Embodied Ways of Knowing

The other day I read about a phrase that was something like, “embodied ways of knowing” (and of course, I am not remembering which social media feed I read it in or the original author). It felt like a response to explorations of “women’s ways of knowing,” or “gay ways of knowing” that at a stroke cut out problems with binary essentialist foundations of being, spirituality, and community—while at the same time allowing individuals to customize or specify their personal praxis.

I suppose there is potential for erasure with “embodied ways.” I could see how not naming a specific group would make it harder to enclave with others of similar embodiment. On the other hand, using embodied ways feels like it would make it harder to mistakenly assume community when in fact all there is are shared gender and orientation expressions.

I’m not sure if this is a New Thing, or if it’s So 2020.

Stories, Masculinity, and Entertainment

"What is your story about masculinity?" you ask.  "What does it mean to be a man?"  

Why should I tell you?  To heal the community?  Shall I, as William Blake puts it, tear up the garden of desire and fill it with churchmen saying "Thou shalt not?"  Should I fall into the trap of sharing my stories and risk contributing more bricks into the edifice of the orthodoxy of men? 

    

Because there is a Church of Men.  You have to move through its pews orthogonally, like a rook sliding over the black and white squares of a chessboard.  Here's our saints in the stained glass windows:  Crafty Odysseus and Telemachus, the good son.  The Magician, the Lover, the King, the Trickster, the Wounded Healer, and the Siberian Shaman.

   

In the special niche for the opera queens, gym-dandies, and the leathermen, the stained glass windows show ancient Greek aristocrats, samurai lovers, and The Native American two-spirits.  Here's the icons of gay male martyrs, starting with the Sacred Band of Thebes and ending with Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing, Harvey Milk, and Matthew Shepherd. 

At the altar is our holy of holies:  the erect penis with its foreskin whole and testicles packed with the seeds of life; the cock, the dick, the boner.  Our pride.  Our pleasure.  Our bodily vehicle of grace.  Our pointer pointing out desire and informing ourselves and our interactions.

But if you jump over the pews, if you step on the cracks between the tiles, the next time you try to enter, you'll find the church doors closed behind tangled briars, and you'll have to be satisfied with catching snatches of hymns being sung by the people inside.

The mainstream hedges and censors the male narrative with taboos to keep it safe for women, children, the old, the uninitiated, and the naive.  If I name my power as a man, what will the mainstream's response be but to tell me, "you must acknowledge culture's authority by only talking about manhood and manliness a certain way -- a precisely specific and controlled way -- and in certified safe spaces."  The mainstream will take my stories of manliness and maleness, but box them up into neat packages, conferences, and performances so I may be sold pieces of myself -- for the greater good, of course.

So forget you, and forget the mainstream.  I'll share my stories with you -- that's what this blog is for -- but you can't have my definition of what it means to be male.

Some Relevant Links:

Neo-Paganism:

http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2014/02/fallen-pagan-notes.html 

http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2009/03/un-uud.html 

http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2013/04/gay-beltaine.html

http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2010/05/neo-pagan-cynicism.html

http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2009/01/nice-version.html

The Genders:

http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2014/12/decade-in-review-2009.html

https://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2011/05/review-hidden-spirituality-of-men.html

http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2009/02/why-im-solitary-neo-pagan.html

http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2011/04/jung-homosexuality-parents-and-gods.html

http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2011/05/myth-of-matriarchal-prehistory.html

Decade in Review: 2004

July 2004.  Our beagle, Pickles, died of various medical complications.  Mark had found him at Greenhill after our England trip in 2001, and conditioned him from an obese, so-fat-his-back-is-flat chow-hound obsessed with food to a lean, mean eating machine obsessed with food (able to steal cookies out of children's mouths with a single bound).

Living with Pickles was sometimes a challenge, because he used all of his low animal cunning to eat things like other people's Thanksgiving stuffing, other people's children's Halloween candy stashes, and slug bait.   Sometimes I think Pickles was practice for having a child.   And we still had Muriel, the world's crankiest, old-lady cat.


August 1, 2004.  I married Mark in a garden, in a ceremony not legally recognized by city, state, or federal governments, and overseen by the Rev. Caroline Colbert (the Unitarian Universalist minister at the local UU church).  Our friend, Lime-Green Larry From New York was the best man:  he compiled and presented all the statements about marriage and love that we'd asked everyone to write.  My sister, Julie, gave a very funny toast.   My friends in a recorder ensemble played Renaissance music.

The wedding was a huge affair -- a lot of our friends and both families gathered in our landladies' garden and cried as we exchanged vows.  Mark said his.  I was a wreck when I said mine.  Afterward, we had chocolate cake in white suits.  And I led folks in a round of "The Shark Song."

But since I couldn't exactly say, "Mark is my husband," without it being a political statement, I sometimes referred to him as my "husband out-law."


December 2004.  I started this blog on Blogspot, back before it was slurped up by Google.  Before this, I would send out e-mail missives to a long list of folks.  

At the beginning of the decade, I was interested in the spiritual lives of gay male Neo-Pagans and in the expression of deity as a gay male.  I was hoping that I'd find something like a gay Cernunnos,  or a gay male Isis.  Or maybe something like a spiritual minded sacred band of Thebes.   I'd even asked Starhawk if she knew who a gay male Starhawk could be, but she didn't know.

I put together the beginning of a e-newsletter called "Lavender Leaves" hoping to attract like-minded men, but it never amounted to anything -- and the musings, book reviews, and general thoughts on queer theory and theology were channeled into this blog.


I turned 40.  For the birthday celebration, we set up a throne for me to sit on, and guests were required to bring a Wonder of Science or sing a song.  Turning 40 was a breeze, especially compared to when I turned 30.  Mark teased me that I was middle-aged, which I denied -- claiming that I planned to live to a hundred, and I wouldn't be in the middle of my life until I turned 50.

Dreams, Russ, and Personal Voice

This morning I woke up with a dream.  I only remember the tail end of it -- something about Mark and me walking in Northfield/Astoria along old closed storefronts... 

In the dream, I awoke in our bedroom.  There was classical music playing from KWAX on the radio.  And on the floor of the bedroom, still glowing from last night, was the iron teapot with a tea light in it.  

I'm not sure how I was able to see light through the tea pot, which was pleasantly warm to the touch.  Good thing I didn't start I fire, I thought.  Mark was still asleep so I took it out of the room.  

And then the dream turned into a gardening dream... I was weeding early in the morning.  We had a (not existent in real life) plot in front of the house.  I was using a plastic claw or rake to uproot weeds and snag out dead leaves from around the roots of a small ?maple? and ?flowers?.  I had a brief conversation with with a dream amalgam neighbor, probably about weeding.

I woke up for real with the image of a warm glowing teapot and gardening.

---

I read more Joanna Russ this week, and her other works aren't speaking to me as strongly as her Kirk/Spock papers.  I was hoping to click with her Lovecraft essay, but I didn't, perhaps because the alien voice interests me more than horror induced by depression caused by the realization that chthonic forces will return the self to the void.  

The work of Russ that I have read is mostly from from 1985, and a lot of it is (surprise!) feminist theory.  The conversation about feminism has changed from thinking about a specific end goal  to thinking about a process or journey, and essentialist notions of discrete genders and orientations have become continuums.  And, although she reports about trying to get a gay male perspective on Kirk/Spock, it feels like she wasn't able to talk to many gay men.

On the plus side, Russ's papers have reminded me that stories have a latent content (heart or symbolic meaning) as well as a manifest one (rockets and dragons).

Russ's image of Kirk and Spock as divine male-male lovers spoke to me very strongly, and while Russ claims her story is written by a woman speaking to other women about egalitarian vulnerability in romantic relationships, her symbolic imagery speaks to this gay man.

Which leads me to questions about my own direction.  Do I need to write gay speculative fiction?  I think the world does not need Yet Another Coming Out Story.  Do I need to write male speculative fiction -- or, better question:  how do I write male speculative fiction as a gay man writing in (as "Women Destroy Sci-Fi" reminds me) a male-dominated speculative fiction market?   

Do I write a story about future men-without-penises, or male AIs, or a fantasy country called Tiresias, where the inhabitants may switch genders?  Oh dear, I think I'm being pulled into writing what Russ called "a dreadful Amazon Utopia" story.

I think the answer is "just write what you're interested in."  Like gardens and glowing, warm teapots.

More on Russ, Kirk and Spock

Whew. I'm back from the special collections room and another round of Joanna Russ essays.  This time I looked at rough, first, and second drafts of "Ravings of a K/S Addict," written thirty years ago, about, I think,1982 or 1984.

Russ is exuberant at her discovery of Kirk/Spock slash fiction.  After listing about eight attributes of Spock's which are also the attributes of non-traditional women in a male-centered and dominated culture, Russ hails slash fiction it as an exiting new structure enabling women to tell stories in women's language about women's ways of loving and romance.

Russ's essay drafts have energized me.  She breaks down the elements of romance fiction in order to show how they work in slash fiction written by women for women.  She makes astute observations about the differences between male and female writers.  Every other page examines a foundation of fiction's voice, construction, or social impact.  I keep asking myself how each page can be applied to my own writing voice.  It's exhausting.

Near the end of "Ravings", Russ writes that Kirk/Spock slash fiction allows women writers to not have to write on the slant (Emily Dickinson) or against male literature (Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf).  She writes that slash fiction has gotten away from the the process of writing fiction being an "unpleasant awareness of being different or marginal."  And later that Kirk/Spock slash is a Rosetta Stone because "[the authors of it] make their art from the same wishes, fears, knowledge, background experiences and desires as their audience.

The difficulty I have with "Ravings" is the essentialism in it.  For her, Kirk/Spock slash is romance and adventure fiction exploring the notion, what do romantic relationships look like in a universe where one gender is not undervalued nor exploited?  This necessitates a linkage of lists of gender traits which can feel a little quaint, as one woman asked me, "Spock is the woman? Do people still think [in gender binary] like that?"

What's interesting to me is her confession that, as a non-traditional girl who was smart, she could identify as the half-human, half-alien Spock, who was part of both worlds and belonged in neither.  This is exactly the same reason he appealed to me, a non-traditional boy who was smart.  I guess the language of women (and gay men) in the seventies early eighties was the language of alienation.  

I'm not sure that's still as true in 2014.  Back in the 80's, there was a lot of emphasis on "women's ways of knowing," or on exploring gay men as "anandros" (Harry Hay's term for "not-men") or gay men's "lunar masculinity."  My sense is that in the 70's and 80's the identity politics of gender and orientation equality was more about describing what a perfect society would look and feel like, whereas in 2014, there's more of an emphasis on the journey to and the dialog about equality.  Also, this was before e-mail was commonly used; web pages wouldn't exist for about fifteen more years:  the Internet in the United States was a collection of DARPAnet and other fledgling networks.  People were much more isolated from communities, and Kirk/Spock slash fiction was one way to share in a community.  (Russ reports that her phone conversations with another woman about literary theory, women's voices and slash fiction resulted in astronomical phone bills.)

While oppression based on gender, orientation, and perceived gender still exists in the forms outright harassment, and  of wage and marriage inequalities, it seems like mainstream American has assimilated the more palatable aspects of "non-traditional women" and the homosexual community (e.g. "Will and Grace," "Queer Eye," Ellen DeGeneres).  And it seems like LGBTTQ identity has become less about an either/or matrix of qualities and more a continuous space along the axes of social gender, biological gender, and orientation, with a person's expressions a fuzzy cloud instead of a discrete point.  Additionally, the internet has provided virtual community for far-flung folks (there's an essay, "How the Internet Dissolves Perceptions of Regional Difference, or 'Yes, We're All Individuals. / I'm not!'")

Still -- Wishes, Fears, Knowledge, Experiences, and Desires -- sounds like like a useful lens for crafting stories to me.  (Looks over list again...) And I'm pretty sure this is a tarot card spread, too.

Joanna Russ Kirk & Spock Slash Fiction

I managed to get to the Joanna Russ archives.  I looked through the holdings and saw holdings on HP Lovecraft, something called "Sword and the Poppy" and something called "Kirk / Spock."  I figured I'd start with Kirk and Spock.

The reading room is a wonderfully tall room, with corner molding of pyramids and disks, and old rectangular vases placed on darkly stained bookshelves.  The long wooden tables have foam book stands for holding old books open without straining their spines.  After a short wait, a librarian brought me some boxes and I found the folder I wanted.

I half-expected black and white photos of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy in Star Fleet garb, or maybe a typed essay of some sort.  What instead came out of folder 13 was a loose collection of yellow legal-sized papers with a longhand draft of a Star Trek story on it.  The line edits and crossed out text gave insight to how she would introduce or develop ideas.

As I read, a very drunk Dr. McCoy walks in on a kinky (OMG!) domination scene (OMG!) between Kirk and Spock (OMG!), who, after four years of working together, have become lovers.  You could have knocked me over with a feather.  The story follows Dr. McCoy's dealing with being the fifth wheel.  The Yesterday's Tomorrow's Homophobia was odd coming from McCoy, especially given the rest of the crew's acceptance.

One particular sex scene (OMG!) near the story's end struck me, as Russ wanted to make a connection with Spock as Pan and Kirk as a Golden Grain God.  Again, the cross-outs in the manuscript were instructive about how she wanted to introduce the idea.  

Russ managed to cast two gay male lovers as pagan gods, had managed to do it without it feeling like one of them was the Goddess in drag or a queer retelling of Lot's Daughters, or an artificial queer gloss over a heterersexual construction.  I'm guessing that it was written after Ursula Le Guin's "Left Hand of Darkness," which would date it no earlier than 1970, but it could be as late as 1980.  [Edit--it appears that Russ was introduced to K/S fiction between "Wrath of Khan" and "The Search for Spock", or 1982-1984.]  Queer Pagan God-lovers were  barely visible in 1985, and I can't imagine someone imagining them in the seventies.  But Russ did.  [Edit--Russ mentions some gay K/S fiction, or at least a story where Kirk and Spock are gay, but it's a tiny minority.]

I skipped the "Alternate Universe Naked Slaveboy Kirk in Chains on Barbarian Vulcan" story and went on to read the draft of the essay, "Women's Pornography and Star Trek." 

Apparently, in the early 1970's there were a number of 'zines devoted to stories written by women, for women, featuring Kirk and Spock as lovers.  They followed a standard romance formula--restraint & reticence, trauma induced holding, crisis, responsibility-shunting circumstance, and a lot of sex--which I recognized in Russ's story draft.  

Russ preferred to call all stories with sex in them pornography, in order to stay out of the "it's not pornography, it's erotica" debate--hence her essay's title.

I was blown away because, apparently, her short story was pornography by a woman for women.  The reading room closed before I could finish Russ's essay, but her reasoning went something like Kirk = Macho Man, Spock = Alien "Not-Man," therefore Spock = Figurative Woman; and therefore, Kirk and Spock's relationship can easily fit--if not more nobly fit--into the framework of a women's traditional romance story.

I'm not sure I agree.  Judging from my reactions as I read the hot throbbing parts, her story worked fairly well as gay porn for me (partially because I took on a Spock persona to survive elementary and middle school, and partially because William Shatner pushed my prepubescent buttons every time he lost his shirt).  But maybe this is one of those manifest content / latent content things, and maybe there's more in the twenty or so pages of Russ's essay that I didn't get to.

I'm sure there must have been some gay male Kirk/Spock slash fiction from the early 1970's, but the only thing I can think of is a passing comment between two characters who had such great sex that think they must have been Vulcans in a mind-meld.  And on additional reflection, gay  smut from the 1970's follows a different formula:  desire, discovery of mutual desire, entrance into a permissive space, slow disrobing, hot throbbing bits, post-coital kiss & summary.  Eighties and nineties, it gets more about safe-sex, caring, and pride.   

So the questions raised are, 1) Are Russ and the authors of 1970's Kirk/Spock slash fiction co-opting depictions of male-male sex to reinforce heteronormative notions of male and female roles in romance?  2) If an author says, "This writing is for women," does that preclude its consumption and enjoyment by a male audience?  3) Is pornography inherently the literature of gender and orientation essentialism?  And, 4) What about Batman and Robin?

Wrestling With Ancient Queer Paganisms

Between Hutton and some Queer Pagan Theory from 2011 I've just recently read, I've been revisiting gay male NeoPaganism.

From Hutton's "Pagan Britain" I've gotten the idea that history and archaeology aren't the steady guides to a pre-modern Paganism I thought they were (that they were steady guides, yes; that they were guides for NeoPaganism, not so much).  Hutton seems to be taking the Many Worlds theory of the multiverse to turn history from a linear narrative and into a superposition of narratives only particularly constrained by the archaeological record (so much for steady guides).

A multiverse history enriches possibilities to model present spiritual practices based on past ones, but sacrifices specific, definitive models.  I suppose that's a good thing if history is to become a tool to navigate present choice because it increases the number of cautionary tales.  But so many choices makes choosing the future less about choosing a route on a map and more like an interpretive dance.

According to Hutton, ancient British Pagans, as evidenced by their paleolithic cave art, may have had more fluid boundaries between animals, deities and humans; between spirits, the living and the dead; and between male and female.  Applying this and other parts of the book to gay male NeoPaganism, "Pagan Britain" is both supportive and disproving of any founding stories of gay male NeoPaganism (it would be a better resource for this inquiry if it covered the Qedeshim, but they aren't British).  Gay male NeoPaganism sometimes casts The Greenman and Hern as same-sex lovers.  The Greenman is a modern development of the theories of Lady Raglan, and Hern is a literary figure back-projected onto ancient Paganisms; so the construction of them as same-sex lovers is a modern one, not an ancient founding one.  Not that I've been able to connect with any founding stories that I felt applied to my current, modern life--which leads to the Queer Theory.

The quick-and-dirty gist of what I've read so far goes something like this.  The heteronormative way of looking at things is binary, specifically gender-binary.  Early formulations of gay (male) liberation simply added another binary to the mix: straight or gay.  Male ways, gay ways, or other essentialist ways of knowing expand the heteronormative paradigm without changing it much (not changing the status-quo was a criticism of the men's mythopoetic movement).  A gender-queer world view rejects gender-binary systems; being gender queer is more about the process and practice of interacting with other folks within an analog continuum--which sounds a little like modern cave art paintings of gender and orientation.

Hmm. I'm certain that I find body and facial hair, firm torso and arm muscles, and male genitalia sexually attractive... in addition to certain scents that I'm fairly certain only males produce (pause to wonder if sexy scents are sexy inherently, or if sexy scents are sexy because sexy men are producing them... also, have I ever smelled sexy scents from a woman's body?)  I think this makes me a gay male essentialist trying to be gender queer.  

More importantly is queer theory's effect on ways of knowing.  No gender or orientation binary, no specifically gendered or oriented way of knowing.  Which might work well with the ancient cave paintings, but I am not cave art.  On one hand, if queer is a process of social interaction and not a destination or an essential identity, and if queer is a field of both/and responses instead of an either/or limit, then general, pan-cultural ways of knowing become  specific, personal ways of experiencing/experiences.  Which is freeing on one hand--no more obsessing on reconstructing gay male relationships from ancient feudal societies in order to rebuild a lost gay heritage--and feels completely unstructured on the other (quick, time to ground myself in history and re-read all those medieval and renaissance records of "The Night Police" and other criminal records of men having sex with men).

So that's the theory. Now onto the praxis.

When I think about gay male NeoPaganism, I remember that dream I had where I was a priest filling a giant rhyton which curled over my shoulders from a river so I could bring the waters back.  Or that frenzy-raising dream with Odin.  Or (cue Peter Gabriel's Mercy Street) that dream kissing Jesus.  When I remember that one gay male gathering back in 1997 where we all sat around a river bank in various states of undress sharing health tips, that feels like a gay NeoPaganism.  When I fantasize about sacred gay sex... well... I can already hear the sarcastic comments; the complaint that we don't have the space to build a giant bonfire, platform, and hot-tub; and the criticism that wanting great sex to be sacred too is greedy (and then I can hear James Broadbent talking about a visual orgy featuring tantric can-can).

When I try to think about some gay working of Hern and the Greenman as lovers, it seems like sexual attraction isn't the point, it's a metaphor for a station in the relationship between flora and fauna--and then I wonder, if gay sex is sacred, why not gay dying, or gay eating, or gay dancing ...and then I think about the "Gay Things To Do Today"/Gay Agenda joke, Heart Circles, anti-tech attitudes, Winkte-wannabes, prosperity checks, and Potlucks and I just want to run away screaming--because they aren't refreshing, they're draining.

So much for praxis....  I feel like I should just channel my inner 1960's Judith Viorst and write a poem titled "It's Hard to be Gay and be Pagan." Or just throw in the towel and write that Starhawk-esque "Spell to be Friends with Your Prostrate."   Or just mash together 1990's songs:  "As I slowly fall asleep / for a moment dreams are sacred" // "that's all I wanted, was something special, something sacred -- in your eyes...."

Queer Pagan Theory Links

This is a note to myself to read the following.


http://enfolding.org/jottings-queer-pagans-or-queering-paganisms/

Seems to say queer paganism should be a process, not a destination, and uses words like "praxis."  I found the other links by web-walking through the enfolding.org site.


http://enfolding.org/issues-with-the-gender-binary-in-public-paganism/

OMG!  The quote from Z Budapest is... just... wow.


http://enfolding.org/are-there-queer-pagan-mysteries/

http://enfolding.org/jottings-on-queering-deity/

http://enfolding.org/book-review-sex-before-sexuality/

http://enfolding.org/pagan-paths-for-a-gay-man-wicca-or-druidry/

Conclusions from Hutton's "Pagan Britian"

I finished Hutton's Pagan Britain last night.  I'm still processing it.  As a NeoPagan, I started Pagan Britain with the expectation that myths about its historical pedigrees would be debunked.  This happened, but not to the extent that I thought (and secretly hoped) it might (in a Cynthia Eller kind of way).  It's more-or-less a continuation and updating of earlier works published by Hutton (The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles; Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination; Stations of the Sun: a History of the Ritual Year in Britain; The Triumph of the Moon; Blood and Mistletoe: the History of the Druids in Britain; and Witches, Druids, and King Arthur).  I'd place it with Pagan Religions and Shamans because of its dry runs of archeological case-studies, and include Blood and Mistletoe because it references that work a lot.

The final pages of the book argue for a subjective, both-and interpretation of the history of Paganism in Britain.  That is to say, as long as the record specifically does not disprove a particular interpretation (and he would argue, for example, that the record disproves the construction of Stonehenge by extraterrestrials), our historical knowledge, imagination, and wonder are better served by allowing individuals the ability to choose which interpretive narrative of the archeological record appeals to them the most, as long as they recognize that their historical narrative is one of several, equally plausible (though not necessarily equally probable) historical narratives.

This conclusion turns the book more into a book about the role of history as an interpretive tool, and less a book about who the ancient British Pagans were and what they were doing.   On reflection, at several points within it, the book did deliver a strong sense that the interpretation of the record says more about the interpreters than it does about ancient Pagans (and about how advances in archeological methods have enriched the available data).

I haven't decided if Hutton is trying to have his theological cake and eat it, too.  At least in terms of current British NeoPaganism (and by extension Wicca) being a continuous religious practice, the record is clear:  practitioners of both folk and ceremonial British magic, from about 500 to about 1850, were conducting magic ritual within a Christian framework.  Any "thin veneer of Christianity over a Paganism" held by the rural British masses was really more likely to be a "thin veneer of Paganism over Christianity" of the educated British elites.  With this veneer in mind, although the format of the seasonal rites might have changed, the underlying function or urge for them remains mostly the same.  This last bit shifts the question away from "what does Paganism mean?" to a more general "what does human spiritual practice (in Britain) mean?"

What makes the writings of Hutton attractive to me is that when I first took the NeoPagan path in the mid 1980's, one of the drawing features was that its adherents had chosen it as a religion instead of blindly following it by default.  "We choose our religion / We question or beliefs" was a kind of rallying cry.  Maybe this was a function of choosing the NeoPagan path at Reed College.   Reading a scholarly history of (Neo)Paganism helps me to make informed choices about spiritual practices.  (And I also think some of the more recent historical roots of modern NeoPagan practice is hysterically funny.)

Fast forward through the years, and I've encountered NeoPagans who don't know what a Solstice or an Equinox is, but who celebrate Beltane "because the ancestors did" or who celebrate Imbolc because "it was a Celtic Fire Festival" (meaning, I think, Riverdance, not realizing that "Celtic" is a language group and artistic style spanning a huge geographical area and temporal span, and not a homogeneous culture), or Goddess-worshippers who justify gender enclave as a weapon of exclusion (instead of a tool for discovering voice)  "because prehistoric Pagans were matriarchal."  This bothers me because I believe a theology unexamined is not worth practicing, and because an unthoughtful or unthinking NeoPaganism cannot produce NeoPagans who are properly balanced, centered, nor engaged with the cosmos with all of their faculties.

So, Pagan Britain allows NeoPagans to say "We choose our histories.  We question our past."  Which I guess is enlightened, but not quite as satisfying as "Hah! You're doing it wrong!" and I'll have to get used to asking "What historical interpretation of the archeological record do you use as a basis of today's ritual?"  (Sigh, I can see the appeal of Christianity, with a religious elite handing down articles of faith...)

In terms of a Queer NeoPaganism, Pagan Britain doesn't directly address it (and I wasn't expecting it to).  Since most of the Pagan rituals address fertility, a good harvest, and healthy cattle, heteronormaitive narratives of deity and worship are assumed.  To try to apply Hutton's book to the Qedeshim (who aren't British at all), my understanding is that A) they probably weren't as sexually active as early 20th century archeologists fantasized, and B) all archeology can really say is that they were temple staff that the editors of Deuteronomy didn't approve of.  Taking Hutton's approach, I'm justified believing that the Qedeshim were gay male priests in the temple of Ashera, as long as I acknowledge that there are other interpretations supported by the record.

How to apply the model of the Qedeshim and map sacred sex within a temple onto modern religious practices is something I've yet to work out ("Hi, I have public ritual sex in a temple with another man in order to invite the blessings of the gods and insure a fruitful harvest" ? ), and Pagan Britain doesn't supply any hints for applying paleolithic, ancient, or classical models of spirituality to modern times.  And recalling some of the attempts to reconstruct a gay male pagan heritage I've read, maybe that's a good thing.

Hutton and Pagans on the Edge of History

The slogging through Ronald Hutton's Pagan Britain continues.  I know that the review of the archaeological literature is a necessary part of the book, but Hutton himself adds in the chapter on the Roman invasion of Britain that the archaeological record provides a wealth of exciting and suggestive data that neither strongly proves nor disproves many things and leaves blank spaces.  I wish that I had been a little more rigorous reading the book, because I know that some time in the future I'll want to reference it during an argument and then have to re-read large swaths.

What I've gotten out of the last few chapters

• Pre-Christian Pagan worship in Britain can be divided into three broad groups: Iron Age British Pagans (Caesar's "druids" and earth-based festivals), Romano-Briton Pagans (Jupiter, Mercury, Minerva, Mars; Isis and Serapis; Cybele and Attis), and Anglo-Saxon Briton Pagans (Wotan, Thunor, Frigga, etc).  They weren't exactly a continuous spectrum.
• Judging from animal remains, Iron Age British Pagans probably had celebrations (probably six) at the onset of the seasons (e.g. Summer, Winter, sheep shearing, and grain harvest).
• Early Christianity in Britain had wide variation in forms of practice over the island; presumably, British Paganism would, too.
• The peoples of northern Britain, who were never Romanized, and who were collectively called the Picts, spoke in a language that was a regional dialect of British (i.e. "Pictish" isn't its own language); they probably didn't practice matrilinear inheritance; Pictish symbol stones seem to have been developed around 500 AD, post adoption of Christianity, although the symbols resemble metalwork from the Roman Pagan period.
• It's nice when archaeological, literary, and DNA data line up, but they don't always because some historical phenomenon don't show up (if at all) in all three types of data, and sometimes it's hard to interpret the data when the three types don't agree.
• Even with bodies and burials and middens and ditches, figuring out if someone was ritually killed or honored in death or if something was inscribed with magical runes at its making or at its discarding is hard.  Frequently a burial or deposit can be interpreted in a wealth of ways.
• Theories of what folks were doing that were popular in the 1980's have since been less supported by the record than originally thought, or have otherwise fallen out of vogue.  This seems to be especially true of cross-referencing Welsh, Irish, and Roman literary sources.

The book feels like it's going to pick up.  The archaeology is interesting, but what gets me excited are how the theories and interpretations change over the last thirty years.  I admit anticipatory schadenfreude for hitherto unread accounts about some venerable ancient tradition being made up whole-sale a hundred and fifty years ago to attract (nationalistic) tourists.  Already there have been some references to King Arthur, and some observations about attributing shamanic techniques to British Pagans.  Also, with the introduction of the Anglo-Saxon (not Nordic!) practices to Britain, the Paganism is beginning to resemble 1960's British Wicca.  Sort of.

In terms of writing, Mary Stewart's Arthurian retelling stands up fairly well in the light of Pagan Britain.  Other tales, not so well.  In terms of my own writing, I can see that the alternative history world I've been playing in needs to either just make a complete break with our world's history, or else I need to spend some quality time thinking through the consequences of the alternate history.

In terms of queer spirituality, Hutton suggests a couple of times that prehistoric British Pagans were not so hung up on clear categories between human and divine, human and animal, and gender.  No Queer Male way of knowing yet, and I'll guess that the record will not have much to say one way or the other.

Post Conference Wakefulness

Well... It's 3:30 AM and I'm awake.  

There are multiple reasons, but one of the main ones is that I'm digesting the Women in Science Fiction conference and pondering things like my writer's voice and the stories we tell and writers' communities.

One take-away from the conference for me is a need to reevaluate essentialist and assimilationist stances with systems of knowing.  If there are "women's (or men's or queer's) ways of knowing" does that play into structures of oppression (sexism, racism, classism) because it requires essential differences?  On the other hand, queer (or women's or racial) pride requires a rejection of assimilation of the mainstream (.e.g. The straight-acting closet).  

Or is the paradigm too binary?  Do we need to think in shades of grey?  How can we think in different, inclusive ways that preserve and celebrate our differences?  Do we need to revisit Harry Hay's suggestion that gay men call themselves a third gender named "ana-andros"? And is there an elegant way to add that to the "Lesbian-gay-bi-trans-queer-allies Pride March"?

And how does this relate to story?  That was the other take-away.  Ursula Le Guin and the other writers said more than once, "I'm a writer, I tell stories.  Stories are how I do thought experiments.  If my stories are political, it's because all stories are political."

I'm not sure I want to be a Gay Writer.  That seems like limiting me to telling coming out stories, dealing with AIDS stories, hymns to 1974 New York City, or male-male romance stories.  Oh, I forgot gay vampires.  And I'm sure that I've got an out-of-date notion of what the gay male narrative is (assuming there is one or just one).  Sure, I want to write gay male protagonists, because I want stories where I can see myself in them.... Gah. 

I guess in times like this I need to repeat my mantra, "mystery BEGUILEMENT portents WONDER awe CONNECTION majesty SURPRISE."