“Meaning is not in things, but in between; in the iridescence, the interplay; in the interconnections; at the intersections, at the crossroads. Meaning is transitional as it is transitory; in the puns or bridges, the correspondence.”
Norman O Brown, Love’s Body

Whenever I exit London Bridge station, I make a brief nod in the direction of Cross Bones graveyard – its part of my recognition of London’s network of sacred spaces. I’ve been to some of the monthly vigils held at this place, but more often than not, just strolling past it – and knowing that it’s there amid the bustle of London is enough for me. A couple of mornings ago, I wandered down to the gate and spent a few minutes gazing at it, occasionally reaching out to briefly touch the ribbons – some incribed with names and dates from the eighteenth century – festooning the bars. A van passes, a train slowly clunks aross the bridge over Redcross Way. Reflecting on what this materialisation of death and loss means for me, whilst stroking a faded ribbon, brought to mind Carolyn Dinshaw’s evocative phrase from her book Getting Medieval of the need for making “a touch across time”.

Cross Bones graveyard was “discovered” in the 1990s by the Museum of London Archeology Service during the construction of the Jubilee Underground line. In 1992, 148 skeletons were removed, and the archeologists estimated that the site could contain up to 15,000 bodies. Cross Bones has been identified as an unconsecrated graveyard primarily used to interr prostitutes who were excluded from Christian burial.

Cross Bones is part of the “Southwark Stews”. In the fourteenth century Southwark came under the juristiction of the City of London, but certain areas – called “liberties” remained under the control of powerful church officials. It was in the so-called Liberty of Winchester, (controlled by the Bishop Winchester) that the “stews” – licensed brothels – were established (the name “stews” comes from the vapour baths by which brothel-goers tried to steam themselves free of venereal disease). It’s likely that Southwark had a thriving brothel culture before the enterprising bishop decided to profit from legalising and regulating them. The area was renown for a variety of “noisome” trades, such as brewing, tanning, and lime-burning, as well as small traders who wanted to escape the craft and guild regulations of the City. Southwark was also home to a large proportion of foreigners described using the term Doche (which encompassed Dutch, Flemish and Germans).

The ordinances drawn up to regulate the brothels included the strictures that prostitutes were barred from living or boarding at the stewhouses, and during religious holidays the prostitutes had to leave not only the stewhouses but the entire area of the liberty (both these regulations were routinely violated) and the stewhouses were ordered closed during nights when Parliament sat. Women who took lovers and maintained them financially were punished with prison (the bishop had his own prison, the Clink), fines, and banishment from the area. Once a woman became “public property” she had no right to a private life. It is from these regulations that the euphemism – “single women” (used to describe Cross Bones) emerges with the attendant idea that women who were not attached to a husband were in effect, common property. Southwark was also home to Whilst the City of London had no legal jurisdiction over Southwark, its councillors attempted to keep prostitutes from the Stews out of the city – for example, in 1351 prostitutes were barred from adopting the dress of “good and noble dames” (vestments trimmed with fur or lined with silk) and told to wear only simple clothes and a striped hood; and an order in 1391 banned boatmen from ferrying men and women across the river to the stews.

In the eighteenth century, Cross Bones had become a general graveyard for paupers, and by 1853 the site was apparently so full of bodies that it was closed as a health hazard and for the most part, forgotten, until its rediscovery in the 1990s.

Why then, choose Cross Bones for reflections on queering sacred space?

As Adrian Harris says in his paper – Honouring the Outcast Dead – Cross Bones is a unique “sacred site”. It’s “discovery” is fairly recent, for a start, and like many fragments of London’s history, it almost seamlessly blends into the maze of architectural styles – were it not for the iron be-ribboned gate, it would be just another walled-off area, easy to miss, easy to walk past.

Considered as a Pagan site for finding connection with the sacred, Cross Bones is somewhat atypical – unlike more familiar sacred sites such as Stonehenge or Avebury, it’s located within an urban setting. I think this itself makes Cross Bones worthy of more attention. Despite occasional forays into “urban shamanism” Pagan discourses on sacred sites tend to focus on sacred place-making outside of metropolitan centres. Nor can Cross Bones be easily accomodated in the “pagan ownership” narratives that sometimes underwrite contestations of sacred space – that prior to the onset of Christianity (or even the Romans) such sites were “pagan” and that on that basis, contemporary Pagans are “reclaiming” the space as their own. Nor is it immediately obvious how a graveyard for sex workers and infants intersects with the broader theme of “honouring/connecting with ancestors” via the perspective that sites such as Avebury or Stonehenge represent ancient forms of spirituality. Again, Cross Bones is different – it’s sacredness is new – a product of its rediscovery and the subsequent events held there. Adrian, in his paper, draws a parallel between the tokens on the gate at Cross Bones and the “shrines” that mark “the site of road accident deaths” but they also recall for me, the “rag tree” offerings at West Kennet, Avebury and Augustine’s Well at Cerne Abbas.

At the same time, Cross Bones is a fragile site – dependent for its survival, ultimately, on the willingness of Transport for London (TfL), for whom the site represents a prime development area, to work with “local community concerns” such as The Friends of Cross Bones’ proposal that part of the site be put aside for a memorial garden (see Goose Garden for developments). It’s also “fragile” in the sense that its not segregated from other spaces – it’s not, for the most part a “quiet” space where one can easily gain that sense of hushed reverence that we tend to associate with the experience of “sacred space” (from standing stones to Christian churches).

Cross Bones is I’d suggest, a site where pluralistic affiliations coexist and collide. You don’t have to make an affiliation with John Constable’s elaborate The Southwark Mysteries to appreciate Cross Bones, or to feel a connection with the “outcast dead” interred there. That is a matter of self-identification, and the public Cross Bones events have a firm commitment to inclusiveness – no one would be turned away for not being sufficiently “outcast”, and the events attract a wide variety of attendees – people who live in the area, visiting Pagans, Christians, local politicians and the London Mayor (see this Indymedia article for some debate about linking Cross Bones to St. George’s day). As Cross Bones events are not only celebratory, but also work to raise the profile of the site in order that it is not built over, the events have to be inclusive to the widest possible spectrum of potential allies.

Although its well-recognised that the site is Christian (albeit “outcast Christians”) and as Adrian points out, the only icon inside the graveyard is a statue of the Madonna, London Pagans make up a good proportion of those who attend both the monthly vigils and the Halloween festivals which have been held yearly there since 1998. More recently, Cross Bones has become incorporated into walking events organised by Cooltan Arts – marking International Women’s Day and International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia – which in 2011 included a blessing by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (May Day Largactyl Shuffle) at Cross Bones. Not only is Cross Bones a site for remembering its interred “Whores and Paupers of Southwark” but in 2007, messages were pinned to the gate memorialising five women sex-workers who were murdered that year in Ipswich. It has also been recognised as an important site by the International Union of Sex Workers who would like to see the site preserved as a memorial for sex workers. There are other possible claimants too – an 1833 report, expressing concerns over public health and grave-robbing speaks of Cross Bones having an “Irish Corner”.

Here lay your hearts, your flowers,
Your Book of Hours,
Your fingers, your thumbs,
Your Miss You, Mums.
Here hang your hopes, your dreams,
Your Might-Have-Beens,
Your locks, your keys,
Your Mysteries.
The Southwark Mysteries

Cross Bones would not have become a sacred space without John Constable, whose visionary contact with a genuis loci – “the goose” moved him to begin the monthly vigils, the celebrations, and the campaign to preserve the site in some form. His play, The Southwark Mysteries has been performed at both the Globe Theatre and Southwark Cathedral, and caused a minor controversy when it was first performed, due to its depictions of a “swearing Jesus” and a female Satan wearing a strapon phallus. Although John Constable’s own magical perspective (see The Goose, The Crow and The Cross Bones Portal) is often the first point of contact for people wanting to find out more about Cross Bones – I think what is interesting here is that Constable works hard to stress that what is happening at Cross Bones is an “unfolding vision” rather than an attempt to create a particular doctrine.

From the crossbones website’s Halloween event page:

The form of the ritual embodies these contraries: combining a sense of awe and reverence with a bawdy humour befitting The Goose. It presents a syncretic vision of healing and transformation, rooted in native pagan animism and Crow’s idiosyncratic Goddess worship, and encompassing elements of ‘left-hand’ Magdalene Gnosticism, Buddhism, Tantra, spiritualism and the Western Magical Tradition. However, Crow has always asserted that The Goose’s teachings are not a doctrine, creed or belief-system. They can best be understood as a spiritual practice in which conflicting ideas can co-exist within a spiritual or astral state of ‘Liberty’ or ongoing process of liberation. The Southwark Mysteries and other teachings of the Goose-Crow source are revealed in poetry and song, as allusions and emblems of that which cannot be spoken, rather than as literal, ‘gospel’ truth.

Yet at the same time that Constable/Crow makes this appeal to openness – to an “ongoing process of liberation” I think its obvious that the events he has staged there have played an instrumental role in shaping the emerging “mysteries” of Cross Bones. I wonder if, in time, other enactments will accrue around similar burial sites in London such as Cripplegate in Warwick Place or the Bethlem graveyard (again recently rediscovered due to excavations around Liverpool Street Station)? Possibly only if someone comes forwards who is passionate about the sites to devote care and attention to them.

Carolyn Dinshaw, in Getting Medieval describes what she terms the “queer historical impulse” – a desire to make that “touch across time” that is based not in continuity but a “shared positionality” – an “impulse toward making connections across time between, on the one hand, lives, texts, and other cultural phenomena left out of sexual categories back then and, on the other, those left out of current sexual categories now.”
She proposes a politics based not on identity – that is, the continuist model of history which emphasises an easy, essential sameness between past and present – but using the past, and a sense of partial connection to work for connectivity and coalition, crossing boundaries not only across time, but more conventional divides (such as academic-nonacademic, or queer-normative). Dinshaw’s work seeks to interrupt the temporal seperation between past and present.

Cross Bones, I think, fits well with both of these strands, in terms of its coalition, inclusive politics, and its presence as a tangible reminder that the past is never truly gone, that it continues to be felt and that its meanings are always contested, revised, and reconfigured.

“Among the women I saw some men dressed like women, with whom they go about regularly, never joining the men. The commander called them amaricados, perhaps because the Yumas call effeminate men maricas. I asked who these men were, and they replied that they were not men like the rest, and for this reason they went around covered in this way. From this I inferred that they must be hermaphrodites but from what I learned later I understood that they were sodomites, dedicated to nefarious practices. …I conclude that in this matter of incontinence there will be much to do when the Holy Faith and the Christian religion are established among them.”Fray Pedro Font, Font’s Complete Diary of the Second Anza Expedition 1775-1776

For this post, I’m going to briefly summarise some themes in contemporary scholarship relating to eighteenth century attitudes to sex and gender, which underwent great changes throughout the century. This is useful for understanding eighteenth century accounts of shamanism, as many of these accounts throughout the century increasingly focused on what we would now call “gender-variance” as a marker for shamanic behaviour. Several scholars have argued that due to changes in the way sexuality and gender were understood in eighteenth-century European culture, contact accounts of primitive cultures shifted from a general representation of whole cultures being inclined towards same-sex relations towards an increased focus upon same-sex desires as a special case – that of the “effeminate sodomite”. According to Rudi Bleys (1996):

The actual or presumed coincidence of cross-gender roles with same-sex praxis made the former instrumental to new sexual theory in Europe that locked sodomy inexorably into the corset of femininity. Passivity, more particularly, as located in the receptive use of the anus, became quintessential to the ‘sodomite’ identity – a different idea, altogether, from previous notions of sodomy, which included the active partner as well as the passive one, men as well as women.(p81)

Mark Johnson (2009) argues that European encounters with males who dressed as women and engaged in women’s occupations were both fascinating and a source of consternation for European travellers, and that encounters with these “primitive” others were both shaped by, and themselves influenced changing discourses about the nature of sex and gender – in particular, informing what was to become the dominant image of homosexuality. I will look at some of these accounts in more detail in future posts, but for now I’m going to briefly examine the ideas of two influential theorists – Thomas Laqueur and Randolph Trumbach.

From one sex to two sexes?
The central argument of Thomas Laqueur’s Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (1992) is that the understanding of the relationship between men and women underwent a major transformation over the course of the eighteenth century. Prior to this transformation, a ‘one-sex model’ was the dominant scheme, based on the idea that the body was composed of four humours – cold, hot, moist and dry – and that men were dominantly composed of hot and dry humours, and women by cold and moist humours – and that differences of sex were differences of degree. Semen, for example, was produced by bodily heat, and it was thought that women with too much bodily heat could produce semen and even, if they became too hot through excessive exercise, suddenly develop a penis. Menstruation was similarly understood not as something unique to women, but as an example of the body’s propensity to bleed in order to expell excess materials. Only one body existed, and it was represented as essentially male, and whilst females were thought of as “lesser males” with outside-in bodies; men and women were not considered to be radically different in terms of bodily constitution. Medical literature conceptualised the female body as an “inferior” version of the male body, with equivalences between testicles and ovaries; scrotum and uterus; foreskin and labia. Some physicians believed that men’s genitalia were externalised due to the heat of male bodies, which “drove” their organs outwards. Metaphysical understandings of the hierarchy of nature made men and women part of the same order, with men placed above women. However, whilst women becoming men due to excess heat was accepted, the notion that men could become women was not, due to the belief that nature tended towards perfection – and for a man to become a woman would be unnatural – the perfect becoming imperfect.

Laqueur argues that during the eighteenth century, this ‘one-sex model’ was replaced by a ‘two-sex model’ in which men and women became anatomically, opposites, radically different from each other:

“Thus the old [Galenic] model, in which men and women were arrayed according to their degree of metaphysical perfection, their vital heat, along an axis whose telos was male, gave way by the eighteenth century to a new model of radical dimorphism, of biological divergence. An anatomy and physiology of incommensurability replaced a metaphysics of hierarchy in the representation of woman in relation to man.”

Laqueur proposes that the “two-sex” model emerged primarily due to political changes and the decline of religious authority and not to medical discoveries. Laqueur proposes that in order to reinforce the political notion of natural rights, bodies were redefined in terms of opposite sexes. Power could only be formally granted to one group (men) and withheld from another group (women) if the two were distinct and incommensurable – and Political theorists turned to biology and medical treatises in order to justify this view in terms of emerging scientific discourse, rather than Adam’s dominance over Eve. So for example, The demotion of the pre-Englightenment metaphysical order took place at the same time as the fragmentation of social order:

“The rise of evangelical religion, Enlightenment political theory, the deveopment of new sorts of public spaces in the eighteenth century, Lockean ideas of marriage as a contract, the cataclysmic possibilities for social change wrought by the French revolution, postrevolutionary conservatism, postrevolutionary feminism. the factory system with its restructuring of the division of labour, the rise of a free market economy in services or commodities, the birth of classes, singly or in combination – none of these things caused the making of a new sexed body. Instead, the remaking of the body is itself intrinsic to each of these developments.” (1992, p11)

There is some debate amongst scholars over the timing of this shift to the “two-sex model” with some historians locating the shift beginning to occurr in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, whilst others have pointed out that this process was also historically uneven, with the single-sex and two-sex frameworks continuing to exist side-by-side for some time. Despite critiques however, Laqueuer’s work has had a considerable impact on contemporary studies of sexuality & gender.

Mollies: a third gender?
Randolph Trumbach, in his book Sex and the Gender Revolution proposes that:

“Around 1700 in northwestern Europe, in England, France and the Dutch Republic, there appeared a minority of adult men whose sexual desires were directed exclusively toward adult and adolescent males. These men could be identified by what seemed to their contemporaries to be effeminate behaviour in speech, movement and dress. They had not, however, entirely transformed themselves into women but instead combined into a third gender selected aspects of the behavior of the majority of men and women. Since a comparable minority of masculinised women who exclusively desired other women did not appear until the 1770s, it is therefore the case that for most of the eighteenth century there existed in northern Europe what might be described as a system of three genders composed of men, women, and sodomites”
(p3)

According to Trumbach, prior to the eighteenth century in European societies, same-sex desire between males was organised around differences in age, between active, adult men and passive boys – a pattern which he points out, was present in ancient Greece and Rome, and in early Christian Europe and in the later Middle Ages. Trumbach cites the work of Michael Rocke (see Forbidden Friendships) in demonstrating that in Renaissance Florence, sodomy was nigh on universal between men, but always structured by age. Trumbach points out that although sodomy was illegal, and the church spoke out against it as immoral “the actual sexual behaviour of men had changed very little from what it had been in the ancient pagan Mediterrranean world” (p5).

From the 1690s onwards, opinion changed from the old system, which was characterised by all males passing through a period of sexual passivity in adolescence, to a new system, wherein sexual passivity and homosexual desire was presumed to be indicative of an effeminate minority. These “new” adult sodomites were known colloquially as mollies – a term which, Trumbach says, was first applied to female prostitutes, and were charactised he argues, by playing two roles – one in the public world and another in the so-called “molly-house” inside which they took women’s names and adopted the speech and body movements of women. Historians have uncovered a well-established network of molly-house and open-air meeting places distributed throughout London in the early eighteenth-century. In addition to Mother Clap’s molly-house in Holborn, there were also houses near the Old Bailey and Newgate Prison, in Soho, Charing Cross, Drury Lane and St. James’s Square. A pamphlet attacking Charles Hitchins, a prominent thief-taker in London in the 1710s describes the behaviour inside a molly-house:

…they had no sooner entered but the Marshal was complemented by the company with the titles of Madam and Ladyship. The man asking the occasion of these uncommon devoirs, the Marshal said it was a familiar language common to the house. The man was not long there before he was more surprised than at first. The men calling one another ‘my dear’ and hugging, kissing and tickling each other as if they were a mixture of wanton males and females, and assuming effeminate voices and airs; some telling others that they ought to be whipped for not coming to school more frequently … Some were completely rigged in gowns, petticoats, headcloths, fine laced shoes, furbelowed scarves, and masks; some had riding hoods; some were dressed like milkmaids, others like shepherdesses with green hats, waistcoats and petticoats; and others had their faces patched and painted and wore very extensive hoop petticoats, which had been very lately introduced.”
(quoted in Hitchcock, p68)

Mollies became the focus of increased public scrutiny and condemnation, and some historians have argued that the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which attacked effeminate sodomites in print, helped forge a link between the flouting of codes of masculine behaviour with the idea that such men were exclusively interested in sex with other men. These societies were concerned with social reform, particularly the elimination of blasphemy, idleness, and lewd and disorderly behaviour. They frequently relied on informers and agents to gather evidence, and although their most frequent targets were prostitutes, it is their attacks on molly houses (1699, 1707 and 1726) which has provided much of the historical evidence for the existence of molly culture. The Societies published trial reports, public sermons and accounts of their own activities, and from the late 1690s onwards there were frequent references to both molly-houses and sodomites in printed pamphlets and newspapers. Hitchcock points out that whilst the Reformation Societies closed down molly-houses, those men who were publicly exposed on the pillory were sometimes savagely treated by the London crowd – many were severely injured and some men died. (see secret sexualities for further discussion).

Men displaying effeminate mannerisms were increasingly subject to blackmail, persecution and punishment and it is argued that the increased emphasis on legal regulation also contributed to the idea that the sodomite was a distinct social and sexual type. Prior to the eighteenth century, the term “sodomite” encompassed a wide range of acts, but by the early eighteenth-century, it came to denote almost exclusively sexual acts between men. Trumbach discusses how many boys and men charged with sodomy were represented, at their trials as ‘mollies’ (regardless of whether or not they exhibited signs of effeminacy) and suffered the stigma and the harsh punishments associated with such an attribution. Such developments, he contends, obliged men to present their masculine status exclusively through their interest in women – and sex ceased to be represented as that which took place between an active and passive partner (regardless of gender) but as an act between men and women.

As the eighteenth century progressed, sodomy and effeminacy came under increasing scientific scrutiny. Some social theorists interpreted same-sex desire as being produced by luxury, excess and idleness – an explanation which pointed not only to modern European cultures, but also “primitive” societies (see previous post for some related discussion). The sailor John Marra for example, in his Journal of the Resolution’s Voyage in 1772, 1773, 1774 and 1775 on Discovery in the Southern Hemisphere (published in London in 1775) described the polynesians as “an effeminate race, intoxicated with pleasure, and enfeebled by indulgence” (Wilson, 2004, p351). Effeminacy could also be a product of cultures where men spent too much time around women, or as John Millar theorised, societies where women had too much political or social status.

Sources
Rudi Bleys, The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-male Sexual Behaviour outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination 1750-1918 (Cassell, 1996)
Martin B. Duberman (ed) A queer world: the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies reader (New York University Press, 1997)
Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Tim Hitchcock English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997)
Thomas Laqueur Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1992)
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)
Bradford Mudge (ed) When Flesh Becomes Word: An Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Libertine Literature (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Kim M. Phillips & Barry Reay Sex before Sexuality: A Premodern History (Polity Press, 2011)
Michael Rocke Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford University Press 1996)
Will Roscoe Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (St. Martin’s Press, 2000)
Rousseau, Porter (eds) Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester University Press, 1987)
Randolph Trumbach Sex and the Gender Revolution: Heterosexuality and the third gender in Enlightenment London v. 1 (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
Kathleen Wilson (ed) A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (State University of New York, 2004)

What does can it mean to “queer” something? Queering can be thought of a process of disrupting, disturbing and questioning the normal – that which is “taken-for-granted.” Queer sidles up to identities, ideologies; any category that have been taken to be timeless, solid and foundational and exposes gaps, fissures, resistances, instabilities, different possibilities and surprises. As Jeffrey J. Cohen says in Medieval Identity Machines – “Queering is at its heart a process of wonder.” (p38). I want that on a T-shirt.

Part of this commitment to challenge, to uncover the hidden, to look backstage and discover how productions are produced is the commitment to keep “queer” fuzzy and indeterminant. A recognition of the importance of not slipping back into an “us-them” binary which privileges a heroic “transgressive” queer subject against those still bound up in normative relations.

Someone asked me recently if Queer Paganism could be thought of as a “tradition”. It’s an interesting question, which for me highlights how Pagans tend to conceptualise different categories of praxis into “traditions”. It also begs a questioning of how the very concept of “Traditions” is used in Pagan discourse. “Tradition” is sometimes used to denote a commonality of praxis – which is to say that it often implies common practices, ideologies, political alliances – and often, there is an implication that this praxis is historically located – a kind of sense that what we do now was done by our ancestors, sort of thing. Tradition can be thought of (simplifying hugely) as an appeal to unity to varying degrees – and can act as a boundary in making distinctions between one approach to praxis and another. But for Queer Pagan(ism) such appeals to unity can only be, I think, of a temporary nature. One thing i see as central to Queer Paganism is a commitment to diversity and difference – which involves allowing a place for dissent – and the understanding that dissent is itself productive, rather than a failure. Equally, making a case for a historical Queer Paganism is also tricky – although we can talk (at length!) about celebrating queer ancestors, reading queerness into and out of histories, of uncovering the politics of dissent hidden behind monolithic accounts of the past – I don’t think that’s quite the same as rooting a Queer Pagan praxis in the deep, undifferentiated past, if only because I think of Queer Paganism as something new – queer theory and queer activism both emerged out of the 1990s.

If one can speak of “Queer Pagan Tradition” at all – then it is as something that is relational to particular alliances and networks. produced within and temporary to heterotopic spaces such as Queer Pagan Camp. Perhaps a sense of shared tradition emerges when Queer Pagans come together to laugh, celebrate, dance and argue, but outside of such spaces it recedes, dissolving like morning dew. I’d suggest that, rather than looking at tradition as a boundary which encloses particular practices (such as theologies, rituals etc.,) what seems to me to be of more concern within a Queer Pagan space is a commitment to an ethic of mutual care and reciprocity; to an invitation to play with boundaries and categories; to celebrate difference. Its this ethical openness – primarily towards sexual and gendered – but also other forms of difference which I see as central to understanding Queer Pagan approaches – that queer need not be a either/or choice made in opposition to other identities, but (depending on context/situation) possibly a “both/and” choice, or even a “neither/nor” choice. Opening to the possibilities of fluidity entails an acceptancy of multiple orientations and positions that shift according to particular contexts and situations.

If this is a tradition (in a loose sense), it’s one that is being passed around, rather than handed down. It’s focused towards what might be thought of as a politics of doing rather than being.

This, for me, is related to queer theory’s attention to the exposure – and challenging – of how subjects are produced through binary identity categories – heteronormative ideologies, practices, values and assumptions. At the same time, queer theories have contributed to the perspective that identities (including, but not limited to sexual identities) can be thought of as fluid and changing – where selfhood (the “I” position) is not generation in opposition to an other – but discursively negotiated through others. Similarly, activist groups such as Queeruption have stressed the importance of a non-seperationist politics – for example, fuzzying the boundary between serious political work and frivolous personal play and attempting to break down the boundaries between “leaders” and “the led”. At QPC for instance, anyone can turn up and offer a workshop, a discussion, a public ritual, but this is done on the basis of sharing – workshop facilitators are not paid, nor are they accorded the status which at other events, tends to reinforce a distinction between leaders and consumers.

So, back to Queering-Paganism, something which may take the form of Wicca with added glitter, or ceremonial magic in high heels, but also examining/critiquing various strands of Pagan discourse from different queer perspectives. Thus far, such examinations have tended to focus on the ways in which Pagan discourses of sexuality & gender uphold the logic of the heteronormative gender binary in both practices and metaphysics. In America, there are signs that the constroversy sparked by the exclusion of transgendered Pagans at Pantheacon this year and in 2011 is also provoking a closer critique of Pagan discourses around sexuality, gender – and despite the surface rhetoric of being “inclusive” – how Pagan praxis actually works against this, producing seperations and boundaries. I see these projects as the beginnings of conversations that I hope will spiral outwards into wider areas (for example, last month I made a brief foray into queering Pagan representations of deities), asking provocative questions and opening up new possibilities for exploration.

With thanks to Gavin Brown for some provocative writing and conversation.

More Loltheorist fun at loltheorists.livejournal.com

“The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.”
Michael Foucault

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Queer as a form of resistance to identification – a refusal to be categorised or reified into some kind of essential formation. One of my objections to polarity is that, as a form of discourse, it binarises everything according to an either/or regime of signification – and can only, it seems, admit contradiction and ambiguity by having a “third space” which still relies on the the other two points, no matter how much it seems to challenge them (i.e one gets to be male, female, or a bit of both). I’ve taking this from something Eve Sedgwick says about queerness as a resistance to the very idea of fixed gender/sexual identity as if these were natural givens or transparently empirical categories, rather than being historical/cultural formations. Its about making the choice not to be limited to either this, that, or the bit in the middle – its a celebration of diversity and complexity, contingency and contradiction.

I’ve been pondering recently how pagan & occult discourses tend to frame deities. A very common approach is that deities are “biographised” – in the sense that books on magic tend to do short thumbnail biographies of deities, their appearance, likes, dislikes, maybe a myth or two in which they feature, their “functions” (what they are “for”), symbolism, and often, their place in a particular pantheon – frequently with all the brevity of a Craigslist personal ad. This strikes me as reductive, particularly the way that deities get to be limited to particular functions (“deity x is a healer, deity y is for courage, etc). I think that because we are used, in western culture, to thinking of ourselves as bounded, stable individuals possessing a fixed essence, (a particular sexuality, for example) agency and limitations, that we tend to represent deities in the same way.

And by extension, it seems to me that there’s a tendency to approach deities purely in terms of “what they can do for us”. Not long ago, I was approached just prior to doing a public ritual with the question, “What lesson will Kali teach me?” I must admit I was surprised, as I’ve never thought of Kali as “teaching particular lessons”. Sure, one can look back at life events and see a lesson learned (or not, as the case may be) in retrospect – but wanting to know a lesson in advance strikes me as peculiar – it’s another kind of demand-making – and seems an odd way to begin one’s relationship with a deity.

The kind of “hard” polytheism which is getting so popular nowadays, which tends to treat all deities as seperate individual beings is in some ways, I think, a reflection of this tendency. It’s also a response to the paganism of the 1970s-80s which tended to diffuse all deities into “archetypes” (i.e. Pan is the same as Krishna). Both approaches have their problems – the archetypal perspective tends to ignore historical and cultural influences in favour of a universalisation of deity (all deities which share features a,b,c are instances or facets of archetype X) and the hard polytheism which makes all deities seperate and individual tends to ignore situations where deities merge into one another (such as Kali becoming Krishna). Both have a tendency to privilege “the past” as more authoritative than the recent, and so find it difficult to accomodate “new” deities such as AIDS-Amma or Santoshima in India (I’ve been involved in many arguments about the appropriateness of worshipping Buffy as a deity, for example). Both approaches have difficulty with contingency, contradiction and the paradoxical – the “queerness” of deities, if you like – which resides in their protean instability – so often found in Greek narratives of desire – look at Zeus becoming a swan for Leda, a bull for Europa, an eagle for Ganymede, and a shower of gold for Danae. That last one is particularly “queer” don’t you think?

There’s a tendency, I think, to seek in our conceptions of deity an idealised reflection of our own preferred conceptual categories and in so doing, to lose sight of both their historical origins and contexts and, importantly, their instabilities and excesses.

Revisiting my earlier reflections on “queering” Baphomet – one of the points I was trying to get across was that we need not restrict Baphomet to the human-animal polygendered hybrid – that the “static” image of Baphomet (as in Levi’s depiction) can be considered but one of their many forms – a temporary “snapshot” – but we are more than our photos, yes? We might think of the iconographical image as a partial representation, that the stillness of the form hides the seething exuberance of life exceeding all limitations, refusing to be chained by expectations and definitions, escaping limitations and overflowing any attempt to categorise and capture. One might for example, imagine a completely non-human Baphomet, insectoid, amoeboid, a cybernet Baphometic, a Baphomet of systems in decay; a baphomet emerging out of mucous and sticky bodily fluids, a Baphomet formed from the dreams of dead cities. So, if we’re to think of Baphomet as queer, in the way I’ve written about queer above, what does this entail? We could say, for example, that Baphomet is a representation of Queer’s refusal to be defined, an orientation to the world given (temporary) form as a chimeric assemblage – a multiplicious many-bodied hybrid which exceeds any attempt at being defined, codified, and reduced. The “sum” of all our desires/differences known and as yet unthought – not the capacity to be a shape-shifter, but continually shifting shape, blurring boundaries, weeds pushing through pavement cracks, the inviting smile of a stranger when you least expect it. This, I think, invites us to think about deities and our relation to them, in a different way.

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.

“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)

“Shocking things go on here. You wouldn’t believe it! Licentiousness! Orgies! …. Even bingo. Oh yes.”
Lurcio (Frankie Howerd), Up Pompeii

“If a boy has the fortune to be born beautiful, but does not offer his arse for the enjoyment of others, may he fall in love with a beautiful girl and never manage to bed her.”
Graffiti found at Pompeii, quoted from Varone, 2001, p131

In 1734 Charles of Bourbon, king of Naples and Sicily commenced a programme of digging around Naples to search for classical treasures, which led to the excavation of Herculaneum (1738) the rediscovery of Pompeii (1763) and the Villa dei Papiri. The discoveries – which included the Villa of Diomedes (1771) in which eighteen bodies of women and children caught by the eruption attracted great interest – and by the 1760s Naples and Pompeii had become one of the favourite stopping points for those undertaking the Grand Tour. But amidst the wealth of classical treasures brought out of the ground were objects of a more troubling nature. One such find was a marble statue of Pan copulating with a goat, unearthed from the Villa dei Papiri in 1752.

According to Judith Harris, Charles and his court were present at Karl Weber’s excavation site when this sculpture group was brought to light:

“Amidst a flotilla of courtiers in silks and befurred velvet finery, Charles and his Prussian wife Queen Maria Amalia arrived in a rustling, stately procession and took their seats on folding chairs. From the bowels of the earth the carved white marble group of two embracing figures, which Weber had found in the Great Peristyle, appeared at the mouth of the tunnel, borne upon a litter carried by prison labourers. A shiver of excitement rippled through the court. Already the dainty turn of that horn revealed the prized Greek look. When the whole sculpture group hoved into view two heads could be seen and two bodies. One seemed to be a man of sorts, though at closer look he wore two small horns on his head. He gazed fondly into the female’s languid marble eyes. For locked in his embrace was a female goat, surely the prettiest in the flock, whom he was in the act of penetrating.”
(Harris, 2005, p47)

Charles was shocked by this find, ordered the excavations to be halted, and consigned the statue to a cupboard, with access granted only with the direct permission of the king himself. Johann Winckelmann asked permission to view the statue, but was turned down. Standards must have lapsed later, as Richard Payne Knight, in his Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786) refers to the statue as “well-known”. In the early nineteenth century, this statue became part of the collection of the so-called “Secret Cabinet” to which access was restricted to only “persons of mature age and of proven morality”, a decree made by Francis I in 1819, after visiting the Royal Bourbon Museum. By 1823, any artefacts judged to be “disreputable objects of pagan licentiousness” were restricted to this private room.

One N. Brooke, in his Observations on the manners and customs of Italy (1798) was apparently so disturbed by the sculpture of Pan and the goat that he reported it to be made of bronze, rather than marble:

“At the end of one of the galleries is a small room kept locked, and having no ladies with us, my friend ordered it to be opened, in which is placed a single bronze statue of a goat and satyr in a joined unnatural position, that which decency cannot be described, and had it been mine I would have thrown it into the burning mountain, which had once buried it under its lava.”
(quoted from Mattusch, 2005, p156)

News of these discoveries travelled quickly, despite Bourbon attempts to restrict publications relating to the excavations. The diplomat Dominique-Vivant Denon made a series of drawings (including the infamous Pan & goat) based on the erotic artefacts from Pompeii, and published it under the title Priapees et sujets divers. Collectors converged on Naples and there was a brisk trade in manufacturing copies of erotic objects. Winckelmann reported finding on the market forgeries of Priapic figures from Pompeii in paint and sculpture. One venetian artist, Guiseppe Guerra, specialised in producing copies of frescoes dominated by phallic images, for sale to enthusiastic tourists.

Pierre-Sylvain Maréchal, between 1780 and 1803, published a nine-volume work devoted to the finds at Herculaneum, which contained engravings of priapean themes (though Pan was omitted). Maréchal, whilst portraying the ancient Romans as “childlike” and “innocent” tended to apologise for the presence of erotic imagery and artefacts:

“I know of no way to justify the Ancients in this cynical habit. Their imagination, inflamed by the lure of pleasure, desired that all objects, even the most indifferent and alien to this purpose, should remind them of what seems to have been the sole focus of their existence. Vases, lamps, everyday utensils, and the most necessary articles of furniture became, as it were, accomplices of their libertinism, by showing them its crude simulacrum. We must believe that articles shaped like this were intended only for bawdyhouses.”
(quoted from Kendrick, 1997, p9)

Before the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, Rome had been thought as a font of austere majesty and wisdom, but as the excavations uncovered a wide range of sexually explicit objects and scenes, painted on walls and floor mosaics, on vases, in sculpture and everyday objects, scholars gradually (and reluctantly) came to the conclusion that such erotic displays were not exceptions, but the rule. One popular notion which arose in the wake of these discoveries was that the Roman Empire had collapsed because of moral corruption and depravity (a view that still retains some currency, judging by Roberto De Mattei’s comments back in April, 2011) – and that the eruption of Vesuvius was a divine punishment for the licentiousness of the inhabitants of Pompeii.

There is considerable evidence to suggest that literate people in the eighteenth century were aware of ancient Greek and Roman sexual behaviour – see for example Immorality of the Ancient Philosophers, 1735. References to ancient same-sex lovers such as Ganymede and Antinous appear throughout eighteenth-century texts both as terms of derision and ‘codes’ for establishing shared interest. Anne Lister, for example is said to have learned Latin and Greek in order to seek out references to love and sex between women, and also used classical references to same-sex love in negotiating her affairs with other women. Petronius’ infamous Roman novel, Satyricon (see Wikipedia for a plot synopsis) was available in the eighteenth century and there is a reference made to its corrupting (‘sodomitical’) influence in Tobias Smollett’s (1748) novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random.

The Grand Tour
In the eighteenth century it became fashionable for young men of wealth and rank to go on “the Grand Tour” to France and Italy in order to have their education finished. The tour generally lasted between two and five years, and the great cultural centres of Paris, Rome and Naples were favourite stopping points. The discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum also added to the attractions of the Grand Tour, and wealthy antiquarians flocked to Naples, first as collectors, and later as dealers. Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy to Naples from 1764, amassed an enormous collection of antiquities, and his residence became a popular stop on the Tour. The Tour was also an opportunity for sexual adventure, and there were frequent worries that travel to France and Italy would “effeminate” young men. Italy, in particular, had a reputation for sodomy and tracts such as Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England (1729) blamed Italian influences such as opera, whilst Churchill’s 1764 poem The Times had it that:

“ITALIA, nurse of ev’ry softer art,
Who, feigning to refine, unmans the heart,
Who lays the realms of Sense and Virtue waste,
Who marrs whilst she pretends to mend our taste,
ITALIA, to compleat and crown our shame”
The Times

Attitudes to Italy were also coloured by anti-Catholic sentiments and by the climatic theory of temperament. For example, Montesquieu, in his 1748 work, The Spirit of the Laws claimed that people of cold climates tended to be industrious and orderly whilst those who dwelt in hot climates tended to be lazy and chaotic.

In addition to its cultural possibilities, the Grand Tour was also attractive for the possibility of sexual adventures – including those of a transgressive nature. William Beckford referred to Italy as “the place for sinners of a certain sort”.

The discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum also helped fuel a rise in interest in Classical art – and collections of classical art became emblems of of the wealth and taste of their owners. Such was the passion of English collectors for examples of classical art that one contemporary Italian commented “Were our Amphitheatre portable, the English would carry it off.” Not only was the acquisition and possession of art a form of social prestige, but also it was considered desirable to display at the very least an articulate enthusiasm for one’s collection. This led to the growth of interest in theories of art.

The collections of antiquarians such as Elias Ashmole, Charles Townley, Richard Payne Knight and Sir William Hamilton contributed heavily to the foundation of the British Museum. Charles Townley (1737-1805), possessed a terracotta reproduction of Pan and the she-goat by the English sculptor, Joseph Nollekens, who had viewed the original in the 1760s (it ended up in the British Museum’s ‘Private Case’ which later (1865) became known as the “secret museum”). This also led to a re-evaluation of myth. Early Enlightenment thought tended not to admire myth – rationalists such as Voltaire and David Hume portrayed myth as an erroneous attempt by primitive people to explain the world, and deists such as John Toland saw both Christianity and pagan myth as corruptions of a natural primitive monotheism. The discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum led to a new interest in interpreting myths as a necessary part of the Classical past.

One influential theorist of ancient art – who also contributed to the rise of interest in Roman erotic themes – particularly the popular notion of “Roman Orgies” – was the self-styled Baron d’Hancarville (1719-1805) who was engaged by Sir William Hamilton to produce a sumptuous catalogue of his collection – a four-volume set of illustrated volumes, accompanied by an essay on the origins of Greek art (Hamilton’s catalogue of vases was an influence on James Wedgwood, who began to produce vases based on the illustrations of Hamilton’s collection in his pottery factory).

d’Hancarville was by all accounts a colourful character, an art historian who supplanted his income with occasional theft and the production of pornographic works. Around 1769-70 D’Hancarville produced two pornographic works – Monumens de la vie privee des douze Cesars (“Monuments of the private lives of the twelve Caesars”) which purported to be a catalogue of etchings taken from various antique objects that depicted the sexual adventures of the various Roman emperors, but the etchings were “fictional” being drawn from the works of Suetonius and Tacitus (Vivant Denon may have been one of the engravers who produced the illustrations). d’Hancarville also authored Monumens du culte secret des Dames Romaines (“Monuments of the secret rites of Roman Women”) which again, purported to show illustrations drawn from cameos depicting pagan erotic practices. Caesars was scandalous, but also proved to popular – and pirated editions began to circulate.

Illustrations from Monumens de la vie privee des douze Cesars

d’Hancarville went on to publish Recherches sur l’Origine, l’Esprit les Progres des Arts de la Grece (1785), a central theme of which was that all art in every culture originated from a single primitive religion, and that this religion was sexual in nature. He attempted to demonstrate that that the image of a bull breaking an egg (the bull representing the generative power of the creator) can be found in every culture. d’Hancarville proposed that previous interpretations of the mythology of the Classic world – which relied on texts, were incorrect. Instead, he concentrated on the artifacts being revealed at Pompeii – vases, sculptures, coins and engraved gems. d’Hancarville, Hamilton (and Charles Townley) played a role in the publication of Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786).

The sculpture of Pan and the goat now resides in the “Gabinetto Segreto” (“Secret Chamber”) section of Naples’ National Archeological Museum together with a statue of a rather lecherous Pan together with Daphnis, which was originally part of the Farnese collection. This collection was made viewable by the general public in 2000.

Sources
Alistair Blanshard, Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, Salvatore Settis, The Classical Tradition (Harvard University Press 2010)
Judith Harris, Pompeii Awakened: A Story of Rediscovery (I.B. Tauris, 2009)
Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (University of California Press, 1997)
Carol C. Mattusch The Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum: Life and Afterlife of a Sculpture Collection (Getty Publications, 2005)
Partha Mitter Much Maligned Monsters: a History of European Reactions to Indian Art (University of Chicago Press, 1977)
Vin Nardizzi & Stephen Guy-Bray (eds) Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate,2009)
Antonio Varone, Erotica pompeiana: love inscriptions on the walls of Pompeii (L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2001)

“Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor.”
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The Supreme Lord fashions the body and the senses, corresponding (to the sphere of) duality by the power of Maya, while through His power of knowledge He generates Mantras. Their body is the self-awareness which is the expanse (akasa) (of consciousness), and they denote the wonderful diversity of things.”
Ksemaraja, commentary on the Spandakarika (Dyczkowski, 1992)

For the final part of this extended essay I will focus on Sitala and her relationship with disease and possession. Here, a “grotesque” element (from an outsider’s perspective) might well be the idea that Sitala – rather than conforming to the tendency to dichotomise deities as either helpful or harmful – is considered to be the agency which bestows and removes disease. Moreover, Sitala’s bestowal of diseases is often considered to be a “blessing” or sign of Sitala’s grace – with the person experiencing “the kiss of the goddess” and thought to be in a state of intensified “closeness” to Sitala – making the disease a form of possession and sometimes, granting the person a reciprocal power in the realm of disease-management, and as an oracular medium of the goddess.

India has had a long-established culture of possession for over three thousand years, with textual references found in the Rg Veda and the Atharvaveda with numerous schemas (and multitudinous taxonomies of spirits) emerging and cross-pollinating each other through the dharmasastras, tantric schools and ayurvedic practices, as well as yoga and devotional approaches (see Smith, 2006, for a full account) and remains popular today as a contemporary practice, and several scholars have studied contemporary possession practices, particularly in relation to the non-sanskritised village or local goddesses (for example, Foulston, 1999, McDaniel, 2004).

Possession and disease: Sitala and smallpox
Smallpox seems to have become widely prevalent in India from around the 7th century A.D., and gradually ceased to be rare and exceptional. By the mid-19th century for example, 4 million deaths were attributed to smallpox between 1865 and 1899. Smallpox was generally considered to be inevitable and inescapable. It is within this context of the inevitability of smallpox infection that much of the early anthropological and medically-oriented accounts of Sitala are situated. Prior to the introduction of vaccination by the British, the dominant approach to coping with smallpox in India was variolation – using a small portion of infected matter (such as pus) to give a person an attenuated case of smallpox (giving immunity from further infection, although 2-3% of those variolated died). Practices of variolation was described in British accounts of smallpox outbreaks in the late eighteenth century in India, and according to Frédérique Marglin (1987) was accompanied by the worship of Sitala. Nicholas (2003) cites eighteenth & nineteenth-century British accounts of inoculation which suggest that variolation was carried out by itinerant specialists, sometimes known as tikadars – “mark-makers”, who had long-term relationships with client villages.

According to Marglin, smallpox was homologised with Sitala and the sufferer spoken to and of, as though he or she were the goddess; offered cooling drinks (such as asses milk) or food and leaves of the neem tree (which have antiseptic properties) – the same substances that would be offered to the goddess in formal puja. Fabrizio Ferrari (2007, p86) states that:

“Informants all agree in saying that cold waters and cooling edibles are offered to Sitala, not to the ill person. This is because the diseased person is Sitala, quite literally.”

When Sitala is angered, she becomes heated – and the diseases she controls overheat those she possesses, so that measles sufferers are thought to have the goddess’ heat within them. Marglin argues that Sitala, angry and heated, is the diseased person, and when pacified and cool, she is the “cured” patient. In treating the disease sufferer as Sitala, gentleness is emphasised and extremes such as confrontation and aggressiveness are to be avoided, lest the goddess be angered and the disease intensified. This understanding of disease, she argues, does not view disease as an “enemy to be eradicated”. Marglin draws on Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (1975) in arguing that just as in the prison, the enemies of society are placed in a condition of surveillance, so too the hospital or clinic, places the enemy of health – the diseased person – under surveillance, subject to disciplinary control. This, Marglin says, is the consequence of a dichotomous disease model which constructs disease as “an enemy to be destroyed” and death as a negative failure.

British colonial administrators tended to characterise the entirety of Indian medicine, religion and popular belief as superstitious and irrational. Variolation was banned by the colonial government in 1865 and replaced with vaccination, which met considerable resistance as it was conceived of as offensively polluting and another instance of coercion by the authorities – and vaccination was not immediately effective. Colonial administrators tended to interpret resistance as superstitious ignorance and further proof of the “backwardness” of Indian religions – particularly the worship of Sitala – in resisting change and improvements.

Following independence, the Indian government continued to press for eradication of smallpox through vaccination (see Marglin for discussion of “forced vaccinations”). In the early 1970s, a new approach to vaccination was embarked on by the Indian government in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, which stressed sensitivity to local practices and public co-operation, rather than top-down enforcement, and India was declared free of smallpox in 1980.

Sitala and AIDS
India is estimated to have 2.47million people living with HIV (aidsdatahub.org India country review accessed 1 July 2011). A 2006 study found that 25% of People Living with AIDS/HIV (PLWAH) had been refused medical treatment on the basis of their HIV-positive status. A joint report issued in 2010 by WHO, UNAIDS and UNICEF estimated that over 1 million PLWAH in India are without access to anti-retroviral (ARV) treatments. India’s health minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, has been roundly criticised for the remarks he made at recent HIV/AIDS conference in New Delhi. Speaking about men who have sex with men (MSM), Azad said “This kind of act is unnatural and it should not be indulged in.”

The relationship between AIDS awareness and local religions in India has attracted some interest, particularly following the “birth” (or “creation”) of a new goddess – AIDS-amma. AIDS-amma was “created” by Mr H.H Girish, a science teacher in the village of Menasikyathana Halli, in Karnataka, as part of an AIDS awareness campaign. Mr Girish built a shrine and installed the goddess on World AIDS day 1997. Girish found out about a local couple who had died of starvation, having been ostracised from their community when it was discovered they had AIDS. Girish calls the shrine a “Temple of Science” and gives lectures, urging the villagers to seek information rather than protection from the goddess. AIDS-amma is represented by a whitewashed stone on which are solid black silhouettes of a woman and a man’s torso, standing back to back. In the middle of the figure’s merging heads is a large red circle, upon which are written AIDS and HIV in English, along with informative messages in the local language, Kannada.

link to photos of Girish and the AIDS-amma shrine

Anna Portnoy, a Harvard undergraduate who visited the shrine in 1999, says that Girish intended the figures of the man and woman to represent religion, and the red circle to represent the HIV virus, or more generally, science. He gave weekly lectures at the shrine about AIDS, and entreats villages to ask the goddess for knowledge – “Please AIDS-amma, bless me with information” – rather than seeking protection or a cure. Portnoy also interviewed villagers about their relationship to AIDS-amma:

On Friday, three or four women did straggle over from the larger Pataladamma temple, which was set back another twenty meters from the AIDS-amma shrine. With the sound of Pataladamma’s priest chanting in the distance, one of the women, a young mother, lit a stick of incense for AIDS-amma, while the others pressed their folded hands to their chests. The women were reluctant to discuss the temple or its subject. “We don’t know anything about AIDS-amma,” one said. “We don’t know anything except that there is a disease called AIDS.” I asked if there were a connection between the disease and the goddess and she told me that that is what educated people had told her.

The men in the village were more forthcoming about their knowledge of AIDS-amma. Most claimed to go to the temple every day and to pray for a “clean” or “clear” mind. They perceived the man and woman painted on the “idol” to be having sexual intercourse–a pictorial lesson in how the disease is transmitted. One man said, “The idol is quite fearsome. It’s a woman and man because [AIDS] travels from woman to man.”

Portnoy reports that in April 1999 someone – reportedly from a neighbouring village, slashed the AIDS-amma stone in two and poured red paint over it. She was later informed that people did not object to a new temple as such, but felt that the way Girish had connected sex and religion was morally wrong. Some newspapers had reported that Girish had considered placing a box of contraceptives at the shrine as an offering, but Girish told Portnoy that such an open display would incur open religious opposition. Portnoy reports that the vandalism caused villagers in Menasikyathana Halli to rally round in support of the shrine, rebuilding it and forming a union to protect and develop it. There is now a yearly jatra (“fair”) in which AIDS-amma is carried in procession around the village, accompanied by street plays, free medical checkups and blood donations (AIDS-amma Jatra).

Opinions in India about the long-term effectiveness of AIDS-amma are divided. Some critics maintain that the creation of AIDS-amma will encourage villagers to seek protection or cure from her, whilst other commentators believe that AIDS-amma will become a rallying point for raising awareness and countering the negative public perceptions of AIDS.

Although Sitala is frequently referred to as “the smallpox goddess” it would be more accurate to say that she has at her call a wide range of fevers and diseases. Although she is worshipped in order to keep these diseases at bay, there is also the homology of disease-as-possession to consider. Several scholars, notably June McDaniel (2004) and Lynn Foulston (2009) have observed that despite the eradication of smallpox, Sitala has to some extent retained her popularity in relation to diseases such as measles, syphilis, TB and malaria, but more recently, she is also worshipped as an AIDS-goddess.

Ferrari describes the situation thusly:

“According to my fieldwork in rural West Bengal, AIDS tends to be seen as the result of erratic social and ritual behaviour. Especially among less educated people, AIDS is a punishment for not regularly worshipping the goddess and the acceptance of a modern/Western lifestyle, especially concerning intergender relations. The awareness that AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease is not sufficiently rooted, especially among women. … In rural communities diseases are invariably related to the action of deities and spirits. Further, the existence of sexual taboos makes it difficult to understand that a disease – considered a state of possession – can be caused by sexual activity. Śītalā is believed to visit her sons and daughters through AIDS as she used to do with smallpox. The persistence of this pattern has led Śītalā’s devotees to believe in the possibility of recovery from HIV positiveness through worship (pūjā) and sacrificial offering (balidān). Contagion is not always seen as a life-threat. In fact, it can be a privileged condition.”

Ferrari says that devotees of Sitala view contagion as a desirable form of possession and – just as smallpox victims were identified with Sitala, so too PLWAH are experiencing “the kiss of the goddess” (a euphemism previously associated with smallpox) – “an extreme form of love which can eventually devour them.” Ferrari describes specialists known variously as Khalsis, ojhas or rojas who communicate with the goddess as trance oracles, and who suffer, or have suffered from, diseases which they claim to be able to cure, and give advice to clients on healing methods, preventative measures, and offerings to be presented to the goddess. He says that in some case, PLWAH in Bengal are identified as healers in this way and play a similar role in relation to HIV/AIDS. According to Ferrari, some of his informants not only expressed a belief in the possibility of recovery, but also expressed “happiness with their condition, as it gives them social recognition.”

Sources
David Arnold Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (University of California Press, 1993)
Suparna Bhaskaran Made in India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987)
Mark SG Dyczowski, The Stanzas on Vibration: The SpandaKarika with Four Commentaries (SUNY, 1992)
F Ferrari, Love Me Two Times.’ From Smallpox to AIDS: Contagion and Possession in the Cult of Śītalā (Religions of South Asia, North America, 1, jun. 2007. Available at: http://www.equinoxjournals.com/ROSA/article/view/3517/2210 [Purchase/Login required] Date accessed: 28 Jun. 2011.)
June McDaniel Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2004)
FA Marglin, Smallpox in Two Systems of Knowledge (UNU/WIDER working paper, 1987)
Ralph W Nicholas, Fruits of worship: practical religion in Bengal (Orient Black Swan, 2003)
Laurie L. Patton Jewels of Authority: Women and Textual Tradition in Hindu India (Oxford University Press, 2002)
Frederick M. Smith The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilisation (Columbia University Press, 2006)
Susan Wadley, Sitala: The Cool One (Asian Folklore Studies 39. (1980): 33-62)

web sources
Stigma and discrimination in India http://www.aidsonline.org/ accessed 28 June, 2011)
Undergraduate Witnesses Birth of a Goddess the Harvard University Gazette Archives (http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/02.24/AIDS.html) accessed 28 June, 2011)
Anna Portnoy A Goddess in the Making (Whole Earth Magazine, Fall 2000, online article accessed 27 June, 2011)

“I salute You, Devi Sitala, and worship your feet. Wearing royal garments, yet You are space-clad. In Your right hand a broom, in the crook of Your left arm a water pot. You have with You pox-incense. A golden broom in Your hand, a golden pot on Your left side. Come, Ruler of Disease, accept the worship that is rightfully Yours, and offer salvation through Your unique quality.”
Sitala Mangal Bardhaman Pala of Kavi Jagannath (Nicholas, 2003, p133)

In the third part of this essay, I’m going to focus in on the goddess Sitala, frequently described as “the smallpox goddess” or categorised as a “disease goddess”. My impetus for writing this essay was to approach particular Indian forms of religiosity via the interpretive lens of Bahktin’s formulation of the grotesque, in order to highlight the seeming ambiguities and contradictions which so often confound would-be tantric practitioners in the west – in particular, relating to seemingly “antinomian practices” such as corpse or cremation-ground practices. My original intention was to look at three instances which feature “ghouls” – Karraikal Aimmaiyar, Siva’s Ganas, and finally, the goddess Sitala. I had initially thought to discuss the idea of a “disease goddess” and examine the Sitala-Mangal as discussed by Edward Dimock in his essay A Theology of the Repulsive: The Myth of the Goddess Sitala (which was one of the original starting-off points which started me thinking about the grotesque in relation to tantric ideas) in which ghouls take over a kingdom – which could be read as a carnivalesque “overturning” of the normal. However, in reading through the scholarly literature pertaining to Sitala, I began to realise that there is much more to Sitala than the categorisation “disease goddess” suggests. So I’m going to wander away from my original intentions somewhat, although I hope that anyone who has read the first two parts will find matters of interest here too. For this post, I’m going to look at the play or “lila” of Sitala in relation to the Sitala-Mangal, then continue, in the next post, with a more detailed examination of the relationship between Sitala and disease.

Sitala is sometimes classified by scholars as a “village goddess”, or, to use Lynn Foulston’s term, a Local goddess – concerned with the day-to-day issues of her devotees, rather than restoring (or threatening) the cosmic order. Sitala is often considered to be the mother goddess of a village and embodies the fertility cycle of the agricultural year. Like many other Indian goddesses – particularly village goddesses – she is given the epithet mata – “mother” and characterised as maternal, although she does not have progeny.

Sitala emerges in textual sources from around the beginning of the sixteenth century, although Ralph Nicholas (2003) notes that iconic representations can be found dated from the twelfth century. Sitala is often represented iconographically as having a white complexion, sitting astride a donkey, holding in her hands a broom and a pot full of water. On her head, a winnowing basket full of pulses. When she shakes her head in anger, the pulses (diseases) are distributed. When she sprinkles cool water from her pot and sweeps, she removes disease. Sitala is frequently worshipped in aniconic forms such as a black stone slab smeared with vermillion; residing within branches of the Neem tree, or stones which have indentations on them, representing the pittings caused by disease. A Bengali account of Sitala’s origin begins with a king, Nahusa, performing a fire sacrifice in order to obtain a son, supervised by Brahma. A goddess is found in the ashes of the fire, and when Brahma asked her her name, she gave no answer, so he named her Sitala – “the cool one”. The new goddess asks that her divinity be recognised by both the gods and human beings, but she is ignored. She then asks for a husband, and Siva creates Jvarasura (the fever demon) who terrifies the gods until Visnu dismembers him with his discus. Sitala is angered, and summons all the disease-spirits to attack the gods.

Worship of Sitala is particularly popular in Bengal, where there are numerous Sitala temples, major all-village festivals, and the mangal tradition (dating from the 1600s). This is a vernacular literature which eulogises particular gods and goddesses – sometimes pan-Indian deities such as Laksmi, but more frequently, regional deities which have a particular association with Bengal, such as the snake-goddess Manasa. Sections of a mangal may be performed during Sitala-oriented communal festivals, and performers are believed to be possessed by the goddess, as are the authors of devotional poetry.

Increased popularity of Sitala and the performance of her mangals has been related to outbreaks of smallpox (as well as social upheaval and political turmoil). In communal pujas, Sitala is worshipped alongside Jvarasur – the fever demon (although he is not considered a “consort”), and her handmaiden, Raktabati (“she who possesses the blood”). Nicholas notes that in communal village worship, Sitala puja is sometimes accompanied by worship of Olabibi, the Muslim goddess of Cholera. In other parts of India, there is a different emphasis placed on Sitala so that she is less associated with disease. In Gujurat, as Susan Wadley (1980) notes, Sitala is primarily a “giver of good fortune, husbands and sons.” Wadley says that it is Sitala’s “coolness” which links her three “personalities” – Goddess of Smallpox, Protector of Children, and Giver of Good Fortune. As she abhors heat, when angered (“heated”) she heats others. She is also associated with the protection of young children (in particular, keeping them safe from rashes and fevers) and also with the fertility of newlyweds. See Gloria Raheja & Ann Gold (1994) for a description of the bawdy Kesya verses which she is said to be pleased by. Raheja & Gold note that Sitala is associated with not only human fertility but the well-being of the earth and community in general. Communal worship of Sitala takes place near Holi, in the harvest season. See Patton (2002) for a discussion of a Sitala festival in rural Rajasthan – she comments that Sitala “likes being worshipped by menstruating women” (p189). Wadley says that Sitala’s association with protecting children is due to an intermingling of characteristics with the goddess Sasthi.

The play of Sitala
The Sitala-mangal is the story of a king who gets on the wrong side of Sitala. A devotee of Siva, the king is respected, happy, and full of merit. The poem also stresses that his kingdom – the city of Virata – is happy and prosperous:

“There is no injustice or unrighteousness there. All speak the truth and abjure falsehood. The policy of the king and the kingdom is devotion to Siva. There is no mischief, nor peril, nor untimely death.” (from Dimock, 1995, p193)

The king encounters a merchant who has experienced a miracle, a palace appearing in the centre of the ocean, a place of profound beauty, complete with dancing girls, flocks of birds, with predator and prey animals living together in harmony. Within the palace courtyard is a huge baici tree on which coral blossoms, beneath which sits the goddess Sitala, surrounded by maids and children. Needless to say, the king does not believe this tale of wonder, and, taking his retinue, sets forth with the merchant to see this palace for himself. When they reach the place, the king sees nothing but water. The merchant protests that he can see the palace and the lady beneath the tree (he is a devotee) but the king is furious, and threatens to execute the merchant. Sitala, by this time, is ready to intercede on behalf of her devotee, but the sage Narada suggests to her that she give the king a chance, by appearing to him in a dream:

Sitala appeared in a dream. Seated at the king’s head, she was in a most terrifying guise: naked, quelling all vanity, huge and wide, with terrible eyes. Before her danced Jvara, in his deadly form – six eyes, six hands, three heads and three feet. … And suddenly he saw the royal palace ablaze, and he saw freshly severed heads. One hundred and twenty diseases were spread all over, and assuming terrible form, these devoured the king in his dream. There were uncountable [inauspicious] shooting stars and rivers flowing with blood…(Dimock, p193)

To the king, Sitala speaks:

“Listen with a calm mind, O king. It is my grace (daya) to extend this maya to you. I am the mistress of all diseases. I will give you the four great goals of life. I will be your final deliverance, and I will prevent untimely death. Rise in the morning, o king, and worship Sitala with offerings of countless male goats and rams.” (Dimock, p193)

When the king awakes, he recounts his dream to his court, who more-or-less reply that it must have been something he ate. So the king orders again that the merchant be executed, and at this moment Sitala steps in, casting her maya on kingdom and king alike. The city of Virata becomes virata-smasana – as Dimock comments: “one does not know whether to translate virata-smasana as “the cremation ground of the city of Virata” or “Virata, the cremation ground.” In the marketplace, formerly a place of pleasure and commerce, Sitala establishes a “marketplace for ghouls”:

“Demons sounded drums, a great uproar arose, and with arms lifted the diseases danced. Having gathered all the corpses, male and female ghouls put them on abundant display in shops, and bought and sold. … The ears of corpses were sold in the marketplace as pan, and the pupils of their eyes as sali-rice. Female ghouls bought bags of brains of corpses as lime, and rotten, melting corpses as perfume. … Palates were sold as ripe cantaloupe, and human heads as vegetables. Vomited blood is the best loved drink of male and female ghouls; human blood is sugar-cane juice for them. Demons bought and ate the breasts of dead women as if they were custard apples or pomegranates, with great delight … Human ears were hibiscus flowers, fly-whisks were made of skin with hair, and blood and pus were sold as sandalwood paste”. (Dimock, p194)

The king himself is striken with leprosy and glaucoma, and after being afflicted, he is able to perceive the maya of Sitala and the wonderful palace. As the glaucoma clears from his eyes, the king agrees to wed his daughter to the merchant, and recognises Sitala’s majesty:

“Remove these afflictions from my land. I know you now to be the goddess Sarada, full of mercy. I worship your lotus feet; grant right-mindedness to us all.”(Dimock, p189)

Why does the king’s offence affect the entire kingdom? King and kingdom share the same fate; as Ronald Inden (2003) explains, in Vaisvana and Saivite models of kingship; the person of the king was deeply entwined with the well-being of the countries they ruled, and kings were therefore required to be highly attentive to auspicious and inauspicious signs, employing ritual specialists such as astrologers:

“The king, an earthly realization of the Primordial Man (purusa), the Cosmic Overload himself, was thought to include within his persona all of the constituent elements of his kingdom just as the Cosmic Man included all the constituent elements of the universe in his.”

In this model, inauspicious signs are warnings of impeding disaster, and disasters (no matter who they affect) are also disasters for the king – and vice versa. Particular weight was given to celestial signs such as falling stars, comets or eclipses. This intensifies the failure of the king in the Sitala-mangal. Not only does he threaten Sitala’s merchant devotee, but he also ignores the very clear signs She presents to him and Her own warning.

Frédérique Marglin (1987), like Inden, also emphasises the interdependencies between actors in the Hindu model of kingship, stressing that king, gods, priests and villagers are mutually bound within a matrix of dependent relationships. Thus kings “conquer” (make available for cultivation) and protect the land, beginning the chain of life, but due to their hunter/warrior role, which involves the shedding of blood, they cannot directly offer food to the gods. This is the province of ritual specialists (vedic Brahmins) who depend on the king for land, and through their power, establish temples and bring the gods to dwell in them. Absolute authority, Marglin says, is the province of deities, and all positions were determined and recognised in terms of a person’s relationship or service to the deities. Ritual, such as yearly festivals, is a communal affair, requiring the cooperation of an entire polity, along with the pooling of economic and political resources. Similarly, Nicholas points out:

“Like a mother pulling together her quarreling sons so as to remind them that they are both equally offspring of her body, Sitala once each year quietly but forcefully draws together the sons of her village and makes them forget – at least for a while – politics and the pursuit of selfish ends.” (p190)

The mangal texts serve to both enlighten and instruct, in order that listeners recognise the unity – the manifestation of Sitala’s grace within the events of daily life. Sitala’s grace is twofold – it is the both the absence and presence of disease. Kinsley (1986, p211) suggests that Sitala’s grace grants “restitution in return for the understanding of her constant presence … which in turn makes the inevitable outbursts of disease or tragic consequences less devastating.”

In the next section of this essay, I’ll look at Sitala as a bestower of – and protector from – diseases.

Sources
Edward Dimock A Theology of the Repulsive: The Myth of the Goddess Sitala in Hawley, Wulff (eds) The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India (Motilal, 1995)
Lynn Foulston At the Feet of the Goddess: The Divine Feminine in Local Hindu Religion (Sussex Academic Press, 1999)
Lynn Foulston, Stuart Abbott Hindu Goddesses: Beliefs and Practices (Sussex Academic Press, 2009)
David Kinsley Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu religious tradition (University of California Press, 1986)
Ronald Inden Text and Practice: Essays on South Asian History (Oxford University Press India, 2003)
June McDaniel Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2004)
FA Marglin, Smallpox in Two Systems of Knowledge (UNU/WIDER working paper, 1987)
Ralph W Nicholas, Fruits of worship: practical religion in Bengal (Orient Black Swan, 2003)
Laurie L. Patton Jewels of Authority: Women and Textual Tradition in Hindu India (Oxford University Press, 2002)
Tracy Pintchman Seeking Mahādevī: constructing the indentities of the Hindu Great Goddess (SUNY, 2001)
Gloria G Raheja, Ann G Gold, Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (University of California Press, 1994)
Susan Wadley, Sitala: The Cool One (Asian Folklore Studies 39. (1980): 33-62)

“There is something demoniacal or demonic in a line of flight. Demons are different from gods, because gods have fixed attributes, properties and functions, territories and codes: they have to do with rails, boundaries and surveys. What demons do is jump across intervals, and leap from one interval to another.”
Gilles Deleuze, Clair Parnet Dialogues II p40

“Busy in making themselves felt, the ganas were the comparitively infinitesmal quantities replete with the impulsion of his presence that swelled the host of the Great God. … The demonism and density of Siva’s entourage, which throbbed with the invisible and varied texture of feeling alive, was tinged with grotesque and lugubrious hues.”
Stella Kramrisch, The Presence of Siva p395

In the previous post, I examined Karraikal Aimmaiyar – “the woman who became a ghoul” and joined Siva’s ganas. This time, I’m going to take a closer look at Siva’s ganas – the hooligans of heaven. The ganas – and by extension Siva, exemplify Bahktin’s twin poles of the grotesque. They are unruly bodies, blurring the distinction between self and other; and both embody the carnivalesque, irreverent and bodily-oriented play of clowns and fools. As Ronald Davidson points out (2003, p285) the ganas “generally resemble buffoons in their antics.” Siva also embodies the paradoxical comedic impulse. As Lee Seigel says (1987, p374):

Paradox is the power of Siva, the god who both sits still in enstatic trance and writhes in ecstatic dance. Covered with ashes, Siva is said to be light on the outside, but dark within – he is, in that respect, like comedy itself.

Laughter is one of the eight great bhavas (“sentiments”) of the Natyashastra. The laughter of the gods is often an act of creation – Ganesa, the grotesque elephant-headed god (around which are woven many humorous tales) is born from Lalita’s laughter. And what do the gods do but play? Let’s not forget that Maya – so often translated as world-denying “illusion” can also be the marvellous power-play of the gods, and at the same time, a comic joke, a hoax.

A riotous assemblage
Siva’s ganas are the horde of ghouls, demons, ghosts and goblins who accompany him, particularly in the cremation grounds.

Descriptions of the Ganas vary from the wholly abstract, when they represent the fundamental categories of existence (ganascan be interpreted as “categories” or “parts”) to descriptions which emphasise their hybridity and grotesque nature: they are said to be dwarfish or night-walking spirits of gross and lustful appetite – some are headless, some are covered in eyes, whilst others have the heads of animals. They are often described as being found of music and dance and continually changing shape. They are warlike, often fighting alongside Siva, and sometimes appear as a discordant pack, mocking the formalised ceremonies in which Siva is called to participate in by the other gods (see for example the account of Siva’s wedding in the Matsyapurana). Stella Kramrisch (1981) describes them as “prognostications or caricatures of possibilities of the human condition”. Some of the ganas are asuras that Siva has defeated, others, like Karraikal Aimmaiyar, are devotees. Ganesa is, as is well-known, the captain of the ganas (having acquired, in some versions of his origin story, his elephant’s head from the ganas), as sometimes is Skanda.

The term gana when it appears in early texts (i.e. in the Vedas) refers simply to an “assembly”, “multitude” or “troop” (of warriors) and appear in reference to the “sons of Vayu” or the various allies of Indra. Ganapati the epithet given to Ganesa, seems originally to have been “troop leader”. The ganas are frequently associated with singing and dancing, as well as fighting. (see Sharma 1991, chapter 9 for discussion of the ganas as a clan unit).

Similarly, bhuta originally refers to a “spirit” or “being”, (and as a term, is sometimes applied to the gods) and it is only from the Epics that bhuta first comes to denote a malevolent spirit, or preta (the ghost of a person who has died a violent death). In the Mahabharata Siva is given the epithet Pramathanatha – “Lord of pramathas – pramathas referring to a class of beings known as “churn spirits”, “tormentors” or “teasers”. (Again, in the Natyashastra, the pramathas are described as presiding over the sentiment of humour). Also in the Mahabharata, Kubera is depicted surrounded by Ganas (Kubera too is often a comic figure). It is possible that the ganas gained their ambivalent reputation through their association with Rudra, and later, Siva (see Krishan, 1999, pp20-22). The Vedic-era Sankhayana Srautasutra for example, declares that the ganas are spirits which “howl, whistle and roar”. In iconographical depictions, the ganas are often portrayed comically or whimsically. There are also bhuta theatatrical traditions, particularly in southern India, in which particular bhutas’ deeds are eulogised, often involving possession, firewalking, etc.

“The motley crowd of the freakish retinue of Siva is part of his ambience. Indefinitely variable in its monstrosity, wit and vitality, it includes the misshapen as possibilities within his orbit. Rudra refused to create mortals because they were imperfect. The retinue of Siva, Bhutas, ganas, pramathas, parisadas, khumbandas, raksasas and pisacas – different types of spirits, sprites, ghosts and ghouls – do not belong to the pitiable class of mortals; they are part of Rudra’s being, tremors, resonances of his nature, tensions that sustain his contradictory wholeness. They are scintillations of the Rudras, smithereens of the terrifying glory of Rudra-Siva himself.”
(Kramrisch, 1981 pp298-299)

This interdependence between Siva and his horde of riotous hybrids is brought out in the story of Andhaka. Andhaka is a son of Shiva & Parvati, born when Parvati, in play, placed her hands over Shiva’s eyes. The contact of her hands over his eyes brought forth perspiration, from which was born a terrifying-looking creature. Ungrateful, with a bad temper, blind, deformed, and black in colour. He had hair all over his body, matted locks, and behaved like a madman. Shiva named this being Andhaka and ordered his ganas to guard him. Shiva was later approached by the daitya Hiranyasksha, who performed many penances in order that Shiva grant him the boon of a son. Shiva gave Hiranyaksha Andhaka to be his adopted son. Vishnu, in his form of Varaha the Boar, warred with and finally destroyed Hiranyaksha, crowning Andhaka as chief of the daityas. In some versions of the story, Siva eventually kills Andhaka, but in others he makes him a leader amongst the ganas.

The goofball god
In the famous story of the major falling out between Siva and Daksa (as recounted in the Mahabharata for example) one of the reasons that Daksa gives for not considering Siva a worthy son-in-law is that Siva surrounds himself with ganas, and, worse, behaves like one:

“If he really is an ascetic like he’s supposed to be, why does he carry weapons? And he’s supposedly married, but he’s not really a householder since he lives in the burning grounds> He has no caste. He’s neither male nor female, and yet he can’t be said to be a eunuch either, since everybody worships his penis”. (Seigel, 1987, p374)

It’s Siva’s contrary nature which particularly seems to offend Daksa. He does not get the joke. A Bengali popular song expresses Siva’s comic nature:

Siva won’t grow old – he spends all his time
High on bhang and datura – and making love.
he takes bhang, datura and balls of siddhi
And rolls about day and night in the harlots’ houses,
Siva, the lord of deception, among 1600 whores,
Wasting no time in fulfilling their insatiable desires.
Or else you’ll find him in some cremation-ground or such,
His body covered with ashes.
—Everyone says hes’s gone quite mad.
Sitting there, surrounded by ghouls.
This is how he fritters away the year,
Then pulling on his tigerskin and climbing onto his bull
Off he goes again to the brothel quarter.
(quoted from McLean, 1998, p62)

In the myth of the Daitya king Jalandhara, Jalandhara sends Rahu with a message to Shiva, demanding that he surrender Parvati to Jalandhara. Shiva was angry at this message, and this anger took the form of a terrible creature which sprang from his brow. It had the face of a lion, flaming eyes, a body which was dry and rough to the touch, long arms and a tongue which lolled with anger. The creature rushed at Rahu, ready to devour him. Shiva apparently said something along the lines of “we don’t shoot the messenger” whereon the gana pleaded to Shiva that it was tortured by hunger. Shiva told the gana that if it was so hungry, it should eat its own flesh. This the gana did, until only its head was left. Shiva, pleased with such devotion, appointed the gana as his door-keeper, ordering that it create terror for all wicked people. Shiva also ordained that the gana be worshipped along with his worship, and gave it the name Kirtimukha.

Jalandhara was furious when he heard what had transpired and commanded his army of daityas to beseige Mt. Kailash. A fierce battle broke out between the diatyas and the ganas. But each time that a daitya was killed, it was revived immediately by their preceptor, Shukra. The ganas told Shiva about this and he was furious. A terrible form called Kritya came forth from his mouth. Her calves were as stout as trees and her mouth was huge and deep like a mountain cavern. She rushed upon the battlefield and began to devour the enemy. She was so big and strong that a push from her breasts uprooted trees and the earth split beneath her feet. She picked up Shukra, stuffed him into her vagina, and vanished. When Shukra was seized, the daityas were frightened and were scattered from the battlefield. In another version of the Jalandhara story, Shukra is swallowed by Shiva himself. Shukra spent hundreds of years wandering round in the belly of Shiva. Finally he resorted to the Yoga of Shiva and, after repetition of a special mantra, asssumed the form of Shiva’s semen and emerged out of the god’s body through his penis. He bowed to Shiva and Parvati accepted him as her son. Shiva made him a chief among his ganas.

Ganas are central to the 11th century Kathasaritsagara (“Ocean of the Streams of Stories”) attributed to Somadeva (first translated into English 1880-84). Parvati asks Siva to tell her a story that she has never heard before. Siva, in reply, relates the tale of the Vidyadhara princes. A gana named Pushpadanta overhears the telling, and repeats the tale to his wife, who is Parvati’s doorkeeper. She in turn, recounts the story to Parvati, who is annoyed that Siva told her a tale so common that one of her attendants knew it. When she discovers what has happened, Parvati curses Pushpadanta. Another gana, Malyavan tries to intercede on behalf of Pushpadanta and gets it in the neck from Parvati too. Both are doomed to be born as humans. Pushpadanta will only be released from the curse when he relates all the tales he overheard Siva tell Parvati to Malyavan, and he too can only be released by spreading the stories as far and wide as possible, making them “famous in the world”. The tales of the Kathasaritsagara are stories within stories, narratives multiply-authored; passing between the human and the divine realms.

One tale within the Kathasaritsagara concerns the princess Rupinika, who is told how to disguise herself as a gana:

“She had to shave her head with a razor in such a manner that five locks were to be left, then she was to wear a necklace round her neck of skulls and stripping off her clothes, paint one side of her body with lamp-black and the other with red lead so that in this way she could resemble a Gana and find it easy to gain admission into heaven.”(Saletore 2003, p34)

In her book Shiva Shakti M. Gupta provides a long description of the ritual of Mahashivaratri – the Festival of Repentance, which falls on the 14th night of the New Moon, during the dark half of the lunar month of Phalguna. It is said that one who performs this sacrifice successfully, with all the rituals & rules laid down, obtains his most cherished desires, achieves liberation, and is accepted as one of Shiva’s Ganas dwelling on Mt. Kailas.

In becoming a gana, everyone is invited to participate in Siva’s stand-up comedy turn, and share the delightful joke.

Sources
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Indiana University Press 2009)
RM Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement (Motilal, 2003)
Gilles Deleuze, Clair Parnet Dialogues II (Columbia University Press, revised edn 2007)
Shakti M Gupta Shiva (Somaiya Publications, 1993)
Geoffrey G. Harpham On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (The Davies Group Publishers, 2007)
Stella Kramrisch, The Presence of Siva (Princeton University Press, 1981)
Yuvraj Krishan, Ganesa: Unveiling an Enigma (Motilal, 1999)
Malcolm McLean, Devoted to the Goddess: The Life and Work of Ramprasad (SUNY, 1998)
RN Saletore Indian Witchcraft (Abhinav Publications, 2003)
Lee Seigel Laughing matters: comic tradition in India (University of Chicago Press, 1987)
RS Sharma Aspects of Political Ideas and Institutions in Ancient India (Motilal, 1991)
Hugh Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion (University of California Press, 2003)