Guest Post: “Oh Spirits, Grant Me True Knowledge of How to Get to Sesame Street” by Saf

Enter, chanting:

I call upon the power of sunny days

Through the power that I channel I sweep the clouds away

My spirit travels to the realm where the air is sweet

Oh spirits grant me true knowledge of how to get to Sesame Street

I call the spirit of play to fill me

I call into being a world that is A-OK

I summon friendly neighbors and I greet them

Oh spirits grant me true knowledge of how to get to Sesame Street

I don’t remember when I started to realize that I have always venerated a long-beaked bird who teaches us the secrets of letters.

It was some time after I had started a planetary magic practice working with Mercury, and then by way of Mercury the additional syncretized spirits of Hermes, Odin, and Thoth (and some others who came to me in visions).

I came out of my ritual chamber and said to my spouse, “I think Big Bird is an incarnation of Thoth.” And my spouse said, “Well duh.” But I do think there is merit in stating things that are obvious in hindsight but not set into words.

Big Bird is one of the main Muppets from the children’s educational television show Sesame Street. His character was originally created in 1969. He is a seven foot tall yellow bird with a long beak, and is perpetually six years old. Thoth (to summarize very briefly) is the Koine Greek name for the Ancient Egyptian god of writing, analysis, wisdom, magic, the moon, and many other subjects, often depicted as a person with the head of a bird with a long beak: an ibis. He is one of a number of beings who are said to have invented writing or given writing to humanity.

I don’t have any sources that suggest Big Bird was inspired directly by Thoth. However, Big Bird was recognized as an ibis by the god Osiris in the 1983 TV special Don’t Eat the Pictures, aka the one where Big Bird helped weigh hearts in the afterlife. And, given my syncretic Big Bird-Thoth practice, visiting the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where this special was filmed) was an intense spiritual experience. Fortunately, New York City is a great place to cry in public because not only will people leave you alone, they might not even notice.

If you didn’t know, ibises are also native to North America, and you may be able to see them where you live. The white-faced ibis can be seen on the marshes near my home, and the fist time I spotted one, my reaction was: I know him!!!

I think Big Bird adds something valuable to Thoth: a child aspect. If Thoth gifts the letters, Big Bird learns them alongside us. He doesn’t already know them: he, along with all the others, is so excited about letters and numbers that he bursts into song. He even notably mistook ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ as a word in and of itself: ab ca deff gee jeckle menop quir stoove wixes. Which sounds very much like a grimoiric incantation to me.

Sesame Street’s own name is plausibly a pop culture magical incantation. It was inspired by the magic words “open sesame”, from the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. In fact, the first Sesame Workshop international co-production localizing Sesame Street for an Arabic-speaking country (Kuwait) was called Iftah Ya Simsim, which is Arabic for open sesame. Sesame might be magical because the seed opens in two parts, sympathetically with the cave door that needed to magically open, or simsim might be a word borrowing that has a kabbalistic meaning. The only sources I have on this one are bad quality, though, so it may as well be because sesame is delicious.

To return to Big Bird-Thoth: It made a lot of sense that writing gods would reach out to me, because I don’t remember a time before I could read. I figured out what letters were before my hands were dextrous enough to hold a crayon. Only as an adult did I learn that this is a condition called hyperlexia, and it is a form of autism.

So, surprising no one, I became a writing teacher. I have a PhD in writing (Plato’s Phaedrus, which recounts Thoth’s invention of writing, was a required part of the curriculum). I had to re-learn how to like writing after I finished that degree, and periodically since then. Because when I’m staring at a pile of ungraded papers, policies and procedures, meeting notes, my own email inbox…I have been known to say to myself, “Literacy was a mistake.”

It’s at these times I most need to travel to the eternal magical realm of hyperlexia and benevolence, the realm of Sesame Street, and appreciate the gift that letters are.

In various traditions of magic, a magical alphabet is used to inscribe spells, either to demarcate them as “other” or special forms of writing, or because the letters or symbols themselves have power.

But I want to tell you now, the thing I remind myself when I’m tired of my job: every alphabet is a magical alphabet. Writing is itself magical. Scratched symbols representing sounds, concepts, and immense abstraction: this is a precious supernatural gift. Yes, we can use it to bore ourselves to death. But we can also use it to bless, curse, transport ourselves to other realms, learn, expand our minds, and love. My sacred mission, gift, duty, whatever, is to teach it and use it well. And Big Bird-Thoth accompanies me on my path.

May the long-necked bird who teaches letters bless us in the name of:

ablanathanalba

ala peanut butter sandwiches

ab ca deff gee jeckle menop quir stoove wixes

iftah ya simsim

May it be so.

Guest Post: Dirt by Frater Babalon

Have you ever been inside a cave? Have you ever been in cave darkness? Cave darkness is special. It’s different. It’s darker than any other darkness. It breathes.

Earth is often talked about as a gentle, generative element, which is funny because we talk about “Getting our hands dirty” when we talk about violence, and I think there’s something to that, the dark majesty of the chthonic realm is almost unfathomable.

Soil is vital to us in ways I think we often fail to think about, soil is our ability to feed and clothe ourselves. It is alive with microorganisms. Which is one of the reasons you don’t use just any soil for a mud mask, because some of the stuff in soil can actually really fuck you up if you’re not careful, also we can really fuck up soil if we’re not careful.

Soil is largely composed of several classes of mineral matter (Sand, silt, and clay) mixed with decaying organic material. This is the nutrient rich medium in which plants grow, microorganisms which help plants break down the nutrients in the soil. The organic material is incredibly important to this process. The microorganisms that are vital to the healthy growth of plants starve without it, and may even evolve into pathogens as they attack the plants they used to feed in desperation.

Think about how a landscape might tend to function without human intervention. Plants grow, leafs fall, animals eat plant parts, they shit and die, things rot, and the soil is fed, however on cultivated land, when compost isn’t used the organic material in the soil becomes depleted and shit goes real haywire and you can basically make huge swaths of land incapable of growing anything this way, incidentally that’s what farmers are doing (along with depleting the water table which is literally causing land to sink) in California… a region which produces like a lot of our food. Incidentally healthy soil is a wonderful carbon sink… whereas depleted soil… well yeah.

Getting food waste composted and back onto farmland is vital to us not ending up in a really uncool version of Mad Max. Unfortunately, due to suburban sprawl replacing farmland surrounding cities where much of the population is concentrated returning said waste to farmland is energy intensive and a pain in the ass. This is something that needs to be done not on an individual level but on an industrial scale. We need to organize society to be able to sustainably feed our whole population, and I believe we could do that under a communist economic order.

I think it’s really funny how “sustainable” has turned into this word for like crunchy-organic expensive Gwenyth Paltrow bullshit when in fact sustainability contains its concern in the word itself. We have sustainability as a concern, as a concept because people have understood for quite awhile that our current way of managing things is unsustainable, as in we literally cannot keep doing this. The use of “sustainable” as a marketing buzzword is disgusting. The most sustainable anything is the one you already have.

Unsustainable practices are not the result of human laziness or malice, they are the result of the economic order that forces people always to be pushing for maximum profit, and damn any non-monetary cost that doesn’t effect the bottom line.

And so what the fuck does this have to do with religion? I mean I could simply say the earth and all that lives on it is sacred, but I find saying that profoundly trite and unsatisfying.

Partially to me, every human being is divine and thus the maintenance of conditions for continued human existence is important and we must remember that we thrive with nature not against it. The illusion of a zero sum game will kill us all. We thrive on cooperation, we die in competition. But additionally, I do think the earth is sacred.

Not just the planet but the dirt itself. I think a large part of every genius loci lives in the soil. So much about a place is defined by the character of its soil. Manhattan can have skyscrapers the way it does because of how close the bedrock is to the surface, allowing the land to support massive structures that would sink and tilt in softer soil. The rocky but fertile soil of New England is why we have the ubiquitous stone walls, why the crops that grow here are what they are, why indigenous people shaped the landscape as they did. West Texas’s limestone rich sandy loam dotted with desert grasses creating the grey and gold palette that define the region as a place best suited to nomadic herders rather than settled agrarianism, and so on and so forth.

Dirt defines place, the character of the dirt both creates and is the product of the landscape, it tells of the movement of glaciers, and of peoples, the paths of rivers and so many other things.

I am not a person with any belief in blood and soil. I do not have any patience for ethno-states. I believe that an immigrant can become a part of a place, but I do think that an immigrant is very different from a colonist. For one, immigrants do not start a systematic project of genocide and/or subjugation of the people already living there, and perhaps that’s part of it, perhaps you can’t really belong to a place if you water its soil with blood and tears of the people who were already part of it, and perhaps you can’t really belong to a place if you turn people fleeing there in desperation away, especially if you have already done the former.

And I do think especially for people who get food from the land, grow crops or herd animals or hunt and gather on it, there is an understanding that is hard to get any other way. People whose families have lived in a place for generations, or people who have moved in and gotten to know the people who have been there for generations… well essentially, it amounts to having access to generations upon generations of studiously observed research on a place and of course, there’s also the importance of home.

I am currently thinking particularly of Palestine. I am thinking of the villages where generations of a family had lived and died in the same house, and the emotional weight of losing such a place, of the affection one might feel for the beauty of the storied olive groves that Israel continually destroys, for the land that the people living there before the nakba but also even if it weren’t for the sentimental and aesthetic elements here, there’s also a simple “Absolutely no one wants to be forced out of their home and people are often in the place they are for reasons like connections, climate and so on that make that specific place important.”

And beyond that, there is also the fact that war has always had a tendency to have a bad effect on the soil, from burnt and salted fields to the mass killing of buffalo herds to starve out indigenous populations to agent orange, to the HUGE section of France that’s still uninhabitable and unable to be used for farmland due to the minefields, and high concentrations of lead and other pollutants from the first and second world war, attempting to remove people by force from their homes has a tendency to leave invaders with a land far less habitable than it was before.

It’s also important to say that this piece is being written and read out on occupied land, contested Wampanoag and Narragansett territory. Land acknowledgements like this are quite popular now. You’ve probably heard them before, seen them in email signatures and so on, but I must admit I find them sort of… glurgy and annoying.

They acknowledge a wrong, gesture towards white guilt while doing sweet fuck all about the realities of colonialism.

Which brings to me landback, a movement I’ve been researching and trying to my best to get a grasp on. It’s a decentralized movement and so demands vary, but overall it is about returning political and economic management of land to the people who held it before colonization, and basically governance and administration being arranged and organized in ways more in line with the cultures of those colonized people, which tends to involve far more responsible land management practices, and non-capitalist economic structures.

Both because these are peoples who successfully managed the ecosystems on this continent for millenia, rendering it fertile, habitable and healthy and because as a systemically impoverished demographic who often rely on the natural resources of what land they have left to survive, they are some of the people most directly affected by environmental devastation within the US. People indigenous to the Americas are the reason we have corn and potatoes, two of the crops with the best calorie to land use ratios out there (more calories per acre is better when you have a lot of people). The forest management practices of the peoples of the coasts and the animal management strategies of the plains peoples are technological marvels even today.

Indigenous peoples are a mere 5% of the world’s population but are stewards of 80% of the earth’s remaining biodiversity. I don’t say this out of sentiment or some belief in some inherent racial characteristic of “good land management skills,” I’m saying that if a culture overall focuses on being good at a thing, and that culture is structured around that thing, people immersed in that culture will often be good at it, and while colonial powers focused primarily on martial technologies and technologies of power, the polities who devoted their intellectual energy towards other stuff were the ones that tended to end up colonized, so of course colonial powers suck at land management. War machines like that are expensive in time, energy and intellectual ability.

And this is not to say that indigenous people are in any way monolithic. A Wampanoag person is not remotely interchangeable with a Lakota person or an Aleut person or a member of the Nʉmʉnʉʉ. Indigenous people are people and they’re people from a whole bunch of different places and cultures, and pre-European colonization there were colonial powers (like the Aztec empire) and wars and so on and so forth, because people are people, and none of that undermines the fact that A: That excuses nothing, the notion that Europeans were less brutal or “more civilized” is utter horse shit, and also again flattens the profound diversity of indigenous cultures. There are indigenous monarchies and indigenous democracies, centralized and decentralized, with greater and lesser personal liberty and vastly varied systems of property, a set of polities at least as varied as early modern Europe and probably more so because of the lack of Christianity as a vaguely unifying factor, B: Everyone was doing war crimes in the 19th century, and the settlers did more, C: None of that even matters because settler colonialism is inherently wrong and D: It’s not even about morality, it’s about letting the peoples who had systems that were working to keep large populations alive and fed replace the systems that are actively going to kill us all.

Also it does not mean that those of us without indigenous heritage have to leave or anything, we’d just have a different form of government and economic system and I’m pretty sure it’d be an overall far more sensible one. Much like a decolonized Israel wouldn’t mean Jewish people being forced to leave, it would just mean becoming Palestinian citizens rather than Israeli ones.

To respect the land is to respect what’s on it, including people. Things do not grow where we salt the earth.

Guest Post: “the Sacred Power of Poking Fun and Pulling Off” by Reese TOR

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

– Puck, from Wm. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene 2, line 117.

[Shit] on one end, jokes the other,” said Bluebell. “I used to roll a joke along the ground and we both followed it. That was how we kept going.”

-Bluebell the rabbit, from Richard Adams’ Watership Down, Chapter 21 “For El-ahrairah to Cry”

“And Frith called after him, ‘El-ahrairah, your people cannot rule the world, for I will not have it so. All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.’”

-Dandelion the rabbit, from Richard Adams’ Watership Down, Chapter 6 “The Story of the Blessing of El-ahrairah”

In Norse mythology, there is a tale of the jotun turned goddess Skadi and her vengeance against the gods in Asgard. The gods were responsible for killing her father, Thiazi, and in recompense, the gods agreed to let her marry one of them. Judging by the beauty of their feet, she ended up picking Njord, god of the sea, as her husband. She set another task before the gods as part of her appeasement: they had to make her laugh, something she thought was impossible. Some stories say the gods tried many things, but none of them worked until Loki, god of mischief (and one of the reasons Skadi’s father died) tied their testicles to a goat’s beard and left themselves thus until Loki’s cries of pain and the bleats of the goat made Skadi finally laugh.

Jesters were employed by royal families or even just wealthy nobles to entertain and mock and sing songs. There was a certain immunity to consequences that jesters enjoyed called “jester’s privilege,” wherein a jester could mock and speak freely without any punitive actions taken against them. Aztec, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Roman, German, English, Welsh, Polish, and many other cultures throughout history employed the services of jesters (or their equivalent). At times, jesters were used in battle to convey messages or rally troops; and in Japan, taikomochi (a sort of male geisha) were even required to fight in battle alongside their daimyōs in the 16^th century.

“Okay cool, fun facts, great stuff Terry, but what the fuck does that have to do with literally anything about mass today?”

Glad you asked, because here we go.

There is a particular sacredness in the profaning of that which we hold in high esteem. A jester’s belled cap and little staff were quite literally a parody of the royal crown and scepter. A joke is an equalizer, a way to dropkick the mighty off their high horses and say, “You are no better than me, and any pretense which states otherwise is patently false.” The Aesop fable of the emperor’s new clothes comes to mind, how only a child could tell that the emperor was naked, and everyone else just pretended that the kingdom hadn’t been swindled all to fuck.

The incredible thing about trickery is that it has always been a double-edged sword. The reason Skadi swore vengeance on the gods and the reason they were required to appease her was that the gods had murdered her father, Thiazi. But why had the gods done that? Because Thiazi had tricked Loki into letting the goddess Idunn be kidnapped and taken away by Thiazi. The goddess Idunn grew the golden apples that kept the gods young. Deprived of their eternal youth, the gods demanded that Loki bring Idunn back, which he did, transforming her into a nut and flying back as a falcon due to a shape-changing feather cloak. Thiazi chased after them in the form of an eagle, but the gods lit a fire under Thiazi’s tailfeathers until Thiazi fell to the ground, where he was surrounded and killed.

…that was a lot, huh.

“Cool story bro, what is the point of it?” I am getting there, I promise.

The pieces of this little thing that I have been wanting to write for a good long while have been floating around in my head, never quite gathering together enough to form a complete set of puzzle pieces, much less puzzle pieces that would connect into anything that makes sense. But let me try to form them into a cohesive whole all the same.

The Fool as a tarot card emphasizes a purity of spirit, a naivete that in my opinion can only come from beginning a journey with perhaps not enough preparation. Or perhaps an understanding that no preparation will fully encompass every obstacle in the journey to come, so why overburden yourself? Pack light, pack essentials, and go forth willing and able to accept the lessons of the cards to come. It seems decidedly unwise, until you look at it long enough. Likewise, having someone who can openly and freely mock the most powerful people in the land seems absolutely mental, seems absurd, until you realize how important that ability is, and how powerful a weapon a jest can be if wielded correctly. Richard Spencer being punched in the face mid-interview has become a meme, and the man himself has become a moot point. How many times has a Weird Al parody become more prominent than the original song it is mocking? I know every word of “The Saga Begins.” I know very few of the words to “American Pie.” Admittedly, I am a Star Wars fan, but the point remains: mockery holds power, and tricks hold the ability to create and destroy simultaneously.

So. How do we handle this power? How do we tap into both of these things, knowing that they can be used to create chaos and destroy systems, as well as create unnecessary pain and heartbreak? Comedians have been utilizing jokes to punch down on queer folks, folks of color, disabled folks, and so many other marginalized groups for a very long time. They still do, frequently and often, and often badly (seriously Ricky Gervais? You haven’t been funny for years now, learn how to tell a joke instead of fucking being one). Currently indicted by a New York grand jury for his crimes, Donald Trump famously mocked a disabled reporter. And yet from parodies often comes such incredible art and sensitivity and kindness as to be baffling. Young Frankenstein springs to mind immediately, not only for its sympathetic portrayal of the monster, but also for its hilarity and poignantly pointed poking fun at horror movie tropes in Hollywood. Space Balls, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Galaxy Quest are beloved films for a reason. And dare I say that The Velocipastor is also of the same breed as the aforementioned films, since it loves its source materials to the point of relentless, perfect mockery. If any of you have siblings, you will know what I mean when I say that I am the only one allowed to make fun of my brothers and sister, and I am also the only one allowed to die defending them from harm. It is a similar love that drives the best parodies into perfection. If Weird Al did not love music, he would not have created “My Bologna” or “Amish Paradise” or “White & Nerdy” or “Pretty Fly for a Rabbi.”

In short, the only way to handle the power that mockery gives, the only way to harness the destructive creativity that the best tricks can pull off? Is love. And that sounds cheesy as all get out, and I know it. But if I didn’t care about Star Wars, I wouldn’t have anything actually funny to say about that pointy-eared green fuck (know what you did, you do, Master Yoda). If I didn’t care about Lord of the Rings, I would not goof about never accepting a mushroom dish from a Sackville-Baggins. If I didn’t care about my little sister, I wouldn’t call her a tiny nerd who looks like she could be blown away by a weak fart. Loki, for all their flaws and eccentricities, cares deeply about his children and the world, and even the gods, antagonistic though they may be. El-ahrairah, jokester and thief who flouts the will of the gods and lives to tell the tale, would not have gone to see the Black Rabbit of Inlé and suffered the loss of his ears, whiskers, and tail if he did not care deeply about alleviating his people’s suffering from a plague. The entire plot of Singin’ in the Rain would not have happened if Don Lockwood did not care deeply about his films and about music and about how Lina Lamont got Kathy Selden fired. The entire TV show Leverage would not have happened if, on some level, these con artists, hackers, hitters, and thieves didn’t already care or come to care about themselves and other people.

You have to care about things. Trans people are the only people who can actually tell good jokes about gender, because we actively care about it! And if you don’t care, your jokes will fall flat, your humor will turn sour and painful, and the only tricks you will be able to pull off will be harmful to yourselves and to each other. So on this, the day we celebrate tricksters and fools and jokes and shenanigans, remember why we make ‘em laugh. Remember why we pull off heists. Because we care. And what is more Satanic than giving a damn? Thank you.

GUEST POST: “Treatise on Intersex and Non-binary Faith” by Pastor Jarys

Treatise on Intersex and Non-Binary Faith

We begin by asserting that faith is personal. A person’s experience of faith, spiritual phenomena, divinity, and sanctity are subjective and known primarily by that person and that person alone. These experiences cannot be shared, only related and related most effectively between people engaged with the same or similar spiritual paradigm. Therefore, to have tasted of the spiritual life is as personal as one’s experience of oneself, as personal as one’s experience of one’s body, and as personal as one’s experience of their identity. To believe a person when they profess to having a soul, that they have experienced divinity in their lives, or have achieved any manner of spiritual actualization is no less an act of faith in others’ self-advocacy than to believe a person relating their gender identity or their intersex physicality.

This treatise is written for those whose identity or body does not fit the gender / sex binary and who proclaim both faith and the desire to practice as a member of a community of like believers. Such adherents will be referred to in this document as epecine, or simply: “we” “us”, and “ours”. Furthermore, this treatise is addressed to both epecine individuals as well as those individuals who are both dyadic, meaning not intersexed, and binary, meaning identifying as a man or as a woman. May there be no doubt that such individuals exist who stand astride and without the loose categories described within these pages.This document treats as understood that individuals can be singularly non-binary or intersex as well as both intersex and nonbinary. These words are written by one such person identifying with the latter category.

The purpose of this treatise is to engage in the discussion of spirituality and religion for intersex and non-binary humanity. As the realm of human belief is so diverse, these words are meant to be inclusive and generic in their observations and conclusions. As this document is not assumed to be the first work on the subject of spirituality by and for us, may these words serve as an entry in engaging with that topic. What is written here may be revelatory to some and elementary to others, but these conclusions bear stating in order to lay the foundation for discussion of more complex nuances. Insofar as this treatise is successful, it will facilitate effective and constructive communication between us and dyadic and binary people within various religious and spiritual communities .For the purposes of discussion, such communities will be will be used to refer to as an Affiliation, defined as:

Communities, which can range from loosely associated individuals who share a spiritual practice or multi-generational religious institutions, identifying as spiritual or religious

Communities of laypeople, clerical staff, monastics, or any combination thereof

Communities centered around, whether in groups or in coordination, engagement with beliefs and practices surrounding the supernatural, divine, metaphysical, Sanctity, magic, morality, or the advancement of humanism

Furthermore an ethical Affiliation, for the purposes of this document, is such a community as described above that:

Engages its members, insofar as they seek engagement within that community, as an Affiliation is nothing more nor anything less than its members.

Honors the dignity of its members, insofar as the Affiliation has honor to bestow and further when the dignity of its members are impugned, as the ability of an Affiliation to recognize sanctity rests in the human experience of dignity.

Represents its members, insofar as the Affiliation retains authority or power, as an Affiliation does not exist save by the consent of its members.

Liberates its members, insofar as they are suffering impositions upon the human condition from within the community and without, as an Affiliation can offer neither salvation nor solution to the human condition that does not also dispense with worldly oppression.

Nourishes the bodies, minds, and/or hearts of its members, insofar as they look to the Affiliation to slake their thirst for life and actualization, as the beliefs and practices of the Affiliation must address the needs of its members.

Spirituality, as a class of practice, and religion, as a class of institution, functions best when they ethically serve these aforementioned needs for their constituent members.Therefore, any discussion of Intersex and Non-binary partipation in an Affiliation can only be held when the following requirements are fulfilled by an Affiliation. Such a community can only serve its Intersex and Non-Binairy member when that Affiliation does the following:

Engages us, whether this be to recognize our historic role in spirituality and religion or or recognize our role in the contemporary Affiliation. Just as with all adherents, we must be invited, welcomed, addressed, included, and appealed to. While our needs and ability to engage may differ from others, assumptions and prejudices must be replaced with our own advocacy. Our spiritual needs are to be tended to as with any other affiliation member, and that which engages us must be included in surveys that document the practices of our spiritual communities.

Honors us, whether by recognizing the non-binary nature within divinity or by recognizing the divinity within intersex and non-binary individuals as humans. If life is treated as divine, then as such we are to be recognized as belonging to those epicene patterns that are vibrant within life in general. We are to be honored with the same dignity that our religious institutions and spiritual cultures honor dyadic and binary individuals. Honors reserved for men and or women, must not be denied to us by nature of our differences. Where those honors cannot be shared, similar forms of dignity must be erected, through our participation.

Represents us, restricting us not from positions of representation, responsibility, and authority insofar as they are recognized by the religious community and open to men or women. Therefore, such positions reserved for men must also be accessible to women, or similar positions established. Just as no group can be served by a community without their participation, no authority can be established over a group without including their representation. When researching and publishing spiritual practices in which we also take part, our participation and contributions are to be represented as well.

Liberates us, as we exist in the context of an oppressive denial and rejection of our natures and identities. All people bound in inequity require the resounding peal of liberty, and many attune themselves to their pulpit to hear even an echo of that chord. It is a sad reality that not all religious institutions are liberatory, though many forms of spiritual engagement are liberating from mundane contexts. Despite varying degrees of engagement, Affiliations’ appeal to righteous struggle must establish solidarity between all who suffer with equity. Where other congregant’s oppression is addressed, so too must ours be addressed. When other congregants sorrows are heard, so too must ours be heard. However the Affiliation stands up against injustice, Justice for trans and Intersex people must also be championed Spiritual practices and dogma that dismisses our liberation are rampant, but a wrong does not become right because it is normal.

Nourishes our spirits, minds, and bodies, by denying us not the rites, rituals, and mutual aid enjoyed by binary and dyadic individuals within the Affiliation. That same Affiliation should be nothing short of encouraging of our fulfillment in ethos or in dogma. Doctrines that deny our spiritual realities should be scrutinized and reformed, just as Doctrines that deny the spiritual realities of other marginalized people must be scrutinized and reformed. Rituals with binary roles should be adapted to observe us as well, or Epecine rituals of like sanctity must be adopted to the litany. Spiritual truths that deny our existence or value should be questioned and rejected, just as we must dispute the principles of a spirituality based on other forms of bigotry.

These requirements are rigorous, but what are religious and spiritual Associations if not ardent? Nevertheless, this treatise must acknowledge that there exist many influential spiritual and religious communities who do not bear the aforementioned requirements of an ethical Affiliation nor in actuality or intent offer these requirements to their Epecine adherents.

Therefore, our participation and consent in these communities are not to be taken for granted.. Where we are not welcome, we need not seek sanctuary. Where we are not empowered, we need not accede to power. Where we are not sacred, we need not recognize sanctity. Insofar as religious and spiritual practices already exist which are incompatible with these requirements or used unethically to deny these requirements, Epicene individuals are not beholden to follow these paths.

That a religion or belief is accepted by our larger community, our family, or our society is insufficient reason to require our participation. Where such institutions and traditions are being reformed, there We will find welcome and inclusion. Where such institutions and traditions are not being reformed, We hold no obligation But resistance against encroaching theocracy. The spiritual practice and religious community that do not strive for and enact these standards operate as an extension of the oppression from which we turn to the faith for refuge. Good intentions and supportive speech are all well and good, but are meaningless without effective policy and practice.

Insofar as our participation and consent is sought by Affiliations, no lesser measure than these requirements need be accepted. For we are free and empowered to form our own communities based on ethical reasoning we can agree to recognize, and there will be no such religion or spirituality about us, without us.

Be It So!

GUEST POST: A NEW YEAR’S BENEDICTION BY REESE TOR

IT IS THE CUSP OF A NEW YEAR.

MANY THINGS HAVE BEEN LOST, MANY THINGS FOUND, STILL MORE ARE YET TO COME. AND YOU HAVE SURVIVED THIS FAR, DEAR ONE, AND YOU WILL SURVIVE FURTHER STILL.

LONELINESS IS A TEMPORARY DROWNING THAT CAN SEEM TO STRETCH ETERNAL, AN ENDLESS SEA OF NUMBING FOG AND ISOLATION.

BUT YOU ARE HERE, NOW. WE ARE HERE, NOW. YOUR STRENGTH IS ADMIRABLE ON ITS OWN, GIVEN THE THINGS YOU HAVE SEEN AND SURVIVED AND THRIVED DESPITE THEM.

THE NEW YEAR BRINGS MUCH. YOU BRING MORE. YOU BRING YOURSELF AND ALL THE MYRIAD TRILLIONS OF WORLDS OF ANTICIPATION AND POSSIBILITY THAT EXIST WITHIN YOU.

YOU ARE TIRED, AND EXHAUSTION FEELS LIKE HOPELESSNESS. BUT YOU HAVE TRAVELED THIS FAR, DEAR ONE, AND YOU WILL TRAVEL FURTHER STILL. YOUR STRENGTH IS IMMEASURABLE, YOUR COMPASSION AWE-INSPIRING, YOUR KINDNESS A GEM AND A GIFT.

YOU ARE INCREDIBLE, AND YOU DAMN WELL OUGHT TO KNOW IT. NO MATTER WHAT THIS NEW YEAR BRINGS, NO MATTER WHAT BEFALLS THE WORLD OR YOURSELF, YOU WILL BRING YOURSELF INTO IT AS WELL. AND THAT SHOULD MAKE THE NEW YEAR TREMBLE.

THERE IS A SAYING: “THE PAST IS GONE, AND CANNOT HARM YOU ANYMORE. AND WHILE THE FUTURE IS FAST COMING FOR YOU, IT ALWAYS FLINCHES FIRST AND SETTLES IN AS THE GENTLE PRESENT.”

THE FUTURE ALWAYS FLINCHES FIRST. EITHER BECAUSE IT KNOWS IT CANNOT BEST YOU, OR BECAUSE YOU ARE THAT FUCKING BADASS.

EITHER WAY, YOU’VE GOT THIS, SWEET HEART, KIND SOUL. AND WE HAVE GOT YOU. AND BOTH OF THOSE THINGS BRING MUCH JOY.

HAPPY NEW YEAR.

GUEST POST: “Travelogue of an Intersex pilgrim on the Astral Seas” A Sermon by Pastor Jarys

Travelogue Entry 0: The Call to Adventure sets my course through tides of thought

When we find ourselves in opposition to society or the world, we are called to adapt ourselves or to adapt the world we find to fit ourselves. In the face of prejudiced refusal to accept our self advocated experience, I believe that trans and intersex people must resist the urge to please the world by bearing false witness against ourselves . It is with this goal of self-fidelity that I, as an intersex and genderqueer person, find myself drawing a connection and commonality between my gender and my sex. Not to say that one caused the other, but that I experience both as two manifestations of my epicene capacity. Which is to say: the ability to exist with the physical/intellectual/spiritual characteristics of both or without either characteristics of the two binary sexes or genders. Because I do not see this aspect of myself as alienating me from humanity, I wish to better understand how my epicene capacity is reflective of the capacity of humanity in general to exist beyond the binary.

And humanity proves that capacity time and time again. Despite modern critiques to the contrary, Non-binary and Intersex people crop up throughout global history not as an finite cultural movement, but as a statistical inevitability. Nor do these individuals make up a monolithic sub-group, but each instead presents their inner truths individually in accordance with their character and the receptibility of their circumstance. Nor is global history pervaded by the cultural norm that rejects such people. Societies in which humans who are neither men nor women, male nor female, are recognized, empowered, and even celebrated also pervade the timeline, many of which survive today. It seems unquestionable to me that the existence and the acceptance of people like me is as authentic to humanity as religion and art. The goal that drove the explorations to which this travelogue is devoted is to find the androgenous nature within all of humanity from which each intersex and non-bninary person derives that aspect of themselves, and to put this human nature into words in hopes that that our humanity would be unquestionable and apparent to those who now question and deny it. But this mission would not survive the voyage on which it led me.

Travelogue Entry the First: My journey has led me to the shores of Beach city, the residents are both human and crystalline

When discussing what is human and what is normal, I find wisdom in the social science concept of an Overton Window. An Overton Window is the region of possibility by which communities arrange ideas into the center of acceptability and the borderlands of the radical and the regressive. The language of space and territory is important to understanding Overton Windows, as societies form these systems as an overlay upon their physical landscapes, placing capitals at their center and pushing marginalized groups to the borders and beyond. Movement within and the movement of Overton Windows is also essential to understanding them, as communities internalize those ideas that were once unthinkable into the policies of their institutions as that society develops, while individuals and subcultures can move within a Window, becoming more accepted or demonized. In this way, Overton Windows have a fractal quality, as each community carries its own norms, and together form larger communities with aggregate norms. So too is the concept of borders and boundaries inherent to the Overton Window, as those found outside the bounds of the acceptable are forgotten or maligned by the powers within.

When I was born, my biology was deemed too ambiguous in sex to leave alone, which is to say that my body was diagnosed unacceptably deviant. The boundaries of the Overton Window of which I found myself on the wrong side were made clear bureaucratically: my birth certificate was signed days after my birth, for my family and doctors took that time to decide which of the two approved letters would go in field denoting my sex. Only once this arbitrary decision was set in ink could my legal existence be processed. I have come to understand this judgment, and the medical procedures which sought to manifest this judgment upon my body, as a forcible movement of my position from without an Overton window to a place deemed safely within its borders, as a man. In response, I have sought to retrace this transnormative path, and reclaim the space I once inhabited as being an authentic position for a human to exist. As previously written, the concept of “Pools of Possibility” from the show Steven Universe has offered me profound affirmation to this interpretation of my past and the journey I have set out upon. The idea that some pools of possibility are remote or disconnected from normal modes of behavior suggested to my mind that epicene humanity might be one of these. I decided that I was looking for a region within human self-conception in which I could reclaim my legitimacy, and so I kept sailing in search of my native shore.

Travelogue Entry the Second: Navigating the Archipelago of Strange Alchemies – pursued by TERFs

But human gender and sex is not actually a structure of divided territories, but far more like a scatterplot graph in which all of humanity is cast and normative individuals gravitate into two generalized distributions. If each person is a single point, masculinity and femininity are groupings of relative similarity, of which no two members need have anything else in common. Two people who gather close to the grouping deemed “Women” may have two very different, yet equally profound, relationships with that concept and femininity. This frame asks if intersex and non-binary people are but the far flung points in this scatterplot graph, who do not necessarily find themselves divided from binary people, but do not share with them an identity of, or perhaps a body identified with, these binary alignments.

What I particularly enjoy about this frame of a scatterplot graph is how similar the pattern of epicene individuals is in form to the occult concept of Philosophical Mercury, the medium that mediates the movement between the Yang of Salt and the Yin of Sulphur. Alchemy uses this schema to bridge the stark dualism of gendered philosophies with the diverse variety found in the world of life and elements: the triad of Salt, Mercury, and Sulphur forming the third step in the Pythagorean tetractys between the second level push and pull of dualism and the fourth level populated with the classic Greek elements. This arcane schema is built around the dichotomy of coagulation and dissolution, but seeks to transcend that binary as well. I have found much affirmation for queerness in Esoteric Alchemy, with its Divine Marriage and Mystic Rebis, which the psychologist Carl Jung opined to be hermaphoditic symbols. Some Alchemists believe that Philosophical Mercury is both the Salt of the Earth and the Ephemeral Sulphur, being composed of the composite instances exchanged from either or those instances orbiting off to the side, all aspects of this triad flowing into and feeding one another.

Similarly, the epicene patterns in the scatterplot of human sex and gender are often interpreted by Gender Critical writers as the callamitous erosion of the sacred and separate catagoeies of male and female. What I find critical is that we queer individuals do not give in to fears that our existence represents entropic departures from anything – anything but outdated norms, that is. Queerness is not a matter of reneging from cis-heteronormativity, but a recognition of the human realities that lie beyond it. By this I mean that to deny the personal truth of queer people leads critics to malign us as representing a threatening cultural movement, a movement away from normalcy, the changed habits of a person who would otherwise be dyatic, cisgender, or heterosexual. This is a narrative that cannot accept the self-advocacy of individuals over the fear of difference, but within the heart of this narrative lies the language from which the truth of queerness can be affirmed. Queerness as a word, after all, has less meaning in social contexts that lack the assumption that everyone is either a man or a woman and must be one who desires the other.

Travelogue Entry the Third: I’ve learned to Hold Fast to people, not the words used as our tools

While some may find this aspect daunting, the mercurial nature of words is quite comforting to me. That is the creative beauty of language: words cannot appear to declare without first describing, nor can they define without acknowledging ambiguity. The absolutist who first insisted that “All of humanity is either only a man or woman”, knowingly or unknowingly set this language on a collision course with those humans who live outside the boundaries drawn therein, for to say a thing is to define it as well by what you say it is not. By drawing close the borders of humanity to form two mutually exclusive regions of men and women is to allude to the other examples of humanity against which those borders are drawn. Just as to draw a circle around a space, and to attest its form and limitations, is to also mark out its distinctions against the context from which it is drawn. The risk you take in drawing magic circles is that someone else might later cross them.

Words are not concrete things, Plato, they are tools created to assist in our survival, which change over time as their usage needs to be adapted. The presence of ancient words, literature, and laws referring to non-binary and intersex people makes clear our historical existence, but so too does any era’s attempt to deny our existence. And don’t we as transgender people of this era know it, to have been denied our own experience of ourselves in deference to the static stability of words? And despite this deference, the words always change. The usage of the word always changes, our understanding of what the word refers to and how we can engage with that reality through language always changes. A living language evolves, because life moves on. Useful dictionaries are descriptive of language, not prescriptive, for no single institution could ever hold language static, dead, and unchanging. The exact words I am searching for will not be the reality I want. The words will encase it, like a frame unto a picture, and hint at it, as a code alludes to its message. I cannot quantify the queer experience in exacting descriptors, instead I would qualify it as the poet qualifies the beauty if their muse within aesthtics of their wording. My journey to study the epicene potential in humanity could never produce an exact summary that applied equally to all individual instances of sex and gender diversity. To think otherwise would be to misapprehend the goal of my voyage before I had even launched.

Travelogue Entry the Fourth: The Pilgrimage was always about crossing those Gulfs found within

Therefore, I know that I am not looking for an external truth or natural law at all, there is no platonic androgyne that hands out the queerness before each of us are all born. Within the modern era, queerness has been nurtured into an composite culture by which people, who were always present in humanity, assert our lives as examples of legitimate human experience. Queer culture is the interpersonal culture of queer individuals. While each of our scatterplot points might have been marked singly, through communication and community we have contributed to an amalgamation by which we can feel far less alone and historically anomalous. Transphobes may clutcher pearls to see cartoon characters in dresses (thanks Bugs) and homophobes may try to block their children’s gaze at depictions of same sex couples (thank you Adora), but it does not make an iota of difference to our continued existence because queerness does not come from queer culture. It is always the reverse; individuals experiencing queerness in their own lives give rise to queer culture by voicing what they have seen and know to be true. Like so many other queer people, I have finally come to ask myself: If I cannot deny the authenticity of this queerness found without myself, why am I not giving that same benefit to the queerness discovered within myself?

I may not have found what I am looking for in any external culture, but I better understand my query now. Having dispensed with these preconceptions, I am left with the self-awareness that my goal is derived from a desire for legitimacy. Not for people like me, a personal legitimacy for myself alone. Regrettably, I have grown up believing that humanity is a title to which I must look to others to recognize in me or to award to me, because I look within and see nothing natural to my persona. But is that truly because I lack the legitimacy that I see in others, or does no one contain so certain a clue? Through my inward vigilance, have I not denied myself the opportunity to simply assume my humanity exists? I see now that this is not what a person’s humanity is, no naturally occurring inward proof that provides an objective assertion that the querent is a human. I have come to learn that our humanity, my humanity, is a subjective experience of internal qualia and of the human condition in this temporal life. Only I can say that I am human, for only I have direct experience of my humanity, which is a messy interaction of multiple parts. Everyone else must gain knowledge of my humanity from me, secondhand.

Travelogue Entry the Fifth: The pilgrim, being both seeker and treasure sought, is self satisfied

So too is my experience of my androgyny, personal, subjective, and mine alone. I cannot seek outside myself the confirmation that the queerness within me is legitimate and human. Nor can I prove this by analyzing my every thought and sensation. I still believe that there is some way of understanding why so many humans defy the narrative that we are all either men or women, male or female. I believe it to be some truth of the human experience I have yet to put into words or hear put into words. But I still believe that I can engage with this truth of humanity, despite my ignorance. This Truth can be played with and thought about more easily without also bearing the weight of those granite-set definitions of binary thinking. And I still have hope that, if this truth were put into the poet’s wording, others would pause their denials of our existence upon hearing it. The logic of correcting our abnormalities with surgery and silence would falter, the compassion of one human recognizing a human experience in another would bloom. And queer people would no longer need to fight to exist as who we are already in this society, but could rest, breath, and flourish.

But now I know that, like all spells, these hoped for words must first serve to satisfy the speaker’s soul. No words of wisdom can move a heart that comes not from those same revelations within the poet. It is an ill wind that blows no minds, and the sails of my wonder will not be filled with such insubstantial zephyrs. I know not yet what phrase will disturb the comfortable, whose cruelty needs jostling, but I have faith that I will know its truth when those words comfort that which in me is disturbed by the cruelties of complacency. Until I chance upon that phrase, that riddle or truth or mantra, I will keep piloting the pilgrimage of my soul through the thoughtful tides and peruse the occult currents of human culture.

Be It So!

Guest Post: Enki for Intersexuals

By Pastor Jarys Maragopoulos

Content notes: Childhood and medical trauma. References to the subject of child sexual abuse.

Everyone has a different relationship to “normal.” Mine was grievously transformative. To unpack the meaning that the concept of normal played in my life, I would like to tell you two stories. The first is my own story as an intersex person, grounded in the recent history of the medicalization of Intersex people. The second story is from ancient Sumer, followed by analysis that shall hopefully tie the two together. Before the end, there shall be both a look into my spirituality and a cause. But, as endings rely on beginnings, I ask for your patience before I get to the point:

As roughly one point seven percent of children are estimated to do, I was born with ambiguous indicators of sex and, where the doctors found ambiguity, they recommended a transition to femininity. My parents refuted this choice, despite the difficulty of endowing a masculine form through surgery, based on a single indicator that they favored. After four invasive procedures before I was the age of five, I was expected to manifest the success of these alterations. I struggled to do so at times and struggled to cope with being unable to do so at others. Never was I told that I had been anything but a boy; though “Partial Androgen Insensitivity syndrome” was a term I learned as a teenager. When I did not find myself growing into a man, I thought that made me a failure as a person, and a disappointment after all the invested effort. I had no idea I could be anything else, so I came to see myself as sub-human.

As both this narrative and the next will touch upon, Humanity is a territory whose borders are often drawn too exclusively. While many biological markers are used to define humans, four of them have been used in Western Society to identify humans as either male or female: hormones, genitals, gonads, and chromosomes. So assumed are these two gendered states to be the defining division of humanity that our birth certificates require the designation of one or the other. What then, for children born to be or revealed in puberty to be of disagreeing markers? What about children whose individual markers do not align with a binary development? Such children have been born throughout humanity’s written and oral record, and the biology of other species does not suggest this diversity to be as new as language. And what of those children born of the modern era, benefiting from the advancements of scientific medicine?

The Victorian classification of such deviations as (warning: these contain a word many consider a slur) Male Psuedo-Hermaphrodites, Female Psuedo-Hermaphrodites, and the romantically named True Hermaphrodites, summarized medical understanding until one Doctor John Money made his career of the study, even establishing the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in 1965. Money theorized that gender was entirely socially taught and, therefore, could be socially controlled. To maintain that control, Money developed procedures to surgically reform ambiguously-sexed infants into societally recognizable boys and girls, with particular emphasis on the participation in heterosexual intercourse and procreation, if possible. With the child’s body speaking one message, it was for the child’s social environment to strengthen that message. Gender nonconforming behavior was to be disciplined and the child’s assigned gender affirmed by those around them, but always rooted in surgeries conducted early enough not to give the child lingering doubts. These ongoing procedures are rooted in the traditionally Euro-centric certainty that humans can be only either male or female, despite the evidence to the contrary that these same procedures were designed to “correct”.

Which, you would be deft to point out, amounts to a vast and disconnected conspiracy to deny the reality of children like me and the dissent we offer to the concept of “normal”. No secret smoke-filled room required, just earnest professionals doing the work for which they had been trained, assured that the premises on which they were to differentiate healthy and dis-ordered bodies were entirely scientifically derived and without bias. No less organized than the racism that causes medical professionals to underestimate the pain felt by black bodies, no more sinister than the sexism that sorts men into doctors and women into nurses. Everything was done with the belief that it was good for me, including the concealment, which is why I did not find out that a term for my experience was “Intersex” and that I was not alone in it until I was twenty-two years old.

Money understood, to some extent it seems, that he was guarding the borders of normalcy. He taught medicine how to (sometimes literally) measure who was in and who was out, and how to bring those found far afield closer to the norm. It would not be Money’s only entanglement upon that border, for he tried to bring inside a very different group of people found outside its walls when he wrote in support of the legitimacy of pedophillic desire in the now defunct Journal of Pedophillia. Having introduced the terms sexual orientation and gender identity to the world, he made no accounting for consensual relationships in associating his study of queer lives with pedophillia, an association the LGBTQI community has fought to keep from being foisted upon them for decades. While no real argument for Money’s predilections can be made from scant evidence, his opinions cast a terrible light on his procedures. It is undeniable that his work engaged with the sexualization of children’s bodies, in the judging and adapting of sexual function and form. Money also began the practice of collecting photos of naked intersexual children, anonymized with black bars over their eyes, for the stated purpose of study and for the education of the professionals learning his procedures. Whether this objectifying practice was born of malign motivations or not, the traumatizing effect on many of the subjects is a matter of record. I am fortunate no such attempt was made to record my body, but I was still emotionally affected by the medical attention that I endured.

The point of such attention, as it is often asserted in defence of these practices, is to prevent the child from experiencing shame. If that is the case, then the procedures are fundamentally hypocritical. When the child’s caretakers change the child to match the expectations of society, they are not refuting the shame society would bestow on one who is different, but embodying that shame. From my experience, I sensed the secrecy of my procedures as a child, the difficult conversations they engendered, and this taught me to be ashamed of my body. Like many Intersex people who faced medicalization, my earliest memories of being touched in erogenous areas were formed when I underwent hands-on inspection by groups of impersonal doctors, discussing among themselves whether my development was acceptably normal. I learned to associate my discomfort in these situations with that part of my body, towards which I developed judgment and eventually disgust. When I was told as a child that I had to change to be like everyone else, I came to wonder why I was not acceptable in the first place, and felt alienated. I was left in possession of a body post-procedure that did not match my parent’s expectations but, being unable to explain to adults what I was never taught, as a child I came to believe that the source of the frustration lay in who I was. When I grew up to be a trans adult, eschewing the gender assigned to me, I was faced with a society whose frustration with my identity was voiced in the hateful wording I had once used against myself. In my case and in the case of other intersex people with whom I have spoken, Money’s procedures brought about the very thing they are designed to forestall: rejection and shame.

I felt these things throughout puberty and up to the day I understood who I was. When I felt unacceptable and despised myself as a child, I likened myself to Gollum from my father’s stories: mutated and loathsome. Reading voraciously, I discovered Frankenstein, and I felt a kinship with the creature formed from experiments he barely understood, subhuman and wretched. It was not until I began reading Terry Pratchett as I entered high school, with his use of Golem characters to demonstrate a fantastical construct gaining self-identity, that I found characters who reminded me of my own artificiality free from feelings of self-disgust. I suffered an enduring depression and pervasive anxiousness in high school and beyond, sensitive to rejection, afraid that showing too much enthusiasm for people would give them an opportunity to see how abominable I was. I was unable to meaningfully date or to be intimate with anyone until after I discovered I was intersex, so deeply were my misconceptions of my origin tied to how I felt about my body and myself.

I did not resolve these misconceptions by pure happenstance, but felt a splinter in my mind, a sense that something was wrong which I carried into college and my early adulthood. Feeling that something in my origins held unclaimed meaning, I asked my mother to re-send to me a letter she wrote when I turned eighteen, giving her account of my birth. It represented, at the time, the most information I had about what occurred, but when she re-sent it to me just before I turned 23, she thankfully updated some of the medical language. This revamped document guided my research, during which I discovered the term “Intersex.”

Reading the Wikipedia article felt like a lightbulb had illuminated within me, for I finally found context for what had happened to me in the legacy of sexual assignment medicalization that Dr. Money had standardized. I also saw my first hints that I was not alone, that Intersex people had sought community before me, that others like me were out there still. That day represented the turning point in my self-image. Whereas before I had accepted abusive and cruel treatment from peers, thinking it was my due, I began a positive journey toward self-regard in which I could stand up to such treatment and begin to see myself as a person. I sought a therapist, who arranged an Intersex Support Group. I was hungry for more information on people like me and their mark on society, so I also searched for our place in stories.

Looking through the annals of TVtropes dot com, I was surprised by how prevalent Intersex characters were in fiction (often called hermaphroditic, which is as I said a sensitive term), but I was also disheartened by how often they were depicted as malevolent freaks. While the site led me to positive stories now beloved, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, I discovered that Intersex characters were mainly seen by audiences in the West as murderers who could frustrate forensic investigators due to their medical oddity, or often in the East as literal monsters. Sadayko or Samara, the ghost from the horror story The Ring, is an Intersex youth who seeks vengeance upon the world for parental rejection, a particular theme I found prevalent in many narratives with Intersex antagonists. However, the oldest story featuring Intersex people I found was not from modern fiction, but from myth, and this myth is featured in the Intersex articles on both TVtropes and Wikipedia.

This is a Sumerian story of Enki, the god of wisdom and teachers, husband to Ninhursag, goddess of nature and creation. The couple worked together, day in and day out, forming all people out of clay and assigning them destinies or places in society. After a long day of Promethean ceramics, this couple gets to drinking beer and challenge each other to a contest (the Sumerians were big on beer). Whomever of the two could create a person in a form so problematic that the other could not find a “Good Destiny” for them, would win. They set to work producing various sorts of infirmities and handicaps from the Sumerian perspective, including a woman who cannot conceive (who is given the role of Priestess) and a person “without maleness or femaleness”, the latter created by Enki. In the end, Ninhursag cannot devise destinies for Enki’s creations, but instead of simply taking the win, Enki states that the gods do not make people to not have a good destiny, and he proceeds to assign a place in society for each of his people. The place for the person who is not male or female, Enki states, is to “stand before the king” as a courtier and helper. This language of dignity stuck with me, especially when I met other Intersex people in support groups who also repeated this very myth with a sense of self-dignity. Later research into Sumerian culture has shown me that the King in this language may have once referred to a high priest, or someone acting as the focal point for the ritual magic conducted by the state. At the time I took the most meaning from the idea of standing before power instead of kneeling.

As the Sumerians would have it, this is not the only time that Enki creates Intersex people or beings. There is a myth where Inanna (later called Ishtar) descends into the Underworld for want of conquest and is held hostage there by her sister, Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld. Of all the gods, only Enki sends help by creating two beings also described as “without maleness or femaleness”, to whom he gives the water and plant of Life to revive Inanna. He also teaches them how to get into Ereshkigal’s good graces by showing her compassion as she continuously and painfully birthed the dead into her kingdom. These beings, called Galatura and Kurgara, do as they are taught, showing Ereshkigal compassion. She repays their kindness by offering them anything they want, to which they ask for the body of Inanna.

In these narratives I saw a common theme of social value and acceptance for Intersex people. Destinies being the Sumerian idea of social cohesion, Enki’s refusal to leave the Intersex and other differently bodied humans outside the bounds of society and humanity cut deep into the alienation I felt. If a civilization five thousand years past knew of people like me, and had a myth to explain our inclusion, then I saw that there could be another way. Sumer was not and is not the only such culture; intersex, trans, and non-binary people are accepted in many societies throughout history and around the globe to this very day. Ancient Rome and early Christianity published legal documents that make allowances for such people, while beyond Europe Indiginous people continue to refute the gender binary as a colonial incursion. Narratives of Intersex people’s natural validity are far older and told far wider than Western society’s unNarrative that we cannot and should not exist.

These myths led me to work with Enki as an eidelon of teaching and a symbol of Intersex acceptance. Enki’s bestowment of magical power and the teaching of compassion to these beings suggests to me that the Sumerians were in some manner of agreement with other cultures who see Intersex people as spiritual, unifying, and worthy. In accordance with the Descent Myth, the temple of Inanna developed two orders of priests that were often described in gender-bending terms: the Gala Lamentation priests who attuned to the emotions of the gods to gain their favor, and their counterparts named for Kurgara, who performed mock battles for Inanna’s’ glory. These orders, particularly the Gala, spread to the temples of other gods and were associated with queerness and queer sexuality. Perhaps a trans, intersex, gay, or bisexual person born in Sumer would have been seen as a natural candidate for these priesthoods, as an alternative to the expectation to continue the family line.

These spiritual themes around gender-nonconforming identities motivated me to seek and establish theology that does not require participants to fit into a gender binary, in a community that values compassion and the temerity to stand up to injustice. To accomplish this, I helped to form the First Church of the Morningstar, where pagans, occultists, and dabolitors of many Traditions come together to practice without dogma or abuse. Once organized, the congregation elected me to join the volunteer pastoral team, where I represent the non-Satanic members. In Church events, I lead reconstructed Sumerian rites and rituals, invoke Enki and other faces of divinity with which I am engaged, and help to facilitate community support.

In fact, I first read a version of this statement, in the form of a sermon, at a Morningstar service in Two Thousand and Nineteen. At the time, this was the most public venue in which I had spoken about being Intersex, and I had some anxieties over the value of what I was imparting to my audience. However, I am so glad that I spoke despite my fears, for afterwards a congregant came forward to share proudly that he too is Intersex. This congregant (whose permission I have to repeat these details) had also endured gender assignment surgery as a child and had been negatively affected, feeling alone in this experience. But, as he asked that I state here, hearing my account was the first time he had heard another person speaking so openly about their intersexuality and medicalization, and he thanked me for abating the feelings of loneliness the latter so often leaves behind. After my earlier misgivings, his disclosure banished all my doubts. I felt assured that there was a need for advocacy and spiritual workings drawn from my Intersex experiences, and the First Church of the Morningstar became the home for these efforts.

Practically, when speaking of my efforts, this often involves the relating of personal meaning through mythic symbolism. It is important to me to keep in mind my subjective connections to these spiritual experiences without letting that limit my sharing of them. This is what Pagans have been known to call Unconfirmed Personal Gnosis, where a believer shares their subjective engagement with a spiritual entity or idea without writing dogma or expecting agreement. One way I do this is by giving an “Enkian” take on a thematic topic. My practice originates in my conscious choice to use the Enki and Ninhursag contest myth as a model for self-acceptance. I do not require Enki to have an objective reality for his stories to help me psychologically and emotionally, and in fact this subjectabist attitude has allowed me to develop an analysis on Ancient myths to comfort Modern hearts. When I do so, I join a cherished tradition of other artists, mythic storytellers, theologians, and magicians to whom we owe humanity’s bounty of narrative.

When we struggle with normalcy, alienation, and conformity, Enki’s myths illustrate that these things are relative and artificial. When the Sumerians told the story of how Enki brought about the organization of the world as they knew it, their conclusion had Enki bless the lands of Sumer. But then he then goes as far afield as the Sumerians understood, to the lands of Africa and further East towards the Indus Valley, and blesses those lands and their people as well, using the same language he used for Sumer. To the Sumerians, divine blessing and civilisation was not theirs alone, but to be shared across all boundaries and borders. What does a god like Enki care for such divisions? In fact, he is shown to care a great deal, in valuing diversity, as we can see from the following “myth within a myth”:

In the oldest written myth from which we inherit the Tower of Babel trope, the Sumerian incantation of Nuddimund describes a mythical time in which humans had no rival in nature and all people spoke one language to exult Enlil, Enki’s brother and ruler of the Gods for a time in Mesopotamian theology. Enlil, through his priests, has amassed all of Sumer’s knowledge (tablets of Me) in one ziggurat, an artificial mountain on which stands the most holy of temples, language and literature consolidated around one place of power. Enki, in response to this ambition, makes multiple the languages of humanity, stymying further attempts to consolidate humanity into conforming to one worship and one understanding. This incantation of Nuddimund was given to Sumerian messengers to read before their missives, in acknowledgement of humanity’s decentralized diversity of beliefs and customs. It is poignant that this incantation is presented to us inside a larger narrative in which two cities compete for the seat of divine power.

Here we see Enki in his trickster role, lauded for his wisdom but acting contrary to the story’s implied value. The myth explains to the Sumerians why the world is the way it is, populated by different cultures and languages, but also sets that normal state of affairs apart from a nostalgic past, in which conformity is seen as glorious, ambitious, and the will of the chief god. Enki’s challenge to his brother represents part of an ongoing theme in Sumerian myth, a humanistic triumph of dissent over obedience, which sheds light on the larger narrative of competing cultural centers in which the incantation is set. This is one of multiple myths in which Enki stands up for those who are left outside the circles of power, inviting them in despite the wishes of his rulers. An ethos to be imitated, I think, that does not require homogenization.

And isn’t that the point? I have shared the childhood narrative that is my own, a brief history of sex assignment surgery, my exploration into the stories and myths of Intersex people, and the ways I have used the stories I found to empower myself and my community. I tell you this because I believe that there is value in each person and their story, as these narratives have taught me to see value in my own story, which I once felt was anathema and unworthy. I tell you this because I believe that, like left-handedness, homosexuality, and transgender people, Intersex people are not dis-ordered but apart of humanity’s boundless diversity. What I have learned leads me to the conclusion that the narrative that drove my medical treatment is fundamentally flawed. Its stated purpose was to protect me from shame, but instead it imparted to me an alienating shame from which myths and fiction have offered me freedom. Furthermore, I am compelled to speak out and change the story for the next generation of Intersex children. I believe that these non-consensual and often harmful surgeries will not end until enough dissent has amassed to challenge their logic and necessity in the public eye, and I will not stop writing until that is so. May Enki bless these words, and may humanity receive them.

Guest Post: the Witch Myth by Frater Babylon

A sermon given at Church of the Morningstar on December 5th, 2020

The Witch Trials. What do those words bring to mind? Arthur Miller’s play the Crucible? Bodies burning on stakes? The opposing forces of religion and rationality as modernity took hold? The persecution of female healers and midwives who knew “the old ways”? A madness instigated by clergy? Ergot poisoning? A misogynist campaign to remove protofeminist independent women?

Most of these are more reflective of folklore than fact. Outdated scholarship and fictional depictions that have become part of our cultural mythology. What function do these stories have? Why are they so… sticky culturally?

Why is it so pleasing to us to believe the “witch dunking” torture inevitably resulted in death (those who sank were perceived as innocent, whereas those who floated were guilty because the water had “rejected” them), when in reality those who sank were of course not just allowed to drown. Why are we so keen to explain them away? Blame ergot hallucinations, or Christianity, or misogyny, or the “irrationality” of the era.

Well I think it’s because it’s hard to confront these things directly, and because they feel so inexplicable they become mirrors, empty spaces where we can fill in our fears and fantasies.

So for this sermon I want to focus on one particular aspect of the folklore of the history of the witch trials, the feminist myth of the witch trials, because that seems to be the most prevalent here.

So what is this myth? I’ll borrow a version of it from Diane Purkiss’s marvelous book “The Witch in History”

Here is a story, Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived on the edge of a village. She lived on her own, in her own house surrounded by her garden, in which she grew all manner of herbs and other healing plants. Though she was alone, she was never lonely; she had her garden and her animals for company, she took lovers when she wished, and she was always busy. The woman was a healer and a midwife; she had practical knowledge taught her by her mother, and mystical knowledge derived from her closeness to nature, or from a half submerged pagan religion. She helped women give birth, and she had healing hands, she used her knowledge of herbs and her common sense to help the sick. However her peaceful existence was disrupted. Even though this woman was harmless, she posed a threat to the fearful. Her medical knowledge threatened the doctor. Her simple, true spiritual values threatened the superstitious nonsense of the Catholic church, as did her affirmation of the sensuous body. Her independence and freedom threatened men. So the inquisition descended on her and cruelly tortured her into confessing to lies about the devil. She was burned alive by men who hated women, along with millions of others like her.

I think this is a fairly good encapsulation of this myth. It’s a popular story, a deeply appealing story, and a story that’s had a huge effect on the history of many social movements, from gay liberation, to feminism, to ideas that spread through and take deep root in the modern left. However, it’s also not a true story. The true story is far more complicated, with far less clearly defined camps in terms of good and evil, and far less persecution of a supposed threat to patriarchal authority or economic dominance, but rooted in genuinely and deeply held beliefs. Midwives were not targeted (we have exactly one case of a midwife being accused of and executed for witchcraft in Britain and a second one in France), in fact Midwives were more likely to be involved in witch trials as expert witnesses for the prosecution. A good portion (and possibly the majority) of accusers were women themselves, and most cases relied at least partially on the testimony of women. There is no evidence that most witches were unmarried, sexually liberated or members of what we would consider the LGBTQ community. Catholic church courts were usually more lenient than civil courts. These facts are backed up by the numbers we get when we look at compiled trial records across Europe, checking for prosecutions, convictions, details of accusers and accused, witness testimonies and so on, and you can find most of this in the Witch in History.

In Medieval Europe the Catholic church considered belief in evil witchcraft to be heretical and the Germanic Council of Paderborn in 785 explicitly outlawed the very belief in witches. Those who accused others of witchcraft were the ones considered acting pagan, not the accused, and the author of the Malleus Maleficarum (often a source used to support this myth) was admonished by the Catholic church and his book was banned, additionally many authorities dismissed his work as quackery. Not to mention that the Medieval and early modern Catholic church often considered birth control and abortion a lesser evil for a family that would suffer if they had more children. Clergy often using the phrase “Si non caste tamen caute” meaning “if not chastely, at least cautiously” (essentially advising those engaging in elicit sex to use some form of protection).

This myth also astronomically inflates the number of witches executed from the modern scholarly consensus of less than 100,000 and likely between 35,000 and 60,000 during the period from 1400 to 1782 across all of Europe. More were tried of course, but another myth is that witches, once accused, were nearly always convicted and conviction inevitably resulted in execution. In fact conviction rates were no greater than was usual for the period and place typically (and sometimes lower, in some places and times as few as 25% were convicted) and punishments also included fines, imprisonment, exile, and flogging. Witch trials could also take the form of civil rather than criminal matters.

Certainly, misogyny is evident in the fact that 75% of those accused (in all of Europe across the period) were women, but the fact that 25% were men, and that there were areas and periods where the majority were men (Iceland for example where 92% of the accused were men, and 70% were men in Normandy) suggests that misogyny, or an attempt to gain control over reproduction during the population crisis after the black death were not fundamentally the cause of the witch panic. It does seem that societal stress (for example in Scotland 3 of the 5 witch panics occurred during times of unusually high prices for wheat) was an influential factor, or Germany which was one of the bloodiest battlegrounds during the religious wars between Catholic and Protestant had a very high number of witch executions). There are also theories that the witch panic was partially or entirely based on either economic tensions (such as the Thomas/Macfarlane theory that rich neighbors accused poor neighbors out of guilt after refusing them alms) or as part of a plan to discipline the working class, interrupt networks of mutual aid, sew distrust and seize property so it could be consolidated by the elite (such as Federici’s analysis in Caliban and the witch). The problem with these theories is that more witch accusations were intra-class than interclass (Witch Hunting in Seventeenth-Century England: a Historiographical Review RACHAEL MACLEAN) and Witch panics were quashed by authorities as often as they were encouraged. Anton Praetorius, a noted Calvinist preacher for example, preached against witch trials, as did Reginald Scott, a member of English parliament, who wrote a pamphlet on the unreality of magic and the absurdity of the trials..

There are even accounts of elite judges who didn’t believe in witchcraft being forced by juries made up of the lower and middle classes to convict witches they didn’t believe were guilty as recounted in particular by Roger North. The Witch panic seems to be as much a popular phenomenon as an elite one (and it should be noted that the number of witch executions does not include the unknown number of extrajudicial killings that occurred).

It’s a thing that’s happened repeatedly. For example in 186 BC Livy records that there was a panic over a secret society of Bacchus worshippers which lead to mass arrests and executions. He accuses them of sedition, orgiastic sexual practices and infanticide… all same claims that show up for the early modern witch panic. Prior to that Theoris of Lemnos was accused and convicted of some crime involving poisoning and sedition at some point before 323 BC, and those are far from the only examples. In the 80s and 90s where the idea of “recovered memories” of horrific abuse along with a number of other factors lead to a Satanic Panic which bore striking resemblance to all the other witch panics that had come before.

It is also worth noting factors that seemed to prevent witch trials, for example strong local belief in effective countermagic or in faeries as agents of supernatural mischief tended to mean an area would be unlikely to have significant witch persecutions (Ronald Hutton, The Witch). Honestly, I think the witch trials can be ascribed to a variety of factors, 1. The fact that efficacy of Catholic sacramentals as protective talismans was now in doubt due to religious conflict, like I don’t think it was the result of direct Catholic/Protestant conflict as the two just can’t be linked, but I do think the fact that “wait there’s a second option?” probably made the world seem more supernaturally threatening, 2. The fact that a dude wrote a scary book about witches and the printing press had just been invented. 3. Capitalism was starting, everyone was freaked out and under stress.

I think it is interesting how much this myth strives to link the witch persecutions with persecution of women and pagans while skipping lightly over the very blatant link to persecution of Jews.

The inquisition didn’t persecute all that many “witches”, but it did persecute a hell of a lot of Jewish people. The witches “sabbat” (a very obvious corruption of shabbat, c’mon), the innumerable narrative threads that tie witch accusations to anti-semitic blood libel, which is especially interesting given the way that many modern texts espousing the myth appropriate language and forms associated with writing about the holocaust. A particularly egregious example is Mary Daly’s equating bad reviews of feminist books to nazi book burnings in Gyn/Ecology a book that lingers lovingly on the torture of women.

Why do we feel we must find some ulterior motive for the witch trials, as if they must have had some hidden agenda behind them, rather than being simply another in the long history of Satanic Panics that have shown up throughout history? What do these stories of groups of sexually liberated anti-church underclass rebels crushed by the forces of Christianity, heteropatriarchy and the advent of Capitalism mean for us? What fascination do they hold? This question is important to me because it was for a long time, a story I believed with the fervor of a founding myth.

There are a lot of reasons it sticks with us. It frames being within the domestic sphere and the performance of traditionally feminized labor as a form of resistance. This is a mixed bag I think, on the one hand it places real value and importance on things that have often been treated as unimportant, and without significant value. On the other hand it is also in some ways limiting, as it can be said to suggest that the “true/natural power of women” lies in the domestic, in the unprestigious and usually unpaid. In dismissing formal education and so on, it dismisses the struggles of women and other marginalized people to access those fields.

It offers to grant groups of people often rendered invisible by history a glamorous and exciting role in it as martyred freedom fighters. It gives us a sense of connection to a mythic and idealized past. It offers us the belief that at some point, somewhere in history we have a model to work from for our ideal society… but if that model’s not real, then why should we give it the primacy it would have if it were a functioning example?

I think another one of the reasons why we like these stories is that they’re very morally clear. The accused has never done anything wrong. The accusers are always malicious, venomous and fully aware their accusations are lies. The accusers are powerful, the accused is powerless. It’s an oddly Christian morality tale of the perfect innocent sacrificed by the malevolent and fearful.

Ironically in our critique of Christianity, we make ourselves Christ, and I do mean ourselves because I think another reason for the enduring popularity of this narrative is that it’s so easy to identify with. In histories of this nature, details of torture are often described with lurid and almost eroticized detail, while any details of what the accused said or did is oddly absent. Anything in short that might break the sense of identification with the suffering body and make us see them as truly human, historical figures with identities of their own. We are allowed only the knowledge of atrocity so that our focus can be on empathizing with fear and pain, and avoid having to understand them as people. The witches in these stories (when they are allowed a voice) are modern people dropped into history. They never say anything we’d disagree with. They value nature and freedom. They are sexually liberated. They’re kind to animals. They believe in gender equality and so on and so forth. They are persecuted because they are not like the irrational, judgemental and cruel people who surround them.

It’s a flattering picture. We like the idea that if we existed in these past contexts we’d be like that. That we’d maintain our current values unlike those people. We like the idea that our ideas are somehow purely the result of something internal to us, and that we are discreet individuals with tidy and impermeable borders to our identity. We also like to believe that the world is consistent, that we can comprehend the past easily through the lens of the present, that various beliefs consistently go together (like that Catholicism always means opposition to birth control, or that belief in the need for economic equality always means opposition to cruelty to animals). It also allows us to see ourselves identified with the perfect victim. We are never the midwife who examines the accused for witch marks. We are never the accuser. We are always the victim, never complicit, always innocent of the blood on the system’s hands. The accused is never mean spirited, vindictive or foul mouthed. She is always, ironically, for all this myth’s focus on a society wishing to be rid of difficult women, easy to love.

GUEST POST: Thanksgiving Sermon

A sermon given by Frater Babalon at Church of the Morningstar’s first Thanksgiving mass.

So, this mass is tied into the holiday of Thanksgiving, a holiday whose popular narrative is about pilgrims and indiginous people coming together for a meal after the local tribe had helped the new comers through a winter that would have starved them all otherwise.

A holiday of gratitude towards the Wampanoag, in a country that’s still actively genocidal seems bitterly ironic, especially given what happened later when, after having been allies, the colonial rulers began to create intentional distance between their people and the Wampanoag. The Wampanoag, a federation of farming communities, held land in common, the way English peasants had done until around this time, when the ruling class was enclosing common lands to have it worked to increase their own profits. The Wampanoag also ran their society… basically like an anarchist federation (sending delegates after voting on issues… because they’re a goddamn civilized people) and the ruling class of the colonies sought to prevent their servants and slaves from defecting or considering how the Wampanoag’s system of organization might be applied on the home front. The Wampanoag after a relatively long period as English allies, saw their people being enslaved by the Colonists over petty criminal cases and saw their lands and rights being further and further eroded and so they organized with other local tribal groups to fight back against the English.

In retaliation, the tribe was nearly (but not completely) wiped out. This is especially gruesome given that the reason that the Wampanoag had allied themselves to the English in the first place with a treaty that served the colonists far better than it served them, was because they had suffered a devastating plague that had killed 2/3rds of their population and left them vulnerable to traditionally hostile neighbors.

The Wampanoag weren’t recognized by the US until 2006 and we’re STILL trying to steal what miniscule amount of their land they have left. (Update: We took their land again)

The first Thanksgiving wasn’t even a Thanksgiving for the Wampanoag, simply a harvest festival in Thanksgiving to the Christian god. The Wampanoag only showed up and were invited to dinner because they heard colonists firing as they hunted geese and thought the colony was under attack and rushed to help. The colonists then invited them to dinner, but the Wampanoag warriors saw that the spread was meager and went out and shot several deer to supplement the food. These are people who fed and aided my ancestors, who fed and aided my partner’s ancestors and they betrayed them unspeakably and we keep on betraying them unspeakably.

The horror of Thanksgiving is that it’s the equivilent of thanking someone you’re actively trying to murder for saving your ass when you were choking to death.

Settler Colonialism is a truly Faustian bargain. Settler colonialism, typically a nice way of saying “invasion and genocide” is a mechanism of control. It’s a way that the ruling class can expand its reach in times of unrest by allowing the working class to pillage from others, so they do not turn instead to take back what their overlords have stolen from them.

It is a way of temporarily improving the living conditions of the working class, by giving them gains stolen from other peoples, that then, the ruling class can gradually appropriate for themselves. It is fool’s gold payment for spreading their power yet further across the globe.

This was especially true in America where many of the indiginous peoples had forms of social organization that would have been profoundly dangerous to the European ruling class if the lower classes had gotten too much exposure to them.

We live on stolen land, land stolen so that a few centuries later a real estate baron could own all of it and charge extortionate rates to the descendants of those who had committed mass murder on the land baron’s ancestor’s promise that they’d be free there.

Happy thanksgiving.

Guest Post: Sermon on the Iggigi by Pastor Jarys

This sermon was given at Church of the Morningstar on October 3rd, 2020, during a mass themed around workers’ struggle.

When we honor workers, we honor ourselves and our history, even when we feel removed from that identity. While most in our society are not a part of the ruling class and, therefore must work to survive, so gradual and global are the chains of social and economic hierarchy, that many individuals who serve the wealthy are orders of magnitude more wealthy and influential themselves than widely encompassing cross sections of humanity. Whether by the exact nature of their work, or their self-awareness, such liminal people may not consider themselves workers. Which is only causal, after all, Capitalism makes use of alienation to support its continuation, and narratives such as the middle class serve to alienate workers from workers. If some workers can take on the attitudes of the wealthy toward workers in general, without having to enjoy the corresponding advantages, all the better for the wealthy. And that is why it is rejuvenating to examine and celebrate our identity as workers, and to enjoy the freedom to explore theology that sanctifies our struggle. We are not the first people to think so, if the Congregation will indulge me in a religious history lesson, I may explain. A mythological narrative that may hold modern significance.

I’d like to tell you a story from Mesopotamian Mythology, a story that has roots with the Sumerians and echoed throughout the cultures who followed them. The version of this story tbat I will begin with today is from the Akkadians, a cultural adopter of the Sumerian cuneiform writing and pantheon, whose empire lasted for about 200 years after first annexing the fallen Suemrian cities-states around 2300 BCE. Enki and Enlil are both characters in this story, but the narrative focus is on the Igigi.

Who were the Igigi? There are multiple schools of thought on the exact meaning of this term. As many Sumerian words were often derived via numerology, some have sought a definition in the numbers that make up Igigi, equaling a sum of 600, which is one of the numbers given to the entire population of gods. But this story excludes the most powerful gods from the term Igigi, who are identified as the Annunaki. So perhaps “Igigi” could be read to mean “The masses” of the gods, in the way that the term excludes the most powerful when used today. The other school of thought breaks down the name Igigi into its composite words, as Sumerians also used word compounding in the naming of complex concepts. The words beak down to “The Heavens, eyes or sight, and [this being the Sumerians] penatrative sex”. From this, historians offer these possible translations: “Those whose view from the sky penetrates all obstructions”, or “The Observers on behalf of heaven”, or possibly “The Watchers, who deflower”. Make of that possible influence on later mythology what thou wilt.

The story is clear that the Iggi were, like all gods, made in an act of birth or artifice by other gods. The Sumerians believed that Enki created the Igigi, though the Akkadians did not specify this detail. The story is also clear that the Igigi outnumbered the Annunaki significantly. But let’s get into the context in which our narrative hangs, shall we?

In the mythological roots that came from Sumer, the gods did not practice what Sumerians would call civilisation, at least not at first. They had houses, they had implements, but they did not generally labor for their survival. When they were hungry, the gods grazed as animals do, “ate of the field”, the tablets say. But Enlil did not like this.

Enlil was a god of armies and storms who, sometime in the Akkadian prehistory and possibly sometime during Sumerian history, came of prominence and supplanted An, the sky god, of rulership over the other gods. This often occurs in Middle Eastern mythology when people with a cultural god conquer or otherwise take command of other peoples, who have their own cultural god. Both gods get folded into a shared mythology over time, with the victorious symbol becoming the King of the Hill. After he took on this glory, Enlil was forever after the god of tyrants, and his followers seemed to mean that earnestly. I may have already told the earliest myth about Democracy in this Church, in which the gods hear of Enlil’s sexual assault upon his betrothed, and put the matter to a vote, succeeding in dethroning and exiling him to the land of the Dead. In that myth Enlil becomes the symbol of what Democracy stands in opposition of, totalitarian rule.

Similarly, in this story, Enlil is a jerk. He does not want to pick things up off the ground and eat them, his will is to eat the bread produced from agriculture. And, furthermore, his will is that it be delivered to him without much effort on his part, much like an folklore Jeff Bezos. In what mythologists call the Dictatorship of Enlil, the Igigi are set to digging the first ditches needed to irrigate for farming and Enlil goes to rest in his house. The Igigi know they are being forced to do this, they know the share of labor is unfair. So what do they do?

They strike. The Igigi burn their implements and stand en mass outside of Enlil’s house, accusingly. Enlil is given a rude awakening, possibly by the shouting of those he once thought of as peons outside. While the myth does not specify this, we might suppose that the god of armies and storms….is afraid. So afraid that he doesn’t rush to action, which is unusual for him. Instead, Enlil convenes a council of the Annunaki, and they agree to send a messenger to the Igigi. The Igigi receive the messenger with earnest honesty, advocating for their rights against this unjust treatment. Upon hearing of the Igigi’s complaints, Enlil still does not go to war. He does something he hates to do, he asks Enki for help.

Now, in the Sumerian version of this story, which also features the Igigi suffering the dictatorship of Enlil, there is no strike, just despair. The working gods cry tears that tremble the heart of the earth goddess, Ki, who birthed them. In response, she wakes the sleeping Enki and entreats him to open himself to the suffering of the Igigi. Enki reaches his arm to them, concerns himself with them, and decides to resolve the situation in their favor. There is more compassion and perhaps a lesson in shutting up and listening to those less privileged than you in this version, but in both versions, Enki’s solution is the same.

Enki proposes that they relieve the Igigi of their work through automation. Specifically, through the creation of a new type of being to do this work. You may have heard of this robot, or as the Sumerians envisioned them, clay-formed golems, because you see them every time you look….. in a mirror! That is right, the golems are humanity. In the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonion creation myths humans are formed to resolve a labor dispute. Make the humans do it.

Which is telling, I think, the story has obvious theo-sociological uses in Mesopotamian society, by explaining why people relied on irrigation farming to survive, and therefore the massive cooperation of cities full of people to support farming on a societal scale. To the Sumerians there was no urban/rural divide. The City was invented to supply the Farm, who feed the cities in turn. It is all cooperation, always has been.

This myth also had obvious uses in explaining class hierarchy built on a laboring class at its base. Certainly, when the Sumerians first started speaking their language, government may have been radically different than the imperial monarchies they passed down to the Akkadians, as their myths hint at direct democracy and merit-based management. As far as we know, in the earliest literate Suemrian cities, priests trained to read the texts in which instructions on farming had been written down, by previous generations, and to note down occurrences and their possible causes in further texts, so that some kind of progress could be eked out by later generations. Unfortunately, the temples became too self-serving and from them arose monarchical families, who innovated kingship from past managerial roles, and started an ongoing and yet never-ending series of conflicts over dynastic rulership in the area. To summarise so far: the Igigi, like the Middle Class, are a narrative that upholds social hierarchy, imagining that it extended all the way into the heavens. Your boss had a boss, who had a boss, who was a god, but also had a boss. Such a worldview would hold Enki in regard for his contribution to the status quo. Why am I even telling this myth to you, then?

Because it seems to uphold injustice power structures until, I think, we crack that story open and examine some underlying themes. There are two things that I want to highlight about this myth for ruther study and the first is the victory of the Igigi. The Annunaki have primary importance in Mesopotamian religion, and the head god had a symbolic place of narrative, if not historical, primacy. And yet the Igigi won their strike, and not just won but withheld the labor they were bullied into playing without any reprisal or further oppression. They were no longer required to labor, but to watch over those who labored, and advocate on their behalf to the powers that be. This is where the Sumerian and Akkadian belief in a personal god clears things up, by which I mean the belief that every person has a god devoted to their well-being. This god’s job was to watch over you and to advocate for you to the Annunaki. When people suffered ill fates, they often sought to soothe and care for their personal god, to make their job easier so they could spend more time arguing with the gods of Heaven to make your fate easier in turn.

The Igigi, as the masses of the gods, can be assumed to be these personal gods. Which makes sense, as the priesthood and then the monarchs claimed that their personal gods from among the Annunaki, the gods of state. This was a deeply introspective divinity, a person and their god were said to identify with each other, as humans were made of not just the mud provided by Enki from the Abzu, but the blood shed by all the gods in that labor strike. Later myths identified this blood having come from a single sacrificial god, usually the titan-like figures of Tiamat and Abzu, from which later societies were inspired to create Leviathan and Abyss. Humans were made, the myth suggests, from the blood of the struggle for justice and freedom. The Igigi, the Annunaki, and humans share that blood, though not from equivalent participation. This is not a myth of Tyranny’s victory over Labor, but of Tyranny’s failure in thinking it is of a personhood distinct and superior to those of Labor. In the Sumerian myth, the Earth Goddess Ki knows that the narrative of superiority is not true, and via compassion, Enki knows it too, and by solidarity proves the truth. In the Akkadian myth, the Igigi know that this dominance narrative is not true, and by direct action, proves the truth.

The second thing I want to highlight is the greater context of this myth, for the story does not stop there. No sooner had the tablet explained the Akkadian paradigm of a humanity derived from a strike, and Enlil getting what he wanted in the form of human religious offerings, when the same tablet continues thusly:

‘‘There had not passed twelve hundred years, The inhabited land had expanded, the people had multiplied, The land was bellowing like a wild bull. The god was disturbed by their clamour, Enlil heard their din. He said to the great gods, “Grievous has grown the din of mankind, Through their clamour I lose sleep. . .”.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “I know what story this is leading up to, there is a story just like it in the book of Genesis.” And, of course you are right, but not yet. And the distance between this story and that one, holds wisdom.

You see, in his annoyance at the very beings created to appease him, Enlil first sends a plague that ravages the human population. In response, Enki goes to Atrahasis (in Akkadian, his name in Sumerian is Ziusudra,hw essentially inspired the character of Noah) and the god tells Atrahasis of what the Igigi have accomplished, of the role of humanity as labor for the gods, and that what worked for the divine would also work for us. Enki advised a worship strike against all gods, including himself, except for that in benefit of the god of Plagues. And so Atrahasis goes out and advises the temples, they withhold all offerings and sacrifices, except to the plague god, who receives more than usual. And in return, the plague god disobeys Enlil and stops the Plague. Again, strikes work.

So Enlil sends a drought, and Enki advises the same reaction. The People withhold their prayers, except to the god of rain. It rains, the drought ends, and Enlil starts again. What he does next is obscured by a damaged tablet, but it causes a period of prolonged death, which the people reacted to with a third strike, which also worked, and then – THEN – came the flood. But first, a thought finally appeared in the vacuous caverns of Enlil’s mind, and he first went to Enki to lay a ban upon him. This is the same type of Enkian ban we perform in the First Church of the Morningstar, when we chant “En-Sagba-sagba” *, but this ban used upon the god of magic himself, and Enlil forbids interference by Banning Enki from talking to any human about the impending flood.

So Enki goes to the house of Atrahasis, refusing to speak to his acolyte, saying “I am here to address your door, you may go away, but not too far… OH DOOR! If only the humans knew what was about to befall them, a terrible and unending rain for all 40 days of the month, if only a particularly wise human would build a boat exactly to these dimensions, are you getting this door? Welp, good chat, I knew I could talk to you, door. Give my best to Atrahasis.” And Atrahasis gets the hint, sheltering farm animals and people in a large bowl-like boat, and survived Enlil’s temper tantrum of a flood, a story the Suemrians used to explain the flooding of the gulf of Iraq into a marsh plain. Enlil was so pissed that Enki had found a way around his ban, that he elevated Atrahasis to the status of a demigod after the fact, so that Enlil had not technically been disobeyed, and here we see the egotistical weakness that is Tyranny;

Their abuse of us is never going to satisfy them, until we so refuse the conceits of their demands that they have to accept our boundaries. Enlil could never appreciate the personhood of humans, could never learn from the strike of the Igigi, because to do so would require humility. And here Enki teaches humanity a theo-technical tactic that was WIDELY used, even up to today. In the Chinese Traditional Religion, the gods of villages hold a position of employment, and the people of the village are within their rights to terminate their ties to that god in response to poor performance. Similarly, Jewish trials of catharsis during the Russian Progroms sued Yahweh for breach of Covenant, allowing the congregations to release themselves of the disappointment in their insufficiently-proactive supposed superior.

When I read deeply of this myth I read that our gods, our inner divinity, serves us, and we never have to accept a theology or a power over us that is harmful to us and agnostic to our consent. Our boundaries, our own bans, are as sacred as the bans of the gods. Our right to freedom, justice, self-determination, and non-exploitation are divine, for even the gods could not deny these to each other, nor to their worshipers, when the power of collective action is implemented. The values and figures we worship, just like the governments and businesses we choose to support, are subject to our consent, end of myth. The powerful need us more than we need them, and when we withhold their use of us, we are practicing a divine magic. Workers are Divine, the Strike is Sacred, and an ounce of Compassion and Solidarity will beat a pound of Oppression in any era. Such is the wisdom of Enki, from my personal gnosis.

Thank you for reading.

*The famous “Ban Ban” circle spell, known to the Sumerians as the Zisurrû.

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