This gallery contains 7 photos.
Originally posted on rainbow messenger:
Once up on a time, and for vast eons of it, there were just a few shamans born in each human tribe -they performed the tasks of serving people and spirit for the benefit of all. They lived slightly apart from the rest of the people, their principal relationship being…
Life on planet Earth is changing fast. Humanity and our planet are facing a crisis of apocalyptic proportions. As an AIDS survivor I know what that can feel like at times -as the encroaching dis-ease worsens and we scurry around for anything that might help, we may even find ourselves getting very angry at this horrifying road humans seem hell bent on pursuing. This could get very nasty and very scary – but it can also be a turning point in our civilisation, where we face the big questions of life head on.
AIDS triggered me to pursue the spiritual search – so intense was my longing for answers in the face of death that even in my darkest hours I became attuned to the love-presence of the divine within me – I went on to recover and to re-enter life as a transformed being, who now seeks to assist the growth of spiritual intelligence, compassion and liberation in the world. Like many who have a Near Death Experience (a slow motion one in my case, lasting a couple of years), I returned to life with a sense of purpose that previously had been absent.
AIDS brought me an Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self – looking at the crises rocking the world today it seems to me we are all being pushed to the edge of destruction, a place where we might finally face ourselves and heal our separation from the planet, from spirit and each other. We may be, one way or another, heading for an Accelerated Collective Discovery of Consciousness (ACDC) – the underlying unity of life will eventually demand to be known and will push us kicking and screaming to that point –
OR WE COULD LISTEN TO THE MYSTICAL VOICES THROUGHOUT TIME THAT LEFT THEIR TEACHINGS OF UNITY
AND TO THE EXPERIENCES OF AIDS, CANCER, NDE AND OTHER SURVIVORS
WHO ARE GETTING ACCELERATED UPGRADES IN AWARENESS, LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING IN THIS LIFETIME
AND CUT THE FIGHTING, CUT THE GREED, CUT THE ABUSE, CUT THE ALIENATION, CUT THE DESTRUCTION
AND CHANGE LIFE ON EARTH RIGHT NOW.
MY BOOKS
Available at Lulu.com:
From AIDS to Eternity …offering a radical vision of the link between queer people and the spiritual dimensions, one that breaks down the barriers of both religious and rational thought to take you to a place of presence, discovery and remembrance: available as ebook or paperback…
+++ 3 books of my poetry, which also include visuals and inspiration from queer ancestors, teachers and prophets:
AIDS Shaman 1: Queer Spirit Awakening
AIDS Shaman 2: Through the Veils
AIDS Shaman 3: Dimensional Shift
Diagnosed HIV+ in 1990, aged 25, by 1995 I was preparing myself to die – and opening myself to a spiritual reality i had, since the age of 12, not believed in. A complete transformation of my being began, and since recovering from AIDS I have been exploring ritual magic and conscious community that connects both to the earth and to spirit with other queers in the global Radical Faerie community and as an organiser of Queer Spirit Festival in the UK.
HIV was for me a trigger to a deep awakening in my soul. AIDS was for me a ‘classical’ shamanic awakening – stripping away everything i believed, all my dreams and fears – until the raw, conscious, multidimensional soul was released. It is my belief that many gay men, lesbians and trans people are shaman souls, and that HIV is still today a call from the soul to question our assumptions about life and face, accept, our mortality – and find our home in eternity.
I rarely post on this blog page any more
Follow my posts at https://rainbowmessenger.blog/
VERONA MAY VIVIEN WHITING, nee HADDOCK
21.2.1928 – 10.2.2021
YOUNG RONA
.
YOUNG MUM
RONA’S PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS
.
RONA AND NORTON
.
MOTHER AND SON
MOTHER BELOVED
THE WEB OF LIFE
Is a Dancing Oneness
LIFE – DEATH – REBIRTH
An Eternal Cycle
Designed to Carry Us Home.
.
The Web gave birth
to a self-conscious species
whose purpose it is to care for the creatures
and create with the power divine within us –
the Infinite Creative Potential of the Holy I AM.
.
Gifted with Self Awareness,
but blind to Unity and Interdependence,
this species birthed religions to bridge the gap
but forgot that religion is meant to be a map
not a destination.
.
The goal is to return to the Garden
where once our games were all joy
before the rules and rigours of our evolution
sent humans into dreams and delusion.
.
We will still experience separation
but once we understand the game
we’ll be on the path of re-unification
and life will never be the same.
https://rainbowmessenger.blog/2021/04/13/the-web-of-life/
In the years 1995-2000 I underwent a transformation of my being – due to sickness I was motivated to explore the metaphysical layers of existence and quickly worked out that:
THERE ARE TWO LAYERS TO OUR HUMAN REALITY
THE MATERIAL (PHYSICAL BODY) AND THE NON-MATERIAL (MIND, SPIRIT)
The Western culture lost this understanding at some point in its history, and began to see the mind as a feature or function of the physical brain, but in the Eastern world the exploration of Mind (which in the East includes thought, imagination, memory, emotion and spirit) took central place in the philosophical and religious sectors.
In the West all our incredible scientific and medical advances in understanding are missing awareness of this fundamental nature of reality, and will ultimately all one day be revised, when the nature of consciousness is better understood. For example I have learnt through my studies and experience that how we think, what we believe and imagine are always creating frequencies that generate well-being or dis-ease in our bodies.
Regarding GENDER, both body and mind/spirit express through gender and the gender of each part of us may be differently aligned. The rise in TRANS VISIBILITY, especially since 2014, is happening in the West where this basic metaphysical reality is not understood. The inner gender may well not align with the body gender, and this is normal, as traditional cultures once understood. We may feel we are both genders on the inner planes, or that we are a medley of frequencies that need no gender label at all.
“Among the Dagara people, gender has very little to do with anatomy. It is purely energetic. In that context, a male who is physically male can vibrate female energy, and vice versa. That is where the real gender is.” Malidoma Some of the Dagara people of West Africa, http://www.menweb.org/somegay.htm
(This was once widely accepted in the pre-Christian and pre-Islamic pagan cultures of Europe and the Middle East where TRANS PEOPLE FULFILLED SACRED ROLES, a vestige of which is still present in the Hijra people of India).
This accepted, we can then see how it is possible to transform one’s gender in two ways. It might be that a person feels motivated to embrace and expand their inner gender, but not necessarily wish to change the body. Every single personality is formed through an interplay of gender, awareness and belief, and we can all expand our life experience in each area.
This was my path. In the mid 90s, as I faced living and dying with AIDS, my inner feminine took over and led me on a path of soul transformation. I love my male body and have no wish to change it, but I had never felt fully at home in all male company, often even in gay male venues. In the Radical Faerie tribe I have met men who naturally and joyfully embrace and express their inner feminine. These are the kind of men I can be around, assuming they also get that female and trans-identified faeries are also part of this mix of gender fluidity that has within it the potential to transform not only individuals but the understanding, behaviour and attitude of the whole human race.
Rock icon Debbie Harry said in an interview a few years ago, in her nonchalant manner – like ‘why doesn’t everyone get it?’ – that she has always just felt the point was to embrace both male and female spirit and power within ourselves, I’m sure that’s her secret to still rocking on in her 70s.
The flow of feminine and masculine in the body and the mind makes me whole.
The modern emergence of gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans people has happened in a western world somewhat lost in a spiritual void, but if voices of the traditional cultures are listened to, and our own western history revisited, we could find out much more about who we are why we are here.
I INVITE YOU TO FOLLOW OR SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEW SITE
www.thequeerageofaquarius.blog
The Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn at Winter Solstice 2020 is being hailed by many astrologers around the world as a major step in the gradual dawning of the Age of Aquarius. We’ve had several of these over the past 50 years, the two headliners being the 1987 Harmonic Convergence and the 2012 Winter Solstice which coincided with the ‘end’ of the Mayan Calendar. I’m not sure what the big astrological story of 1995 was, but that was the year that I underwent a total transformation of my understanding and experience of existence, a shamanic rebirth brought on by HIV/AIDS, the year I became aware of what the Age of Aquarius actually means, and aware that I as a gay man might have some part to play in birthing it.
The reason for this blog site is that a crucial aspect of Aquarian energy, which is acknowledged but generally underplayed by astrologers, and largely lost to the many of the people it most affects, is revealed in the mythology behind the sign, the story of Zeus and Ganymede, a fact that deserves a lot more exposure.
The emergence of gay people into society, accepted and embraced as never before since only half a century, and only in some parts of the world, is already changing the world, and the Queer Age of Aquarius is only just beginning.
On this new site I will present my Aquarian story of awakening to spirit and the mystery of consciousness, and offer perspectives on life, and the part Queer people play in it gained during 25 years of walking on my soul path. I offer words that I hope will assist in the evolution of a more compassionate world of enhanced understanding, well being and joy. I hope it will help people to overcome negative attitudes around spirit and faith as we realise we can find our own answers through direct experience, and that it will assist queerkind to appreciate that we have a long hidden spiritual history to be uncovered and reclaimed.
PLEASE VISIT AND SHARE THE QUEER AGE OF AQUARIUS
www.thequeerageofaquarius.blog
I am posting less at shokti.blog, you can find more of my writing also at rainbowmessenger.blog
‘The great tides and strides of history
all part of the Divine Plan:
A species left to rule its world
To build a divine sisterbrotherhood
without the Goddess’s guiding hand.
As we reach the point of unification
voices of love and wisdom arise in every land,
but they’re not the ones in power,
this we should understand:
THE LOVE REVOLUTION COMES FROM BELOW
THIS TIME WAS LONG AGO PLANNED.
Whether it will be peaceful or violent
is in humanity’s hands.’
Welcome to the launch blog of my new book
AIDS SHAMAN 3: Dimensional Shift
When I came out in 1986 the few books that had been written about the spirituality of gay-lesbian-bi-trans, ‘queer”, people were far from my radar. Nor was I looking for, or open to, any spiritual meaning in my sexuality, I just wanted to have fun, to free my repressed nature, which of course was a completely spiritual goal, I simply didn’t know it.
In the three and a half decades since I found the courage to be true to myself in a world that I knew would judge, even hate, me, many books have been published on the theme of our queer spirit that seek to expand the understanding of what being attracted to people of the same gender is all about. The first I came across was Gay Soul, Mark Thompson’s 1994 compilation of interviews with gay pioneers, bringing names such as Harry Hay, Will Roscoe, Ram Dass and Joseph Kramer into my awareness. This opened up the doors for me to start exploring the possibility that, far from being unnatural and abominable, my gay sexuality might be a holy gift. I soon discovered Mark’s other works Gay Spirit and Gay Body and the mystical writings of Andrew Harvey, whose work Gay Mystics draws out the hidden heritage of queer spiritual voices throughout time and in every corner of the world.
The turn of the millennium brought forth many new works on gay spirit, of course largely unnoticed by the commercially driven mainstream gay world. It’s clear to me that this flowering from mainly gay male writers was part of our response to the devastating challenge of the AIDS years. These books were truly ground breaking and covered all bases – such as offerings from
Andrew Ramer (Two Flutes Playing),
Toby Johnson (Gay Spirituality, Gay Perspective),
Christian de la Huerta (Coming Out Spiritually),
David Nimmons (Soul Beneath the Skin),
John Stowe (Gay Spirit Warrior),
Winston Leyland (Queer Dharma),
Will Roscoe (Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same Sex Love),
Christopher Penczak (Gay Witchcraft),
Michael Thomas Ford (The Path of the Green Man).
These works, all published 1997-2005, were signs of the gradual opening up of the story around the spirituality of LGBTQ+ people the world over, which was also happening in increasing numbers of gay spiritual retreats, queer pagan and radical faerie gatherings at this time, a turning away from the tame and humble words of some gay people defending us within religious institutions and instead proclaiming the innate and ancient power in our sexuality, as well a manifestation of the longing for deeper meaning in their lives and love relationships than the often shallow immediacy of the mainstream gay scene.
These works built on the inspired writings of the earlier pioneers of this path –
Arthur Evans (Witchcraft and the Gay Counter Culture, 1978),
Larry Mitchell (The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions, 1977),
Judy Grahn (Another Mother Tongue, 1984),
Randy P. Connor (Blossom of Bone 1993).
Since 2005 more books have appeared as more authors share their own liberating insights, such as Salvatore Sapienza (Gay is a Gift, 2009) and Caffyn Jesse (Orientation, 2015). Some focus on de-colonising the notion of sexuality from the binary, western, psychological model developed in the late 19th century – when we look at diverse cultures around the globe it certainly becomes very apparent that homo and trans sexualities have a deep association with spirituality, long ago denied in the monotheistic religions. Thomas Prower takes a world tour on this theme in Queer Magic (2018). Raven Kaldera highlights the sacred history and power of gender-variance in Hermaphrodeities, while books such as Arcane Perfection (2017), a second Queer Magic (subtitled Power Beyond Boundaries, 2018), and most recently The Book of Queer Prophets (2020) are compilations of writings by queer individuals each telling something of their personal tale and sharing their unique eye on the world.
My personal journey into magic and consciousness began in 1995, as this wave of queer spiritual energy was building. I explored esoteric schools, eastern spiritual teachings, celtic paganism and shamanism, as I underwent a complete realignment in my own soul. My journey with AIDS was a modern version of a very ancient experience of ego destruction and shamanic rebirth, one that would have been recognised as such in a traditional tribal setting, but which the modern medical world does not comprehend. I survived this annihilation and rebirth through finding a determination I had not known before, a complete devotion to the path of awakening and service, offered to the gay community that we might reclaim our holy queer spirit, discovering and proclaiming who we are, no longer allowing ourselves to be defined as ‘other’ by others; and I offer my work to the whole of humanity as a missing piece of the puzzle that, when put back into its place, will suddenly make the whole picture much clearer to see.
My contribution to the gradual remembrance of humanity’s cosmic nature is not simply intellectual and book bound, it is an engaged practice, a way of life since 25 years, the first five of those in my aids cocoon guided by the loving presence of the goddess and spirit friends, since then in lively, spirited, colourful, exploratory community with other questing queers who seek to release our creativity, passion, power and holiness, and be of service to the world.
My aids shaman books are not intended to explain everything that I want to share (that will come in a prose work later), they are intended to inspire your own thoughts, your own remembrances, your own soul to come forth and guide you. With quotations to make you think and a poetic stroll through past, present and future realities and potentialities. My words are here to help re-align the subconscious mind towards an outlook of compassionate interconnection with all of life, towards holistic creativity and simple acceptance and enjoyment of who we are, and why we are alive at this time. And perhaps move you to explore some of the fantastic written works on the theme of queer spirit and mysticism in general that have emerged in the past decades.
AIDS SHAMAN 3 IS ON SALE AT AT LULU.COM:
print version https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/shokti-lovestar/aids-shaman-3/paperback/product-5w7k45.html?page=1&pageSize=4
“Many shamans were homosexual; many of the worshippers of the Goddess under her various names and in her various cults all over the world … openly avowed their homosexuality and were accepted and even specially revered as priests, oracles, healers and diviners. Homosexuals, far from being rejected, were seen as sacred – people who, by virtue of a mysterious fusion of feminine and masculine traits, participated with particular intensity in the life of the Source. The Source of Godhead is, after all, both masculine and feminine, and exists in a unity that transcends both…
“Allowing the wisdom of the third and fourth sexes to be fully vocal in our culture would dissolve the false, rigid categorization of “male” and “female”, and the male-centred, male-dominated, competitive, war-and-power obsessed mentality that it keeps alive.” Andrew Harvey, Gay Mystics
“We look forward to creating a genuine Gay culture, one that is free from exploitation by bars, baths, and gay business owners. We look forward to re-establishing women’s mysteries and men’s mysteries as the highest expression of collective Gay culture and sexuality. We look forward to regaining our ancient historical roles as medicine people, healers, prophets, shamans and sorcerers. We look forward to an endless and fathomless process of coming out – as gay people, as animals, as humans, as mysterious and powerful spirits that move through the life cycle of the cosmos….. Like butterflies we are emerging from the shells of our past restricted existence. We are re-discovering the ancient magic that was once the birth right of all human beings. We are re-learning how to talk to the worms and the stars. We are taking flight on the wings of self-determination. Come, blessed Lady of the Flowers, Queen of Heaven, creator and destroyer, Kali – we are dancing the dance of your coming.” Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture
“The position that gay people take in society, the function we so often choose, is that of mediator between worlds….. In a tribal environment, this means shape shifting into wolves, birds, stones, wind and translating their wisdoms for the benefit of the people of the tribe… in the long patriarchal history that has gradually enveloped the world’s people, the gay function has been to make crossover journeys between gender-worlds, translating, identifying and bringing back the information ……..gay culture is always on the cusp of each intersecting world or way of life, on the path between one world and another.”
“The tribal attitude said, and continues to say, that Gay people are especially empowered because we are able to identify with both sexes and can see into more than one world at once, having the capacity to see from more than one point of view at a time.” Judith Grahn, Another Mother Tongue
and finally, here’s an excerpt from
AIDS SHAMAN 3: DIMENSIONAL SHIFT –
Spirituality is the Aquarian way of Self-discovery,
of liberation, understanding and loving community.
There is nothing but human minds
holding back the progress to unity….
What we conceive we create,
we need a new global story
that recognises our Oneness
and the many routes to Glory.
Earth centred traditions once derided, are now respected
For their wisdom and knowledge
Of the body, of the stars, of other worlds, of the soul.
The Union of all paths is the goal.
We’ve tried living without God
– God knows we’ve tried –
But faith is something that we have deeply invested inside.
Until the separate self unites with its deep core,
the divine place in us that knows we are a part of so much more….
Humanity continues to create more and more
Drama, discord and disease…
In our struggles we’ve raped and pillaged the earth.
2020s is the decade where we become ready to give birth
To an enlightened humanity and change our world.
The elemental structure of Nature
Shows us the way to heal, to wholeness, balance, peace.
Nature will find a new harmony
When the madness in humanity has ceased.
Queer Spirituality In “Queer Spirit”
The Queer Spiritual Frontier In “Queer Spirit”
Our Most Ancient Original Ancestry In “Queer Spirit”
i am shokti, lovestar of the eurofaeries, aka marco queer magician of london town. i explore the links between our sexual-physical nature and our spirits, running gatherings, rituals and Queer Spirit Festival. i woke up to my part in the accelerating awakening of light love and awareness on planet earth during a shamanic death-and-rebirth process lasting from January 1995 to the year 2000, and offer here my insights and observations on the ongoing transformation of human consciousness, how to navigate the waves of change, and especially focusing on the role of queer people at this time. View more posts
THE WORLDS ABOVE & THE WORLDS BELOW
At this time Humanity reaps what it has sown,
We each find out how much we have grown
in this year of rapid transformation
at this time of evolution’s culmination.
Religious fools are screaming “End Times”
but the end that is due is of the delusion
of separation and individuality
that is ruling the human mind.
The Dead will return, the Christ-Self too
Judgement Day is upon us
But It’s not what people think it is.
The Dead never went away, nor did the Goddess
it’s humans who lost their second sight
forgot how to talk to trees, winds, sun, moon and rain
who convinced themselves life must be suffering and pain.
Now is the time to reunite the Worlds
For the Healing of the Earth
and to start living from Joy again.
GODDESS PRAYER
Goddess I am your child
Come be always at my side
Lead me through the veils to light
Grant me your holy second sight
Teach me of the eternal way
Sacred are the Goddess Days.
The Return of the Goddess
The Holy Spirit Herself
INVOKING HER PRESENCE
INVOKING HER WEALTH
Birthing her children
Into her Domain
The Wheel of Life
Takes us round again
Teach us of the Eternal Way
Sacred are these Goddess Days
LOVE * LIGHT * LAUGHTER
DANCE * RHYTHM * SONG
PLEASURE * GAIETY * COMPASSION
these are the Ways of the GODDESS
through these things we know we belong
to the Cosmos, to LIFE itself.
.
The Goddess within us all
brings our lives true wealth,
Her cycles, seasons and wisdom
generate well-being and health.
.
In ancient times known as Mother Cybele,
as Isis, Ishtar, Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite
as Venus, Diana, Freya and many more names.
Revered by Christians as the humble Virgin,
Her true powers hidden as Holy Spirit,
the Goddess is the Comforter, the Redeemer of our world.
Attuning to Her Presence within and with-out
is what humanity needs to do
to bring the Shift of the Ages about.
.
LOVE * LIGHT * LAUGHTER
DANCE * RHYTHM * SONG
PLEASURE * GAIETY * COMPASSION
through these things, through the Mother’s love
may Humanity finally learn how to get along.
The Great Goddess, worshipped by all of the many nations across the ancient European/Mediterranean/Asiatic world for thousands of years, gave birth to Christianity, in full awareness that her power would be eclipsed for the duration of an astrological age as the male gods took over the heavens. Her avatar, Jesus, knew this too, and spoke of her eventual return as the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, whom he said would ‘teach all things, shall bring all things to your remembrance’. We have been told to regard Christianity as an outgrowth from Judaism, but this is not the whole story.
Lost on the modern world but certainly obvious to everybody in ancient times, the significance of Mary’s virginity was not that she had not had sex with a man, but that she was a holy priestess of the Goddess, probably Artemis, whose temple at Ephesus, one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World, and not far from Palestine, had been a huge centre of worship for thousands of years. It was to Ephesus that Mary retired to live after Jesus’ crucifixion.
It was also at Ephesus, after the temple had been destroyed by Christians, that a Church gathering of 250 bishops in 431 CE declared Mary ‘theotokos‘, the Mother of God, thereby opening the way for the devotional love that the populace across the Empire had long felt for the various Goddesses – such as Cybele, Isis, Artemis/Diana, Aphrodite/Venus – to be channelled into Marian shrines and kept within the Church, while at the same time it affirmed the divinity of Christ. Sacred imagery of a mother goddess and human son was nothing new to the ancient world, it was a very common motif from Cybele (who gave birth to Attis, later her lover), to Isis (mother of Horus), to Aphrodite (who was mother to many male gods, including Eros, Priapus, Hermaphroditus and the feminine male Dionysus), to Venus (mother to Aeneas, ancestor of the Roman people).
Jesus was born among the Jewish people, who had a thousand years previously marked themselves out as different from the other tribes of the region by rejecting Goddess reverence and making their Father God the one and only supreme being. The Christian Church regarded Judaism as its forerunner and shared its patriarchal attitudes, for example apopting the Hebrew creation myth, one of many that were told at the time, but the only one which put the woman firmly in her place as the servant of man. Most creation myths of the Middle East gave the prime place to the Creatrix Mother. But actually Jewish mythology also tells of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was thrown out of the garden of Eden because she refused to surrender to his will. Second time round Adam’s primacy was affirmed by claiming Eve had been made from his body, the opposite to the reality of childbirth.
The Genesis story of Eden would have been understood differently to ancient peoples than to most of us today, just like the Gospel’s tale of virgin birth. The snake was one of the most prominent images of the Goddess-centred pagan faiths, packed with symbolism, including sexual. The Genesis story is saying that, once again as with Lilith, the female lands them in trouble, this time because she has let the pagan faith lead her astray.
At the time of the birth of Jesus however the Goddess power was still in full sway. Cybele, the most ancient Mother worshipped since at least 6000 BCE in Anatolia, eastern Turkey, and known to the Greeks as the Mother of the Gods (that phrase again!), had been adopted as the Magna Mater of the Roman Empire two hundred years earlier. Her worship united the world from Britain to Turkey, and it was spread through the Empire by her itinerant, queer or transgender Gallae priest/esses, whose flamboyant, loud, erotic and bloody rituals were hated by the Church Fathers, not least because, for the first 300 years of Christianity, the Roman citizens were happy to go hear a Christian preacher in the afternoon then attend an orgy at the Cybele temple in the evening.
All the holy priesthoods of the ancient Goddess featured both virgin females and transgender or gay males. The Old Testament tells of repeated efforts over 400 years by Hebrew kings to stop their people sacrificing and building phallic poles to Asherah, their local version of Ishtar, Goddess of the region since 10000 BCE, also known as Inanna and Astarte. There were some kings who were more tolerant, such as Solomon, whose many wives came from many cultures, bringing their ways with them to his famous temple. The OT tells also of the Hebrew kings’ efforts to eradicate the Qedesha, translated into English bibles as ‘sodomites’ or, nowadays, ‘male shrine prostitutes’, but whose name meant in fact the ‘Anointed’ or ‘Holy Ones’.
The title of Mother of God moved from Cybele to Mary as the Christians set to wiping out Goddess culture once it had become established as the only official religion of Rome in the late 4th century. This move to name Mary Theotokos (as opposed to Christokos, the Mother of Christ – the heated debates over this at the Council of Ephesus led to a schism between Roman Christianity and some, mainly Persian, churches that was only finally addressed and healed in 1994) was a conscious act taken in full awareness that people everywhere held the Divine Feminine in the highest regard, taken because this would enable them to dismantle the worship of other female forms and bring more people into the new faith.
The Church was also busy changing the gender of the Holy Spirit from female to male, the means being the Greek language. In Hebrew ‘ruach’, the word for spirit, was feminine, also in Syriac ‘rucha’, and writers in those languages used maternal imagery to describe the third member of the Trinity. In Greek however, the words used were of either male or neutral gender, and this has of course fed into other translations. Most Christian writings today about the Holy Spirit use He pronouns, but there are some churches that do see a She, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the Unity Church, whose founder Charles Fillmore said of the Holy Spirit, “love is always feminine”. What the Church declared and what people believed have not always met of course, and while European art of the Middle Ages depicted the Holy Spirit as male, there is one surviving fresco in Urschalling, Germany, in a church of St Jakobus, that shows her female.
Jesus also said that people will know the Comforter when they come because the Holy Spirit already “dwelleth with you”. The Goddess in Judaism had been channelled into the concept of shekhinah, referring to invisible, divine presence, regarded and experienced as feminine. Yahweh was above the world, shekhinah was divinity moving through the world in all things – just as the Hindus see male Shiva as the overseeing Father and female Shakti as the Divine present in manifestation.
Note that Shiva is regarded actually as half male-half female, as he contains all within him, and this reflects the totally disregarded description of the Hebrew God in Genesis as being both male and female (which should in fact be clear from the Genesis verses that say he made humans male and female ‘in his image’). Arabic has the word sakina, translated usually as tranquility/peace but which actually indicates so much more, as is clear from its similarity to shekhinah.
In its efforts to evangelise the Roman Empire the Church also took on traits of the Goddess priesthood – such as the wearing of robes, its insistence on celibacy for priests (people were simply not used to holy servants having spouses and families, they were not ready to accept it) and of course built churches at pagan sites (eg St Pauls Cathedral in London at a site where Diana was worshipped) and the timing of Christian feasts to fit and replace the pagan calendar. The Archgallus of Rome, head of the genderqueer servants of Cybele, became the Pope, complete with the same style of headgear, the mitre.
The association of trans/queer people with the Goddess temples and rituals goes way back into pre-history, but from those times we have some myths that suggest we were created by the Goddess for that very purpose. A hero named Asushunamir, who was both male and female, was sent into the Underworld to rescue Goddess Inanna, a task they fulfilled, but not without suffering a curse from Inanna’s dark sister Ereshkigel, which was that they (and their kind) would be hated and feared by the world. Inanna could not remove the curse but appointed the queer/transgender people (known variously as kurgurru, assinnu, galatur at different times in the long history of Mesopotamia) to be her special, beloved servants, and promised a time when the curse would hold no more and they be recognised in their holiness again.
Jesus was aware of all this. The Gospel of Matthew records Jesus saying that there are those who chose to become eunuchs ‘for the sake of the kingdom of God’. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas he speaks of uniting/transcending the male/female in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The future for transsexuality is also referred to by Isaiah in the Old Testament, who predicts, for those eunuchs who serve the lord faithfully, an ‘everlasting name’, ‘ better than that of sons and daughters’. Those joining the Gallae priest/esses of Cybele undertook public self-castration during a frenzied ritual on the Day of Blood, where Attis, the dying (through botched self-castration) lover of Cybele, was remembered. The ritual involved carrying an effigy of Attis tied to a pine tree through the streets raising the ecstatic energy and the next day celebrating his resurrection. This ritual predated Christianity by a very long time, and of course the Christian Church Fathers hated this ceremony, so timed the Easter festivities to replace it.
The Catholic Church encouraged the channelling of devotional feelings for the Goddess into the honouring of Mary, but of course throughout the Middle Ages the populace of Europe were not so quick to let go of their love of other versions of the divine feminine. Diana worship, which was especially associated with nature and the night, with the moon, continued among the country folk for centuries. It was generally Her that witches went to meet at their night time Sabbats, though the Inquisition and later the witch trials would use torture to force prisoners to say they were meeting with the devil.
For English female mystic Julian of Norwich in the late 14th/early 15th century Jesus himself became the Mother. She lived as an anchoress, living a life of prayer in an enclosed space, through a slit in the wall she would dispense advice and wisdom. She was very highly regarded but the nuns of her order kept her writing about the Motherhood of Christ secret for centuries after her death. ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ is now regarded as one of the finest works of medieval mysticism.
Protestantism, from the 16th century, regarded Catholic veneration of Mary and the saints as no better than pagan cult practice, and pushed the divine feminine further into the background. It shared the Catholic fear of witches however and the peak of the witch hunt craze came in the 17th century.
Then reason and rationalism rose to the fore, and religion gradually lost its dominant grip on our lives, but it has yet to release its power over our souls, for so much of the taboos it enforced were carried forward into the rational age – not least the prejudice against gay, lesbian, bi, queer and trans people, which is still far from dismantled as we progress into the 21st century. Religions still influence the attitudes of a large percentage of the world’s population, but without real historical knowledge of how faith was in the pre-Christian world, people today do not see much of the underlying significance of the stories in the holy books on which they base their faith, nor do they understand where their religiously justified, irrational and stubborn prejudices stem from. The long told story of Christianity’s ‘Triumph’ over paganism hides the fact that the religion was born from the Goddess-centred faiths of that past time as much as from the Judaic prophecy of the Messiah.
But the Goddess isn’t worried. She has never gone anywhere. Anyone who has felt the presence of expanded, vibrant, high vibrational, peacefully embracing love has met Her, even if they called it ‘Him’. The shakti-shekinah-sakina is present in all matter, in both ‘he’ and ‘she’.
Jesus came to do a job, his inspirational life kicked off a stream of growth for humanity that has unfortunately utterly severed our connection to the actual presence of the divine in the world, except for rare, magical moments that become the highlights of our lives. To heal our disconnection from the planet, from love, from the god and goddess within ourselves, we need – as a species, but each of us individually can help that day come – to reconnect to the light-giving, loving, teaching, compassionate and comforting Divine Mother Presence in everything- the shekhinah, shakti, sakina: the Great Holy Goddess Spirit.
shokti 