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)

“It can be said that becoming-animal is an affair of sorcery because (1) it implies an initial relation of alliance with a demon; (2) the demon functions as the borderline of an animal pack, into which the human being passes or in which his or her becoming takes place, by contagion; (3) this becoming itself implies a second alliance, with another human group; (4) this new borderline between the two groups guides the contagion of animal and human being within the pack. There is an entire politics of becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family, nor of religion nor the State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognised institutions, groups all the more secret for being extrinsic, in other words, anomic.”
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

One of the major projects I am exploring here on enfolding is the sidling towards an (unnatural) alliance between Continental Philosophy, tantrisms, and queer theories. An obvious point of intersection between these three areas is the emphasis on multiplicities, metamorphosis, hybridity and the grotesque.

What is the grotesque? I am taking a cue here from Geoffrey Harpham:

“Grotesqueries both require and defeat definition; they are neither so regular and rythmical that they settle easily into our categories, nor so unprecendented that we do not recognise them at all. They stand at a margin of consciousness between the known and the unknown, the perceived and the unperceived, calling into question the adequacy of our ways of organising the world.” (2007, p3)

To confront the grotesque is to run head on into contradiction, ambiguity, confusion – to face that which seems familiar, yet leads us astray into unknown territory; a space which cannot be ordered, or resists ordering and categorisation by its own vitality. I tend to think of queer in a similar way, in the sense of queer theorists’ abiding interest in undoing; on untangling the normative, questioning certainties, and dreaming alternative imaginaries. Queer is for me, very much about commiting to a resistance to easy categorisation and admitting a multitude of voices, some of which may be paradoxical and contradictory. Queer is not only about issues of gender & sexuality, but extends into questioning identity, subjectivity, embodiment. It is a call to celebrate theologies of difference.

The ways of living that have come to be identified with the rather chimeric signifier “tantra” seeths with multiplicities and ambiguities, and to enter a tantric space requires the acceptance that whilst a first glance, there is much that seems familiar, there is much that is different, contradictory, and counter to what we might expect. Definitions of tantra abound, yet scholars and practitoners are increasingly abandoning the limitations imposed by definition and taking on board the idea of “polythetic classification” which, rather than attempting to define tantras with a single “essence”, allows for the examination of multiple, intersecting features. Whilst there have been a variety of attempts to come up with schema for deciding how many features a practice, text, or tradition must share with with others in order to be classed as “tantric”, tantra remains, as Hugh Urban (2003, p7) says, “one of the most elusive terms in the study of Asian Religions.” It is this elusiveness and resitance to codification which, for me, is one of the reasons why tantra is queer.

Popular respresentations of tantra tend to stress its supposed “marginality” – locating it at the periphery of Hindu civic life, a practice of “outsiders”. In this essay, I want will take a different tack, and examine three different “marginal” facets of practices associated with tantras, and show that that they are, in actually at the “centre” of tantric life ways. That what to those outside the practice looks marginal, becomes for the devotee, the centre of their orientation to the world – that the centre and the peripheral change easily shift and exchange places. The common thread which links the three features I will examine in this series of three posts is that of transformation and hybridity; the grotesque bodies of Karraikal Aimmaiyar – “the woman who became a ghoul”; Siva’s Ganas – “the hooligans of heaven” and the invasions of Sitala, a goddess of contaigon.

“The grotesque body, as we have often stressed, is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world.” Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World

The Woman who became a ghoul
Karraikal Aimmaiyar (“the Mother from Karraikal”) was one of the earliest Tamil poets to write poems to Siva. Her 143 poems, written in Tamil, point towards a world where devotees may live in the eternal presence of Siva, and provides a window into the early developnent of Saivite philiosophy. Her story was hagiographised in the twelfth century Periya Puranam.

The woman who came to be known as Karraikal Aimmaiyar was born in the 6th century CE in the coastal town of Karraikal. She was originally named Punitavati, and was married to a successful merchant named Paramatattan. She had been, from an early age, an ardent devotee of Siva, yet she was a dutiful wife and was said to be beautiful. One day, one of Paramatattan’s customers gave him two sweet mangoes, and Paramatattan ordered his wife to serve them to him for the midday meal. A Saivite holy man came to Punitavati’s house seeking alms, and she gave him one of the mangoes. When Paramatattan came to eat, Punitavati fed him and gave him the remaining mango. When Paramatattan called for the other mango, Punitavati prayed to Siva for help, and a mango appeared, which she served to her husband. This mango was so delicious that Paramatattan became suspicious and asked his wife where she had obtained it. She told him, but he doubted her story and asked that she pray again to Siva in his presence. She did so, and another mango appeared. Paramatattan took fright at this miracle, and fled from Punitavati.

Paramatattan set up another household apart from Punitavati. She continued the upkeep of his house as though he would return – he had not released her from being his wife. Eventually, Punitavati’s parents found out what was going on and took their daughter to see him. Paramatattan, by this time, had taken another wife and had a daughter from her. When Punitavati appeared, they all fell at their feet and worshipped her as a goddess. When Punitavati realised that her husband did not want her as a wife, she prayed to Siva to take away her beauty and to grant her the form of a ghoul:

So I pray to thee that the flesh of my body, which has been sustaining beauty for his sake, may now be removed from my physical frame and I be granted the form of a ghoul to dance round thee with devotion
(quoted from Denton, 2004, p164)

Shiva granted this boon, and she made a journey to the Himalayas. It is told that the people she met on this journey were terrified by her, but that she “converted their abhorrance to praise.” She began walking on her hands, and Siva was so moved by her devotion that he greeted her as Ammai – “mother” and allowed her a place among his troupe of ganas and to eternally witness his dance.

The world as cremation ground

A female ghoul with withered breasts, bulging veins, hollow eyes,
white teeth and two fangs,
shriveled stomach, red hari, bony ankles, and elongated shins,
Stays in this cemetary, howling angrily.

This place where my Lord dances in the fire with a cool body,
His streaming hair flying in the eight directions,
is Tiruvalankatu.
(Karraikal Aimmaiyar, quoted from Craddock, 2007, p134)

Karraikal Aimmaiyar’s transformation – from devoted wife to ghoul-devotee shows the difference between the bounded world of the householder and that of a life lived entirely as an offering to Siva. This recalls an attitude to life-as-practice which can be found in later texts such as the Saundaryalahari:

Let my idle chatter be the muttering of prayer, my every manual movement the execution of ritual gesture,
my walking a ceremonial circumambulation, my eating and other acts the rite of sacrifice,
my lying down prostration in worship, my every pleasure enjoyed with dedication of myself,
let whatever activity is mine be some form of worship of you.

The image of Shiva in the cremation-ground, surrounded by ganas, ghosts, goblins and ghouls, offers a paradigm for his devotees, and the sadhana (practice) associated with the cremation-ground is highly prevalent in Tantra. In essence, the devotee, by practising the rites of the cremation-ground, emulates Shiva and becomes one of His family of ganas or becomes Shiva and is lord of his or her own categories.

In her poetry, Ammaiyar speaks as the pey – the ghoul or demon gana – a status that is available to all devotees of Siva, regardless of gender or caste. The cremation-ground is also frequently equated with the heart-space (hridya):

I thought of only One,
I was focused on only One,
I kept only One inside my heart.
Look at this One!
It is he who has Ganga on His head,
a moonbeam in His hair,
a radiant flame in His beautiful hand.
I have become His slave.
(quoted from Craddock, 2010, p72)

and

“Let those who say He lives in the sky say that,
Let others who say the King of the gods lives in this world say that
With spiritual wisdom I say
that the One with the radiant throat previously darkened
by poison
lives in my heart”
(quoted from Craddock, 2010, p116)

Again, the theme of Siva indwelling in the heart-space is one that can be found in later tantric texts. In Ammaiyar’s poems, the world becomes the cremation-ground, for those who share in the blazing vision of Siva (NB: See Paul Muller-Ortega’s The Triadic Heart of Siva for a full discussion of the heart in Saivite theology).

Smashan or cremation ground practices have been associated with early forms of tantra. These practices have received much attention in western accounts of tantra, particularly those who prioritise its “antinomian” nature and consequently there is a great deal of interest in groups such as the Aghoris and their historical forebears, the Kapalikas. Lynn Denton (p164) sees Ammaiyar as a prototypal Aghorinii – “the walking but utterly divine ghost”. This is particularly interesting in respect of Ammaiyar’s ability to “convert” the abhorrance of those horrified at her appearance, which recalls the injunctions in the Pasupata Sutra (2nd-3rd century CE?) that practitioners should “wander like a ghost” and to suffer the abuse of others, taking on their merit (see Gonda, 1977, Davidson, 2003). Kaundinya’s commentary makes this explicit:

“…ill-treatment should be regarded as a coronation to a poor man. It should be to him as the touchstone [is] to gold. …He should wander under false accusations on the principle that he who is dishonoured is on [the path to] acquiring merit and [performing] the religious injunction”

This conversion of the abhorrence of others is also a central feature of Aghori practice, and also points to the liminality of the cremation ground as a place in which radical transformations take place; as such, it is a place where power may be sought. As Jonathan Parry (2004, p266) points out, the Indian homology between body and cosmos extends to the cremation ground, which destroys the physical body, as the great fire annihilates the universe. There is a relationship between fire’s destructive and creative potential, and the heat (tapas) generated by austerities. Cremation is also a sacrifice – a replication of the primal creative sacrifice and dismemberment of Prajapati (Parry points to the parallels between cremation, sacrifice and birth in the Satapatha Brahmana).

Despite the association with Aghoris and left-hand practices such as eating human flesh, or corpse-sitting, both Parry and Ron Barrett (2008) stress that Aghori philosophy is recognisably that of mainstream Indian liberation theology:

“The theological line that the Aghori put at the forefront, however, is the notion that everything in creation partakes of Parmatma, the Supreme Being, and that therefore all category distinctions belong merely to the world of superficial appearances; no essential difference exists between the divine and the human, or between the pure and the polluted. As Lal Baba represented his own spiritual quest to me, he seeks to become “like that ideal Aghori, the sun, whose rays illuminate everything indiscriminately and yet remained undefiled by the excrement they touch.”
(Parry, 1994, p261-262)

Ron Barrett’s study of Aghori medicine proposes that for the Aghoris, discrimination is an illness, for which Aghori sadhana is the medicine. Confrontation with death is at the heart of their practice, although smashan-oriented practices are being supplanted by social services – educating street children and providing ashram-based care for those with socially stigmatised illnesses such as leprosy. Aghori Sakti (“power”) is rooted in their capacity to digest – and thereby transform (via an inward assimilation) – all experiences (see Barrett, 2008, pp132-137 for a discussion of the homologies between fire & digestion) regardless of whether or not they are auspicious or inauspicious.

Aghor is not a specific religion or set of practices, but rather a state of mind. It is a state of nondiscrimination in which there is no hatred, no fear, and no aversion to anyone or anything. … Contemplating divinity in the face of death is the ideal Aghor sadhana. Its purpose is to overcome fears and aversions that impede the process of spiritual liberation. The Aghori believe that the greatest human fear is that of death; all other aversions are but diminutive examples of this mortality anxiety. (Barrett, 2008, p140)

Barrett is careful to point out that not all Aghoris view themselves as tantrikas, and that for Aghoris, the relationship between left-hand and right-hand path practices is more complex than the binary opposition in which they tend to be framed:

Hari Baba then pointed out that vamamarg and dakshinamarg are complementary to each other; they are like two banks of a river that work together to channel the water in a certain direction. The disciple might use one or the other path, or a certain combination of both, at different stages of his or her development. Moreover, the disciple need not be an Aghori to combine left-hand approaches with right-hand ones. (Barrett, 2008, p152)

Barrett explains that for Aghoris, the guru is considered to be the best judge for the use of left-hand practices – depending on the guru’s teaching style, and the relationship between guru and disciple. Furthermore, he stresses that left-hand practices (such as consuming one’s own feces) are generally considered to be temporary exercises, rather than permanent ways of living.

all ghouls together

“…all were considered equal during carnival. Here in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by barriers of caste, property, profession and age.” (Bakhtin, p10)

The worlds of Karraikal Aimmaiyar and contemporary Aghoris can be thought of as carnivalesque, in that their nondiscriminatory orientation to the world, their practices of engagement, suspend all hierarchies and collapse binary oppositions. As Craddock (2007) observes, Karraikal Aimmaiyar’s poems speak to a community of devotees where notions of caste and gender are irrelevant – all are united in the blazing vision of Siva’s dance. Their practices, so often misread as antinomian or transgressive, are celebrations of the body’s capacities, a recognition of the carnality of corpses – a refusal to refute death. The woman-ghoul and the necrophagus Aghori seem to invite horror or repulsion from others, but the mistake is presume that their practices are inspired by a wish to be repulsive, to be horrific, to assert themselves against others. Rather, Aimmaiyar’s becoming-ghoul, the Aghor’s embrace of the viscerality of death points to a subjectivity not predicated on seperation.

Sources
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Indiana University Press 2009)
Ron Barrett, Aghor medicine: pollution, death, and healing in northern India (University of California Press, 2008)
Elaine Craddock, Siva’s Demon Devotee: Karaikkal Ammaiyar (SUNY, 2010)
Elaine Craddock, The Anatomy of Devotion: The Life and Poetry of Karraikal Aimmaiyar in Pintchman, (ed) Women’s Lives, Women’s Rituals in the Hindu Tradition ((Oxford University Press, 2007)
RM Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement (Motilal, 2003)
Lynn Teskey Denton Female Ascetics in Hinduism (SUNY, 2004)
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987)
Jan Gonda Medieval Religious Literature in Sanskrit (Harrassowitz, 1977)
Roxanne Gupta, Kali Mayi – Myth and Reality in a Banares Ghetto in Encountering Kali: in the Margins, at the Center, in the West McDermott, Kripal (eds) (University of California Press, 2003).
Roxanne Gupta The Politics of heterodoxy and the Kina Rami ascetics of Banaras (Ph.D thesis, Syracuse University, 1993)
Geoffrey G. Harpham On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (The Davies Group Publishers, 2007)
Jonathan Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Jonathan Parry Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagus Ascetic in Robben (ed) Death, mourning, and burial: a cross-cultural reader (Wiley, 2004)
Hugh Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion (University of California Press, 2003)

“God went out (oddly enough with cricket and beer) and Pan came in.In a hundred novels his cloven hoof left its imprint on the sward; poets saw him lurking in the twilight on London commons, and literary ladies in Surrey, nymphs of an industrial age, mysteriously surrendered their virginity to his rough embrace.”
Somerset Maugham, quoted in Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, p48

For this post, I’m taking a cue from Patricia Merivale’s Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (Harvard Univ. Press, 1969). Merivale’s book is particularly useful as she focuses on the great upswell of appearences of Pan in English prose between 1890 and 1918. Literary representations of Pan in the fin de siècle change dramatically, from Pan as an essentially benevolent and transcendental figure, to a much darker character. Whereas Romantics such as Wordsworth or Keats, who wrote in Endymion “Pan will bid us live in peace, in love and peace among his forest wilderness” tended to view Pan as a somewhat disembodied spirit of nature, reflecting a general nostalgic yearning for nature; the Pan which emerges in the late Victorian period was morally ambivalent, wild and dangerous, as can be seen in the work of writers such as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Somerset Maugham, and D.H Lawrence.

“The paradox of being half goat and half god,” Merrivale remarks “is at the very core of his nature” – and she goes on to point out that Pan is a liminal figure, straddling both the vision of “universal, transcendental Nature” and the instinctual forces of the psyche which are rooted in – and draw us towards the primeval sensibility which exists at the margins of civilisation. Pan represents, in the words of Aldous Huxley “the dark presence of the otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of man’s conscious mind”. This vision of Pan as a ever-lurking presence, waiting to perturb and confound our conscious, rational and ordered life is a strong theme in Pan-related fiction. Moreover, for a number of nineteenth and early-twentieth century authors who were homosexual and classically educated, Pan became a key figure in a vision where male beauty and desire is recognised and permitted, rather than outlawed. As Sandie Byrne (2007) notes, Victorian and Edwardian literary homoeroticism frequently drew on Classical mythology as a register or code.

I’m going to briefly discuss two literary treatments which I think articulate this theme – E.M Forster’s The Story of a Panic (1902) and Saki’s (aka H.H Munro) Gabriel-Ernest (1910).

The Story of a Panic
Mr. Tytler, the narrator of The Story of a Panic is very much the convention-bound Englishman, staying in an Italian hotel with his two daughters. The other guests are Mr Sandbach – a retired clergyman, Mr. Leyland – an artist, and the Misses Robinson, and their nephew, Eustace, who the narrator describes as being “odious”, “peevish” and “unhealthy”. Eustace, much to the disgust of the narrator, displays an un-English avoidance of healthy pursuits such as swimming; nor is he studious – rather, he prefers “lounging” – “His aunts thought him delicate; what he really needed was discipline.” Whilst the adults discuss the picturesque, Eustace cuts a piece of wood and makes a whistle (a Pan pipe). The adults lament that “All the poetry is going from Nature … the mere thought that a tree is convertible into cash is disgusting”. The artist Leyland complains that “the woods no longer give shelter to Pan” which prompts Sandbach to proclaim that “Pan is dead.” He relates the story of Pan’s death (as told by Plutarch and Eusebius). Suddenly, the party is disturbed by the onset of a wind – perhaps prompted by Eustace blowing his whistle – which provokes in them “brutal, overmastering, physical fear, stopping up the ears, and dropping clouds before the eyes, and filling the mouth with foul tastes”. The party flees the scene, and, realising that Eustace is missing, return to find him lying on the ground, hands “convulsively entwined in the long grass,” a “peculiar smile” on his face and nearby, “some goat’s footmarks in the moist earth beneath the trees”. Sandbach exclaims that “The Evil One has been very near us in bodily form”. The adults agree to say nothing about this peculiar event, but Eustace begins to behave oddly. He shows an unseemly interest in the whereabouts of a waiter at the hotel named Gennaro – “a clumsy impertinent fisherlad”. He runs around the wood and reappears with a dazed hare in his arms. He spontaneously kisses an old Italian peasant woman and offers her flowers. The narrator finds such “promiscuous intimacy … perfectly intolerable.”

At the hotel, Eustace eagerly embraces Gennaro. The adults come to the conclusion that Eustace is mad and will require watching. That night, the narrator wakes to find Eustace outside the hotel, clad in his nightshirt, dancing and “blessing the great forces and manifestations of Nature”. One of the narrator’s daughters, perhaps recognising that there is a bond between Gennaro and Eustace, prompts him to enlist Gennaro in recapturing Eustace. The two boys meet, but their bonding of brotherhood is interrupted by the narrator, who offers Gennaro a ten lira note. Gennaro reaches for the money, but Eustace grips his hand. As Eustace and Gennaro share confidences, the adults close in and drag Eustace away to his room. Gennaro avers that Eustace will die if he is confined to his room. Gennaro frees Eustace, and together, they jump from the hotel window. Eustace runs off into the night, never to return, and Gennaro cries out “He has understood and he is saved … instead of dying he will live!” Gennaro, when later confronted by the narrator who wants his money returned, promptly falls down dead, overcome with remorse for his part in the attempt to confine Eustace. The story ends with the departing sounds of Eustace’s exultations far down the valley, in which “still resounded the shouts and laughter of the escaping boy.”

The Story of a Panic is a thinly-cloaked tale of sexual awakening, and by drawing on the figure of Pan, Foster is able to point to the encounter with an erotic “other” – an encounter which is both appealing, threatening and transformative. An awakening to a polymorphous pleasure which is sudden, powerful and disruptive – Eustace’s transformation – and in particular, his intimate friendship with Gennaro, with its blurring of class boundaries, threatens the English notion of proper behaviour and decorum. When the story was published in 1904, Charles Sayle, the Cambridge librarian interpreted it to Maynard Keynes as being basically about “buggery” – an interpretation that Forster insisted that he had been initially unconscious of.

Gabriel-Ernest
Saki’s Gabriel-Ernest is the tale of a boy with savage propensities – a “wild, nude animal” who is introduced into a “primly ordered house”, with disasterous consequences. Beginning with the remark by an artistic friend “There is a wild beast in your woods”, narrator Van Cheele, finds

“On a shelf of smooth stone overhanging a deep pool in the hollow of an oak coppice a boy of about sixteen lay asprawl, drying his wet brown limbs luxuriously in the sun. His wet hair, parted by a recent dive, lay close to his head, and his light-brown eyes, so light that there was a tigerish gleam in them, were turned towards Van Cheele with a certain lazy watchfulness. It was an unexpected apparition, and Van Cheele found himself engaged in the novel process of thinking before he spoke. Where on earth could the wild-looking boy hail from?”

When questioned as to his eating habits, this alarming apparition replies “…rabbits, wild-fowl, hares, poultry, lambs in their season, children when I can get any; they’re usually too well locked in at night when I do most of my hunting. It’s quite two months since I tasted child-flesh.”

The day after this encounter, Van Cheele, much to his alarm, finds

“Gracefully asprawal on the ottoman, in an attitude of almost exaggerated repose, was the boy of the woods. He was drier than when Van Cheele had last seen him, but no other alteration was noticeable in his toilet. Van Cheele’s aunt enters at that point, and he explains the boy’s presence as “a poor boy who has lost his way – and lost his memory.” Miss Van Cheele rises to the occasion with the proper concern for a “naked homeless child” and finds him “sweet”. “We must call him something till we know who he really is,” she said. “Gabriel-Ernest, I think; those are nice suitable names.”
Van Cheel agreed, but he privately doubted whether they were being grafted onto a nice suitable child.

Later, Van Cheele’s artistic friend Cunningham describes his initial encounter with Gabriel-Ernest.

“Suddenly I became aware of a naked boy, a bather from some neighbouring pool, I took him to be, who was standing out on the bare hillside also watching the sunset. His pose was so suggestive of some wild faun of Pagan myth that I instantly wanted to engage him as a model, and in another moment I think I should have hailed him. But just then the sun dipped out of view, and all the orange and pink slid out of the landscape, leaving it cold and grey. And at the same moment an astounding thing happened – the boy vanished too!”
“What! Vanished away into nothing?” asked Van Cheele excitedly.
“No; that is the dreadful part of it,” answered the artist; “on the open hillside where the boy had been standing a second ago, stood a large wolf, blackish in colour, with gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes.”

The story climaxes as Van Cheele realises that Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf, only to find that he has taken a small child home from Sunday school. Van Cheele vainly pursues them, but both disappear as the sun sets, although Gabriel-Ernest’s clothes are later found lying in the road. it is assumed that the child fell into the nearby river, and that Gabriel-Ernest drowned trying to save it. Miss Van Cheele sets up a memorial “to Gabriel-Ernest, an unknown boy who bravely sacrificed his life for another.

“Van Cheele gave way to his aunt in most things, but he flatly refused to subscribe to the Gabriel-Ernest memorial.”

Gabriel-Ernest not only foregrounds the tension between desire and repression, but also the instrusion of the fantastic and the perverse into the ordered realm of the normal. Although the story often veers towards the camp, it is one of the most obviously sensual of Saki’s tales. Gabriel-Ernest, although described in a similar fashion to the other languid youths of Saki’s tales (such as Reginald or Clovis) he is decidedly feral – as Sandie Byrne comments:

“The wild in Saki’s stories is beautiful but violent and dangerous. It contains no trace of the myths of Nature as nurturing Mother. The supernatural force of the wilderness is associated with the beauty of an animal or a lovely, wild boy. The object of desire in in Saki’s stories is often adolescent and inhuman, or at least outside human society, and therefore constraints of class, manners, and mores.” (2007, p115)

More than one reviewer has noted the similarity between Gabriel-Ernest and Wilde’s Importance of Being Ernest. There are also echoes of Kipling’s In the Rukh (1893) in which an English forester named Gisborne encounters a man, Mowgli, who has been raised by wolves and is accompanied by four wolves. In their first encounter, Mowgli is “crowned with flowers, playing upon a rude bamboo flute,” around whom the wolves dance on their hind legs. Gisborne’s German superior names Mowgli as “Faunus”. Saki made more obvious – and crueler – use of Pan in his story, The Music on the Hill in which a stag gores to death a woman who has “persuaded” an otherwise contented bachelor to marry her. Mr Tytler is disgusted and disturbed by his experience, whilst Van Cheele, though seemingly unwilling to accept the obvious, is more ambivalent in his interest.

Both of these stories share similar devices – both are recounted from the perspective of a male narrator bound up in convention and propriety, with the female presence of well-intentioned but uncomprehending maiden aunts. Both narrators’ lack of imagination serve to heighten the extraordinary events which are beyond their comprehension. Both highlight the threat and appeal of male-to-male desire through the body of an adolescent characterised as wild and languid. Both Eustace’s wild behaviour and Gabriel-Ernest’s wild appearance and speech foreground the threatened intrusion of untameable nature/desire into the conventional spaces of English middle-class life.

Between the late 1890s and the First World War, “adolescence” became a key interest for educationalists and psychologists. Adolescent boys were frequently portrayed as being blindly led by their “biological urges” and lacking morality, ideals or individual volition. Some authorities, edging towards moral panic, insisted that if not disciplined and controlled rigorously, adolescent boys would become wayward and lead to national degeneration. The American Stanley Hall for example, is credited with having “discovered” adolescence, and his 1905 work proposed a theory of adolescence followed a Darwinian evolutionist ideal in which the stages of infancy, childhood, and adolescence are primitive stages of development prior to attaining fully developed adulthood. Boys were superior to girls in this evolutionary scheme. Hall reccomended that adolescents be controlled by the state and its agencies, and be taught self-control, and that young women be trained to regard marriage as their “one legitimate province”.

Martha Vicinus (in Dellamora, 1999) argues that in late Victorian culture, adolescent males came to embody “a fleeting moment of liberty and of dangerously attractive innocence, making possible fantasies of total contingency and total annihilation … the boy became a vessel into which an author – and a reader – could pour his or her anxieties, fantasies, and sexual desires.” (pp83-84) She argues that the turn to Classical mythology not only alerted aware readers to implicit sexual messages, but that figures such as Pan, Diana, Apollo and Antinous represented not only freedom, but a “spiritualized disdain” for the age’s materialism and industrial modernity and the expression of the intensity of a single moment of perfection or creativity. Nature becomes associated with creativity and freedom, rather than fertility and the “sanctioned cycle” of courtship, marriage, and raising a family. Vicinus describes how late Victorian fiction was concerned with themes of “manly love” – often set in homosocial environments such as the public school – valorised devoted friendships and self-sacrifice. The association of adolescent protagonists with Pan or Puck raises them to a mythic status, removing them from the world of normal relations – signifying both the possibility of lost innocence in the face of rampant modernity, the possibility of regeneration and autonomous freedom, if only fleetingly.

Needless to say, such homoerotic outings for Pan seem to have completely passed unnoticed by Pagan treatments of Pan until fairly recently. Pagan authors in the 1970s-80s, if they mentioned Pan at all other than as an aspect of the archetypal “Horned God” were more likely to cite Kenneth Grahame’s bucolic portrayal of Pan from The Wind in the Willows or that of Dion Fortune (The Goat-Foot God). Occasionally there were asides in the direction of Crowley’s Hymn to Pan but without any reference to the ‘specifics’ of Crowley’s relationship to Victor Neuberg. Amidst vague mention of Pan representing uninhibited ‘natural’ sexuality; the Wiccan Pan of this era was represented very much in terms of fertility and the companion of the Goddess.

Further Reading
David Bradshaw (ed) The Cambridge Companion to E.M Forster (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Sandie Byrne, The Unberarable Saki: The Work of H.H Munro (Oxford University Press, reprint edn 2007)
Richard Dellamora Victorian Sexual Dissidence (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
R.K Martin, G Piggford (eds) Queer Forster (University of Chicago Press, 1997)
Patricia Merivale, Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (Harvard Univ. Press, 1969)

“Down the long lanes and overgrown ridings of history we catch odd glimpses of a lurking rustic god with a goat’s white lightning in his eyes. A sort of fugitive, hidden among leaves. and laughing with the uncanny derision of one who feels himself defeated by something lesser than himself.”
D. H Lawrence, Remembering Pan

It’s probably my Wiccan roots, but I’ve always associated this time of the year – Beltain – with Pan, and in particular, the urge to plunge headlong, heedlessly, into the wild. A couple of weeks back, we were in Bournemouth, visiting Jenny, and we went down to the beach after dark. The moon, reflected in the waves made it look as though the sea was lit from below with dancing lights, and as I stood on the beach, I felt, then, that call to just dash into the water and join that dance. Fortunately, Jenny & Maria managed to persuade me that it wasn’t a good idea. For me, Pan is very much bound up with a particular sensibility – the thrill of the unknown encounter that waits around the corner; a presentiment that “something” (exciting, weird, strange, who knows?) is about to happen.

A correspondent recently asked me if I knew of any extensive queer pagan-oriented readings of Pan. I didn’t, although it strikes me that Pan is a quintessentially queer diety, embodying numerous tensions, contradictions, ambivalences, from desire and panic/possession; marginality and the liminal, the transgressive, musical lure of the wild, of monstrous and hybrid forms, animal and human, human and divine, simultaneously present and absent; both embodied and transcendental; dangerous and alluring.

What to say of Pan? Plutarch not withstanding, reports of his “death” are greatly exaggerated. There is a vast literature (and art) for Pan, and so too a multitude of Pans, ranging from his shadowy Arcadian origins, the flowering of his cult in the Hellenistic period, the rise of the pastoral tradition through to the “revival” of enthusiasm for Pan during the Fin de siècle (perhaps the point at which Pan becomes distinctly “queer” in the modern sense) and beyond to the present day. So too, the presence of Pan has flitted through the modern revival of Paganism and the Occult, through the influence of Dion Fortune, Aleister Crowley, and Victor Neuberg, through to modern Paganism, with its tendency to – as Ronald Hutton points out, treat Pan as an Jungian archetype, his distinctiveness partially erased in the comparative impetus to to relate him to other deities (often Cernunnos, sometimes Krishna, occasionally Baphomet):

“Just as Diana, Artemis, Demeter and Hertha had lost their ancient individual identity and become aspects of a single universal female divinity of the green earth and night sky, so Pan became in the mid-twentieth century the most famous ancient aspect of a being characterized, with increasing frequency, simply as ‘the horned god’.”
Triumph of the Moon p50

This tendency to treat deities archetypally is being increasingly challenged, particularly through the rise of reconstructionist approaches to Pagan praxis. Pan is often invoked (sometimes uneasily) when Pagans & Occultists discuss and represent matters of sexuality.

So there’s quite a lot to explore here. For this series of posts then, I’m going to wander across this vast and fascinating territory, and in no particular order, attempt to focus in on some of these themes and explore how Pan is represented in various way – literary, artistic, mythopoetic or academic – and how the visioning of Pan has changed and mutated across history and culture – adding (occasionally) my own reflections on my own encounters with Pan over the last thirty-odd years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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