of Miranda Shaw, June Campbell and Wendy Doniger. So for an opening shot, I’m going to summarise one of the themes in Loriliai Biernacki’s Renowned Goddess of Desire:Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra (Oxford University Press, 2007) – the “Kali Practice”.

This practice is formed of five key elements:

• Seeking out women and treating women with respect
• It is in many ways mental practice – none of the restrictions concerning time, place or purity apply
• It is a practice that involves the worship of women – and may include sexual union – but the emphasis is on the worship of living women
• The attitude of reverence and respect towards women should be maintained 24/7.
• The goddess is embodied in living women. Biernacki points out that it is not simply that the women who are worshipped in a ritual context are considered divine, but that women as a category are revered, whether they are formally worshipped or not.

.
Biernacki locates this particular form of practice within a group of texts dating between the 15th-18th centuries, and variously referred to as the Kali Sadhana (“Kali Practice”), Mahamantrasadhana (“Great Mantra Practice”), the Saktacara (“Sakta Conduct”) or the Cinacara (“The Chinese Way”). These texts are particularly associated with North-East India – the Great Blue Tantra (Brihannila Tantra – BT), the Secret Practice Tantra, the Maya Tantra (MT) and the Celestial Musician Tantra. This particular theme is, she says, absent (or at least not as strongly emphasised) from well-known left-hand texts such as the Kulanarva Tantra, the Kalika Purana and the Kaulajnana Nirnaya.

The Kali Practice, Biernacki explains, centres around women – both the worship of women and worship with women. The texts establish a mythological precedent for this practice by asserting that Siva, Radha and Krishna have acquired their power and status only because they worshipped women. The practices involves the ritual worship of women and the cultivation of a reverential attitude towards women:

One should not at all have hatred towards women; rather one should worship women

and

One should not criticise women; one should increase one’s love for them.

Biernacki notes that the term used for love in this latter quote is prema (love as emotional attachment) rather than kama (desire). This cultivation of reverence is towards all women – even towards women with which one has no direction relations:

Having gotten up in the morning, the knower of mantras bows to the clan tree. Having done this, and having meditated on the guru in the lotus in the head, he should visualise (lit., remember) that (guru) as a flood of nectar. He should then worship him (the guru) as free from illness using however, mental items for the worship. Beginning in the root cakra up to the cakra at the top of the head he should contemplate on his personal mantra (here, lit., the feminine vidya). Shining like ten million suns, with a form which is a flood of nectar, that effulgence which pervades through the covering, he should imagine this in his own body. The eight trees are slesmataka, karanja tree, the rudraksa tree, lemon tree, banyan tree, the orange-blossomed kadambaka tree, the bilva tree and the tree called “no sorrow”. These are declared in this way in another Tantric text, O Goddess. Then having bowed down to a little girl, to an intoxicated young woman, or to an old woman, to a beautiful woman of the clan (kula), or to a contemptible, vile woman, or to a greatly wicked woman, one should contemplate on the fact that these (women) do not appreciate being criticised or hit, they do not appreciate dishonesty or that which is disagreeable. Consequently, in every way possible one should not behave this way towards them.”

This part of the practice is a habitual morning contemplation. The worship is extended further, Biernacki says, to the females of other species:

The females of beasts of birds and of humans – these being worshipped, one’s ineffective, incomplete deeds always become full of merit.

Biernacki stresses again, that this practice involves worshipping with women – quoting the Celestial Musician Tantra:

“Together with a woman, there (he should) reflect (on the mantra or practice); the two of them together in this way (they do) worship. Without a woman, the practitioner cannot perfect (the mantra) at all. he should mentally evoke (the mantra) together with a woman and together with her, he should offer into the sacrificial fire as well. Without her the practitioner cannot perfect (the mantra) at all. Women are gods; women are the life-breath.”

And from the Secret Practice Tantra:

Together with the woman, one should recite the mantra. One should not recite the mantra alone.

Drawing on the Maya Tantra, Biernacki points out that the rite of sexual union sometimes included within Kali Practice differs from that of the cakrapuja as described in the Kulananarva Tantra. In the “Kali Practice”, a single woman (rather than a group) is the centre of the rite. She is considered to be the living goddess instantiated, and takes the centre position. Biernacki suggests that the woman-as-divine within this rite is not – as might be the case elsewhere – possessed by the goddess. In this context, she says, the emphasis is on worshipping a normal, nonpossessed woman, as divine. In her discussion of this practice, Biernacki points out that if a woman is the goddess only at a specific time – during a ritual, for example, then it is only necessary during that time to treat her with the reverence due a deity. There would be no need to maintain this attitude beyond the ritual. However “if the divinity, which is the goddess, is intrinsic to her being, something she carries around with her all the time, something she is, then her status in general shifts. Then one would need to be vigilant, constantly maintaining an attitude of listening to her to make sure that the goddess standing before one will be pleased and therefore benevolent. It is precisely the act of looking to her, as ordinary woman, which affords a shift in the normative discourse between the genders and that allows for a recognition of her as a subject, as a person to whom one should listen.

In addition to a recognition that this practice manifests as not harming women and not behaving in such a way as to upset them, there is also, says Biernacki, an attentiveness to fulfilling her desires:

Whatever she may desire, that one should give her.

Biernacki makes the salient point that this goddess is a living woman, so it is not merely a matter of making an offering to an image and receiving the prasada in return – but that the woman might well keep the offering, use it, and may also ask for what she wishes. “She can talk back”. The key here, is the practice of listening to her. Biernacki quotes the MT:

one’s worship is in vain, one’s mantra recitation is useless, the hymns one recites are in vain, the fire ceremonies with gifts to priests; all these are in vain if one does that which is offensive to a woman.”

The texts also direct the practitioner to respect the rights of the bodies and minds of women: “never should one strike a woman, with an attitude of arrogance, not even with a flower” and “not even mentally, should one harm a woman.” – “Even if she has committed an extreme offense, one should not have hatred for her. One should never hate women; rather one should worship women.”

Biernacki notes that this attitude does not come out of some kind of chivalrous behaviour towards women because they are the “weaker” sex but rather, the opposite. One doesn’t harm a woman because she has power, and she might get offended “and then one had better be wary of her curse”:

when a woman gets angry, then I (Siva) who am the leader of the clan, always get angry. When she is upset or afflicted, then that Goddess who gives curses is always upset.”

and from the Maya Tantra:

“A woman who is engaged in practicing the Durga mantra is able to increase well-being and prosperity, however if she gets angry at a man then she can destroy his wealth and life.”

Biernacki notes that in this instance, like the yogi and the Brahmin, the woman has power due to her spiritual practice and her anger “carries an edge”. Moreover, this is an instance where woman’s power is not dependent on either her sexuality or to a consort/husband: “contrary to the normative coding of a woman as a sexual being and dangerous because of her sexuality – or because she’s managed to effectively channel and bottle up her sexuality – here we have a perilous leap into a world where a woman is dangerous because, like the Brahmin priest, like the guru and like the yogi, she knows how to wield a mantra.”

Women have a special ability to master mantra effortlessly:

The restrictions which men contend with (in the practice of) mantras are not at all there for women. Anything, whatsoever, by whichever (means), and moreover in all ways (is attained), for women magical attainment (siddhi) occurrs, without any doubt … for a woman, by merely contemplating (on the mantra) she in this way becomes a giver of boons. Therefore one should make every effort to initiate a woman in one’s own family.

Again, Biernacki explains this in terms that it is woman’s inherent status which entails this power – that a woman can naturally perfect a mantra, in the same way that those born into the caste of warriors have the inherent capacity to bear pain, or that Brahmins ‘instinctively’ tell the truth. Simply being born a woman affords the power of mastering mantras.

Biernacki also notes that as well as a connection made in the texts between the power women have with mantra and the fruits which come from the practice of worshipping and focussing on women that is the Kali Practice, the main reward which stems from the Kali Practice is, rather than the usual siddhis such as flying or killing one’s enemies, a facility with language.

Biernacki says that within the texts she is drawing upon, women appear as both gurus and practitioners. For example, the Blue Goddess of Speech Tantra (NST) she says, presents women gurus in “a casual way” which, she says, “suggests that something is ubiquitous and taken for granted.” Also, in the Secret Practice Tantra (GST), after Siva gives the visualisation of the male guru, Parvati responds:

The initiation given by a woman is proclaimed to be auspicious and capable of giving the results of everything one wishes for, if, from the merit accumulated in many lives and by dint of much good luck, a person can acquire a woman as guru, O lord, what is the visualisation of the woman guru? Now I want to hear the visualisation one uses in the case of a woman guru. If I am your beloved, then tell me.”

To which Siva replies:

Listen, o Parvati, overflowing with love for you, I will tell you this secret, which is the visualisation of a woman guru, where she is to be meditated upon as the guru. In the great lotus in the crown of the head on a host of shining filaments is the female guru, who is auspicious. Her eyes are like the blossoming petals of a lotus. She has firm thick breasts, a thousand faces, a thin waist. She is eternal. Shining like a ruby, wearing beautiful red clothing, wearing a red ring on her hand and beautiful jeweled anklets, her face shines like the autumn moon adorned with bright shining earrings. Having her lord seated on her left side, her lotus hands make the gestures of giving boons and removing fear. Thus I have told you, o Goddess, this supreme meditation on the female guru. it should be guarded strenuously. It should not be revealed at all.

This visualisation, and its source text was, Biernacki says, well-known enough for Ramatosana Bhattacarya to cite in his 1820 compendium on Tantra, the Pranatosini. He also cites a hymn from the Matrkabhedatantra which gives the “armour” of protection (kavaca) sung to the female guru and a hymn entitled the “Song of the Female Guru” (Striguru Gita) from the Kankalamalini Tantra which apostrophises the female guru as the goddess Tarini. Biernacki says that Bhattacarya makes it clear that this female guru is not simply the wife of the male guru (who receives worship because she is his wife) by including later in his text the specific worship that one offers to the wife of the guru. She points out that this seperate worship of the female guru is important because it indicates a female authority who is not dependent on a male relative.

Apart from texts associated with the “Kali Practice”, Biernacki points out that there are other instances where women are teachers and initiators in mantra – though perhaps less emphatically. She quotes a passage from the Rudramayala which describes the qualities that make a female practitioner qualified to be a guru:

The woman practitioner (sadhvi) who has conquered her senses, has devotion for the teacher and engages in good conduct, who knows the essence of the cosmic building blocks (tattva) and the meaning of all mantras, who is skillful and always engaged in worship; she who has all the auspicious marks, who practices silent mantra repitition, and who has eyes as beautiful as the lotus flower, she who wears jewels and is adorned with the (knowledge of) letters of the alphabet and the various worlds; she who is peaceful, of a good clan, born from the clan; who has a face beautiful as the moon, and gives prosperity; she who has infinite good qualities; this beloved woman who bestows the state of being like the God Rudra, she is the form of the Guru. She gives liberation and she explains the knowledge pertaining to Siva – this woman indeed is fit to be a guru. This characterisation excludes the widow. The initiation given by a woman is declared to be auspicious, and the mantras are known to be eight times more powerful (than that given by a man). Except that taken from a widow or a woman with children, which only brings debts and obligations.”

In answering the question, “what does it mean for women to be gurus?” Biernacki proposes that the guru represents not only spiritual authority but also authority in the social and public sphere – that the guru represents a moral authority – a voice in the lives of his or her followers. It is not an accident, she writes, that the same texts that enjoin the “Kali Practice” also take for granted women as gurus – a stance she says, it absent from tantric texts written prior to the 13th century.

Whoever does this auspicious act (of initiating women) – in this lineage are born men equal to Brhaspati. There is no doubt about this. This is the truth, o Goddess.

Brhaspati is the guru of the gods and noted for his learning and eloquence. It is interesting, notes Biernacki, that initiating women will bring about sons who are learned. She notes that the Secret Practice Tantra (GST) says that the wives of Krishna and Brahma attained perfection of mantra along with their husbands – and goes as far as to assert that these male deities only attained that perfection because they had wives who also practiced the mantra.

Sources

• Loriliai Biernacki Renowned Goddess of Desire:Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra Oxford University Press, 2007
• Hugh B. Urban The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of South Asian Studies IB Taurus, 2010

Nervous energies
The scientific investigation of “nervous energy” had begun in 1791 with the researches of Luigi Galvani – his experiments with “animal electricity” and muscular motion. Galvani’s experiments led him to conclude that nerves were capable of conducting energy and that the “invisible spirit” which flowed along them must be electrical in nature. His nephew Giovanni Aldini, performed experiments on the corpses of criminals – eventually compelling them to roll their eyes or lift heavy weights through the animating power of electricity. By the end of the eighteenth century, a number of medical practitioners had begun to theorise that diseases could be classified according to whether or not they were caused by either an excess, or a deficiency, of nervous energy.

Electrical theory was also wheeled out in support of the widespread belief that women were, whilst mentally and physically inferior to men, were more “sensitive”. Baron Charles Von Reichenbach in 1844 experimented with “feeble-brained” teenage girls, placing them in a darkened room and then exposing them to magnets. Reichenbach concluded that girls possessing a “diseased sensibility” could perceive a flickering aura around magnets. Reichenbach went on to develop a theory of “Odic force” which pervaded all matter – and that proper alignment with the Earth’s polarity could prevent illness. (Reichenbach’s theories are still being drawn on today as evidence for the scientific recognition of occult energies).

By the middle of the nineteenth century doctors were warning of the dangers of a depleted nervous system; over-exertion, could sap an individual’s reserves of nervous energy, and could lead to depression, fatigue, or melancholia. Nervous energy was often described in the terminology of economics or physics. For example, the American physician, George Beard, who coined the term “neurasthenia” in 1881 described sufferers as under-charged batteries – and the cause of neurasthenia was not moral lapses, but the pressures of modern civilisation caused by the new technologies of steam power, the telegraph, the popular press. Women, as the weaker gender, thought Beard, were more likely to succumb to the stresses of modern life. Women were particularly susceptible, according to Beard, if they tried to imitate men by seeking “excessive” education or intellectual efforts which depleted their store of nervous energy.

The enthusiasm for electrical therapy continued throughout the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, medical treatments had been joined by a panoply of popular devices offering relief (or stimulation) – and advertisements for electrical corsets, belts, hairbrushes etc., abounded. The link between electricity and sexual vitality which had first arisen in the previous century (as in the case of Graham’s celestial bed -see previous post in this series) also became a popular theme in fiction. James Maclaren Cobban’s 1890 thriller for example, The Master of His Fate features a physician protagonist who believes that electricity is the “universal principle in Nature”. He encounters an enigmatic figure who draws nourishment from the electrical vitality of others. Electricity is the spirit of life, it:

“flows and thrills in the nerves of men and women, animals and plants, throughout the whole of Nature! It connects the whole round of the Cosmos by one glowing, teasing, agonizing principle of being, and makes us beasts and trees and flowers all kindred!”
(quoted in Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-ray by Linda Simon, p165)

The concept of nervous energy was used both by doctors to account for female weaknesses, and, following the surge of interest in Spiritualism in the 1840s, by Spiritualists themselves in accounting for the particular suitability of women as mediums. Spiritualists, in attempting to distance themselves from charges of superstition, drew on current scientific theories and popular understandings of current technologies (such as the telegraph) for their accounts of spirit phenomena. One explanation, for example, of why women were particularly suitable for acting as mediums was their very weaknesses in the masculine qualities of will and intelligence – and their feminine qualities of passivity and impressionability; another was that women’s “negative charge” attracted spirits which were “positively charged”. Whilst women were routinely distinguished from men due to their powers of intuition or imagination, these seemingly positive traits were produced because women were weak-willed and unable to reason intellectually. Some Spiritualists believed that a woman’s abundance (or imbalance) of nervous energy made her more receptive to the higher electro-magnetic transmissions of the spirits, whilst doctors felt that this same imbalance led to ailments – considering the body as a great telegraphic network which, overtaxed by the unstable currents flowing through it, responded with hysteria and mania. For many physicians, belief in mediumship was both cause and symptom of a disordered nervous economy: “One might say, whereas the spiritualists imagined telegraphic technology as a means of transcending material existence in an out-of-body experience, medical science employed telegraphic metaphors to reground consciousness within the bodies of women who were thought to be out of their minds.” (Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted media: electronic presence from telegraphy to television p65). Women who left the home – as mediums did – and entered public life, were thought to be particularly susceptible to nervous diseases.

The Spiritual Telegraph
The first commercial telegraph was developed by Sir William Fothergill Cooke in 1837. In the early 1840s, the American Samuel Morse developed his system of telegraphy which involved encoding messages, which was accepted as the standard form of telegraphy in Europe by 1851 (Morse, like many other telegraphic pioneers continued his work in the afterlife via communications with mediums). By 1850, Victorian engineers had begun the herculean project of “wiring” the world, with John Watkin Bretts’ Anglo-French Telegraph Company laying the first underwater telegraph cable across the English Channel. In 1852, Britain and Ireland were linked together, and by 1858, the first transatlantic cable was laid between Washington and London – a special song composed for the occasion expressed the general feeling:

“One heav’nly spark unites for ever
The earth and ev’ry human breast;
All men are brothers wheresoever
Our eyes upon the earthball rest!”

Telegraphy became quickly associated with utopian visions of uniting humanity via technological progress (and political reform). The American scientist Edward Hitchcock, in his Religion of Geology (1852) makes an explicit link between the moral order of the universe and the forces which connect all humanity:

“It is as if each man had his foot on the point where ten thousand telegraphic wires meet from every part of the universe, and he were able, with each volition, to send abroad an influence along these wires, so as to reach every created being in heaven and in earth.”
(quoted in Gilmore, Aesthetic materialism p51)

At the same time that such utopian visions were being expounded, the telegraph was playing a key role in driving industrialisation – establishing what the Victorians called “Railway Time” – the establishment of a national “standardised” time – Greenwich Mean Time – was adopted by all British railway companies by 1848. The railway pioneer Henry Booth, in a pamphlet (1846) visioned the consequences of this move as “a whole nation stirred by one impulse; in every arrangement, one common signal regulating the movements of a mighty people!”

The telegraph – providing a seemingly instantaneous connection between minds over great distances, fired the Victorian imagination. The telegraph became a focus for both moral and affinitive connection – one example being the physicist James Maxwell Clark’s poem Valentine by a Telegraph Clerk:

“The tendrils of my soul are twined
With thine, though many a mile apart.
And thine in close coiled circuits wind
Around the needle of my heart.

Constant as Daniel, strong as Grove.
Ebullient throughout its depths like Smee,
My heart puts forth its tide of love,
And all its circuits close in thee.”

The first novel dealing with what we now would call an “online relationship” was Ella Cheever Thayer’s Wired Love – a Romance in Dots and Dashes (an Old Story Told in a New Way) (1879).

Just as the commercial telegraph connected persons over great distances, Spiritualists argued that the “celestial telegraph” was a bridge between worlds. Spiritualism grew rapidly in both Britain and America during the very period in which developments in commercial telegraphy proceeded apace. Some spiritualists (Emma Hardinge for exmple) even argued that the advent of the telegraph was initially inspired via contacts from the spirit world – in 1854 the American Universalist John Murray Spear proposed (following contact with the spirit of Benjamin Franklin) plans to construct a “soul-blending telegraph” operated by mediums which would conceivably compete with, if not surpass, the existing telegraph service. The British telegraph engineer Cromwell Varley (1828-83), who played a key role in the development of underwater cables and devices for detecting signal faults, was himself an ardent spiritualist, and believed that his electrical expertise could be used in the cause of furthering spirit communication. Varley proposed that the validity of spirit communications could be tested using electrical devices (it was Varley who later introduced William Crookes to Spiritualism following the death of his brother, Philip Crookes, on a cable-laying expedition in 1867.)

The obvious link was made between Morse’s code system and the coded raps used by the Fox sisters, and also the codes used by Spiritualists in conjunction with a Planchette. Communicating with the dead through coded raps and knocks was – as Jeffrey Sconce points out (Haunted Media, p28) – “only slightly more miraculous than talking with the living yet absent through dots and dashes”. Leading Spiritualists such as Andrew Jackson Davies and Allan Kardec made direct links between mediumistic communication and the electromagnetic action of the telegraph. In a similar vein, spiritualists began to speak of the bodies of mediums in terms of “spiritual batteries”; of circuits between seance sitters, and the necessary affinity between medium and spirit in terms of electro-magnetic flows and currents. For Davies, men and women sitters became positive and negative poles, and the principles of mediumship were identical to the “magnetic telegraph”. Some theorists proposed that the soul itself was electromagnetic in nature, or that disembodied consciousness could travel “telegraphically”. Its no coincidence that the first Spiritualist newspaper published in Britain (1855) was titled the Yorkshire Spiritual Telegraph. Spiritualism was driven by technological advancement, and seemingly offered an empirical basis for religious experience.

In my next post I’ll examine how understandings of mediumship and trance were underwritten by (and sometimes contested) notions of female passivity in the nineteenth century.

Sources
Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago University Press, 2004)
Linda Simon, Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-ray (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004)
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted media: electronic presence from telegraphy to television (Duke University Press, 2000)
Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult and Communication Technologies 1859-1919 (Cornell University Press, 2010)
Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (Berkley Publishing Group, 1999)
Wouter J. Hanegraaff & Jeffrey J. Kripal (Eds), Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism (Brill, 2008)
Paul Gilmore, Aesthetic materialism: electricity and American romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2009)

It is such a standard image, no? Beltane being about the God and Goddess having sex or marrying. She in her long hair and coy long-legged femininity. He always tall, muscular, strong, looking conventionally masculine, holding her a loving embrace. I too attended rituals celebrating their happy union. And at midsummer, they stood together, a couple with their child, born from their Beltane coupling. Like you, I heard this described as fertility. And it did seem logical.

Oh, the apparent quandary! Like you, this is not the template of my own life, nor the image of my own desires. Even when desiring men I did not desire a family. And then, too, I desired women, and saw no celebration of woman-woman coupling. It was all well for someone to say, as some did ‘ah, but it’s the union of your internal male and female’. Thank you, Carl Gustav Jung, but no thank you. It is no comfort to me, for I look inside and I find no internal male. Even my strongest parts are all woman, and gladly so. Perhaps you, as a young gay man, desire your men as a man. Maybe you, like me, have no call to create an internal heterosexual nuclear family with wedding bells, bride and groom.

The Victorians and their 18th-century precursors gave us the word ‘fertility’ as a euphemism for sex. Sexual religion of the ancient world they coyly called ‘fertility religion.’ Greek and Roman carved phalluses were ‘fertility symbols.’ And so on. Tragically, the euphemism carried onto the pagan revival of the 20th century. Though general society got better at speaking frankly about sex, somehow in the books and language of paganism, no shift was made. Till, at long last, those of us meeting and falling in love with paganism in the 1980s and later, met the word ‘fertility’ in pagan books, and only imagined it could mean what it said: fertility, reproduction. As speaking about sex was by then not wrong, and certainly should not be in a life-affirming spirituality, we did not imagine it was a misguided carry-over euphemism. Sadly, it is.

The bodge, so to speak, is not so painful, or so obvious, for those who are straight. Amongst the heterosexuals, it is no more than a gentle blurring covering for lust, sex, arousal, and pleasure.  Eventually, for most, heterosexual sex makes for a pregancy. But for those who are not, for the queer, this conflation seems to say that pagan religion today has no place for them, So, yes, my young friend, it disappoints me that many modern pagans have unwittingly adopted the Victorian euphemism ‘fertility’ for the truer, and equally sacred word, pleasure.

Beltane is and was the joy of desire of the body fulfilled in sex. The folklore tells us so, with boys and girls out in the woods, rummaging in the bushes, plucking flower, discovering the shy one who, now in the wild and in the night’s half-light, is not quite so coy. Come Corinna, let us go a-maying. Many a green gown was given on the night of May Day, we are told. What is this? The grass stains on a girls skirt after a roll in the grass: this is the green gown. So pervasive the image that it survived well into the 20th century as a taboo on women wearing green dresses (‘bad luck, dear, bad luck’).

Sex is, patently, not the same as fertility, even when conducted between fertile people of the opposite sex.
Truly. When unzipping the proverbial trousers, a straight man or woman is not usually doing so for the sake of making baby. And, it’s not even fertile sex most of the time, since for 26 days of every month a woman can’t conceive. It’s hard to disagree with the assertion that when even straight folks of childbearing age start the act of sex, their motive is desire, too.

The ecstasy of the spirit, the joy of the flesh, the fire of the loins, the surrender of the power, the enjoyment of power. The fingers creeping up the thigh; the unbuttoning of a shirt to reveal the shoulder, then the breast. It is pleasure, pleasure in the body, the craving, the need, the ravishing, the enveloping, the penetrating. Cries, sweat, panting, murmuring, it being just the most gorgeous thing. This,  for the past 2000 years, the big taboo of the Western World for both sexes. And for the past 5000 years (yes, five thousand years) their own desire has been the big taboo for females. It is obvious to the point of triteness to point this out, of course. We all know that physicality is denigrated in Judeo-Christianity, and in, bless us, the binary dualism of the post-platonic ideas of the spiritual. To clarify, I mean that placement of  ‘spiritual’ as the opposite of ‘physical’, Spirit as the opposite of Matter. Spirit up, flesh down. The sky versus the swamp, the angel versus the beast. It is bedded deep in us, pervasive and unquestioned. We use it without thinking: become more spiritual and less animal; strive to the higher planes, try to rise up out of your lower nature. And so on, and so on.

So, my young friend, at Beltane let us honour the acts of pleasure. Poor pleasure, so neglected in the discourse of spirituality.

Paganism, in Beltane, at its heart, finds a day of celebration of the body and its dance, its urges, and its magnificence.  I affirm the consecration of the grass stain on the dress, the sacrifice of the carpet-burned knees, the choir of orgasm-cries. This is my ritual, this is the holiest of holies. At other times, I affirm other sacraments: the warmth of friendship, the stillness of acceptance, of birth, of death, of giving, of receiving. But at Beltane, I acknowledge the pleasure.

What of fertility, then? True, for the survival of the species, fertility is needed. And for all species who reproduce sexually, an urge to heteroxual copulation is needed to be encoded in the biological makeup. But so too, for fertility, is needed other qualities: a parental instinct to nurture the young, as well as a pair-bonding instinct for co-parenting. It also requires certain biological features to be in place: a functioning womb, sufficient sperm production, particular hormone levels in both partners. Fertility, to succeed, requires these other things as well. I do feel there needs to be a time to honour and celebrate all the spectrum of things that create the next generation of our species. It seems to me most appropriate to do so at the birth-celebrations of babies.

Perhaps it is as well to remember that the sex act which produces offspring, the ‘fertile’ sexual act, may not even the sexual act which the conceivers find most pleasurable. One or both may get more pleasure from oral sex, say, or, well anything else of the many things lovers enjoy. Or sex at a different time of the month. If one or both is bisexual, they may gain more pleasure, in some senses at least, from sex with a person who has a different gender than the one with whom they conceived. One or both may love or desire someone else. The sexual act of maximum fertility (ie which leads conception) may well not be the sexual act of maximum pleasure.

It might be wondered what might be so magnificent about sex that it actually warrants its own holiday. I mean, paganism does have an holiday for the ecstasy of eating and drinking (well, it does, actually). As mentioned above, it is, perhaps above all else, an affirmation of the body’s joy. Yes, it is a sacrement that flies in the face of world-denying spirituality. It affirms and glorifies something beautiful that has been shamed in humans. So, firstly, it is a day for the autonomous dancing song of the body electric (O Walt Whitman, you whom I love).

Sex is a dance of power. One has power over the other, a domination is presence. Each in different, shifting senses, dominates the other. In this, in tandem with it are all the surrenders. Even a dominating lover has a surrender into orgasm, and even a yearning submissive lover feels the power of knowing that the dominator will collapse in enfoldment at the point of climax. Each gives and receives differing powers, powers that flow into one another, rise up and command then subside for others to come forth.

It is also a sacrament of relationship. To have lust for another person is to want them – to want their body, the very fabric of them. An act that aims for union that is paradoxically both achieved and not achieved. Sex is a dance between the familiar and the strange. The dearly near and the awesome Other. Her body, made like mine, so close, and she feels like I have her, and, in the tender moments, she is dear to me as sister, mother, child. Closer than close, twin of my soul. Yet, yet. In a flash she is strange to me, her face like that of someone I cannot know, some naked creature somehow, inexplicably, entangled with my body (who is this and how did this happen?). Then she is mine again, darling, but I see her ecstasy takes her to somewhere a million miles from me. Then I hers again, but my ecstasy takes me a million miles from her. I flicker between knowing the beloved so well, and not at all.

And is not it so with anyone one is close to? Alternately familiar and unknown? I live by a commitment to live in compassionate connection, I share the world with others. But each person I meet, know, or encounter is somehow my nearest kin and, simultaneous, an unknown whose uknowability I must respect. I know that each person has joy, disappointment, suffering – yet with empathy I must not presume that horror that is the patronising phrase, ‘I know just how you feel.’ Every encounter challenges me to connect yet not presume sameness. In each face I find one like me, one utterly unlike me, one beloved, one strange. Connect, only connect, and let that dance, like the dance of sex, continue in the face of the ever-moving paradox.

In sex is a metaphor for every relationship. So, dear reader, at Beltane let us honour the acts of pleasure.

Sexual love is akin in many ways to my relationship with the divine. It is like being a priestess, it always feels to me. Or, to use another parlance, a devotee. My path asks me to see divinity in each person. Each of us is a god, each a goddess. How do I do that. Platitudinously, calmly, wisely? Only sometimes, my young friend, but not always. Infatuated desire many of us know well. We have, for the beloved, the look of love (as the song goes) we see them through what is often called rose-tinted glasses. ‘Everything she does is magic,’ sings Sting out of the 1980s Police album I used to bop along to in my teens. It’s standard to say that when we desire a person, we don’t see them accurately, we only see them wrongly, deludedly. What if that is not right? What if when we are enamoured and longing, we see the person as they really are – full of magic, every tiny thing adorable, every tiny thing excruciatingly desirable. What if the look of love is the true gaze? I would suggest it is. If you want to know how to really appreciate a fellow being, recall the way you regard a longed for lover. Regard the awe they inspire in you, the tenderness of which they in their very being, seem worthy. Thus does desire, visceral desire, give us a taste of what it is to see divinity in each being.

For this, and for all the other, yet-to-be discovered illuminations offered by desire and pleasure, let us give the feast of Beltane its due, untrammelled by the misleading euphemism of ‘fertility’.

Midsummer, which follow Beltane, is indeed abut being a householder (to borrow an Indian term) or, on a grander scale, to be a Sovereign, a ruler. With or without physical child, this can be. At midsummer one celebrates the ability to reign over one’s own domain, in balanced power and responsibility. It may include a family or a marriage to enjoy and be responsible for. It is also the responsibility for one’s flocks and fields, and one’s people: family, children, friends, employees, dependents. To be strong enough to give support and care to the weaker, the poorer, the lonelier.

But, ah, Beltane. Beltane is not all that, and need not even create a child for it to grow into this phase.

Let us give desire its due, and sexual pleasure its holy rites.

Yours sincerely,

Christina