Re-membering after Dismemberment
An excerpt from QUEER DEVOTION
Queer Devotion comes out from Hay House this Tuesday, May 20th. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 1, “Queer Mysteries, Queer Initiations: Coming Out of the Closet with the Eleusinian and Orphic Mystery Traditions.”
The thing that divided me from spiritual belief and devotion for so very long, aside from religious trauma, was proof. An insistence on explanation, legibility, empiricism, validation. Before I could believe in a thing, I had to understand it. This is also part of what kept me from embracing my own queer sexuality and nonbinary gender until I was 30 years old. I felt that I needed to check an appropriate number of queer and trans boxes, meet some burden of proof, know “for sure.” But this self-doubt, this burden of proof, did not come from inside me, but from outside. It was placed on me by a society, culture, and religion that didn’t think I was “real.” A society where a doctor is the one who can “decide” if you’re trans. A culture that grooms children to be the “right” kind of masculine or feminine—no limp wrists for boys, no bossy attitudes for girls. When my spouse came out to his father as trans, his dad replied, “I don’t believe in transgender.” As if his transness were Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. I was more fortunate. When I came out to my dad, he asked me to help him understand. When he still couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it, he said he didn’t have to understand it to believe me.
That’s the secret right there: You don’t have to understand in order to believe.
While I’m firm in my queerness at this point, I still struggle with my spirituality sometimes. I have days when I doubt all the insights, revelations, uncanny experiences, dreams, visions, synchronicities, signs, guidance, and assistance that I have received from my deities and spirits. Did Aphrodite really help resolve that relationship issue after I prayed to her for help, or did my partner and I just get over it? Did my accountant grandpa really intervene with the credit card processor after I asked his spirit for help, or did the issue resolve on its own? This, too, is a product of the cis-heterosexist, materialist Western culture of reason over emotion, fact over feeling, mind over body. This is the legacy of a culture that teaches us to question what we know in our queer bones and queer soul to be true about ourselves and our experience. Why does it have to be one or the other, after all? Why can’t it be both? Maybe Aphrodite thawed my and my partner’s hearts so we could work out that relationship issue together from a place of openness and love. Maybe Grandpa greased the wheels at the credit card processor, slipped my support ticket in front of the right eyes—or nudged me to change that one detail in that one setting in my account, the day after which all was resolved.
The big thing I had to learn in my spiritual path—the big, huge, massive, supremely challenging (for me) thing, the thing I’m always still working on—is letting go. Letting go of that control, that insistence on empirical proof and absolute understanding, that fear of being wrong or foolish.
Letting go is a kind of death.
Baring and Cashford describe the Mysteries of Kybele (Cybele) and Attis: “[The initiate’s] old beliefs and way of life are sacrificed to his or her new understanding of the Mysteries, and [the initiate] is ‘reborn’ from the death-like state of his former level of understanding.”1 Initiation, whether queer or religious or Mysterious, always requires the death of understanding in order for knowing to be reborn. And I do believe that knowing is reborn. I think the knowing of the Divine and the knowing of queerness are similar like that. Both are realities that were once alive within us, inseparable from us, knitted into our souls and cells as children—before the world got in the way. Before cis-heteronormative society taught us we were aberrant. Before trans- and homophobic institutionalized religion taught us we were going to hell. Before other kids on the playground learned this too and started the name-calling: lesbo, sissy, faggot, dyke. Before access to God was locked behind a pearly gate, a code of conduct and a clean report card required for entry. Before we learned to separate the mind from the body and forgot the spirit entirely.
We must forget what we’ve learned to remember what we know.
So much of the Divine has been lost in the empirical thrust of the scientific and industrial revolutions, in the violent hierarchical divisions of Cartesian dualism, in the dehumanizing labor extraction of capitalism and sexless Protestant productivity. Western intellectualism has parceled out the body of God into ordered taxonomies, hierarchies, and dichotomies, pinned and labeled like a butterfly specimen in a naturalist’s display case. It has done the same to our souls. In one of Dionysos’s two deaths in Orphic tradition, the infant Dionysos is abducted by jealous Titans and his body savagely torn apart and eaten. Only his heart remained, and it was from his heart that the “thrice-born” god was regrown. Perhaps this story of Dionysos, the gender-bending god of transformation, can offer a remedy, a path to regrowing the spiritual body along with the queer soul: from the heart.
I could not believe in the Divine until after I accepted and embraced my queerness. In remembering ourselves, in remembering the truths of our own heart, we re-member ourselves from dismemberment. We put ourselves back together. We are reborn into what we’ve always been: holy and whole.
The Gods, the Divine, have always been there, waiting for us to remember.
Come celebrate with me! This Tuesday, May 20th, I’ll be having a book release party at Seagrape Apothecary here in Portland, OR. We’ll have an author talk and book signing opportunity, along with yummy snacks and drinks. RSVP to be entered into the raffle where we’re giving away a bunch of free books and card decks! Plus, Seagrape and I are cooking up an exciting limited release collaboration that will be available at the event. Don’t miss it!
Masks required. ASL interpretation provided.
Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London: Arkana, 1993), 413.