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READERS NOTE functioning in connection with the magico-religious life, existed all over the world." Richard Burton The whole of the telling of GANYMEDE's story, the mortal boy whose beauty excited the desire of the Greek God ZEUS, is akin to that of the daughters of memory, the MUSES, connecting not only the souls of the lovers to each other, united in their bodies and their minds, but also to the fact that the goddesses and gods themselves are embodied in the forces of life itself. GANYMEDE stands for anybody who, like his Two-Spirit native brother, the cou pan of the sub-Arctic Konyagas, stands "drinking in the light of the moon, the stars, absorbing all its brilliance and splendors to become a man of god." 1 It is also why the physical and emotional rapture of sex has played a vital role in religion, magic, mysticism, occultism, symbolism and the whole range of human dealings with the supernatural. Far from the preaching of the puerile and puritanically minded who would believe that sex for any purpose other than reproduction is sinful and demonic, "this experience, or at least an approach to it, is the ultimate aim of all religion, the ultimate reference of all myth and rite." 2 It is the solvent of isolation, a means of moving beyond the normal bounds of human consciousness to touch into cosmic forces, and thereby unite with the whole of life. Yes indeed, Ganymede’s thighs do set the divine light of ZEUS afire and, in the deliverance, GANYMEDE becomes the cupbearer of the gods. All the shamans, sages, artists, and your every-day-on-the-street queer, many of whom do not deny this very attainable and human experience, have revered it, in stark contrast to many of the recent scholars on homosexuality whose research (and, one would also suppose, their minds) is so sterilized of the transcendent function that they must cling to the notion that same-sex love in, for example, Greek mythology - presumably far removed from the experience of modern life - was meant solely as a preparatory rite for heterosexual union. "Oh, he's just going through a phase," was debunked long, long ago. Yet, as with any paradigmatic shift of consciousness, of which the resurrection of gaiety is but a part, there remains hope for the misbegotten in the form of a force that is so overwhelmingly powerful that it comes and picks them up, like GANYMEDE carried aloft to the mystical heavens, and away from their socially constructed definition of homosexual life. Sex has, in fact, frequently elicited the religious or magical state of mind. "During the sexual act, especially if it ends in mutual orgasm, both parties achieve an intense, often uncontrolled state of temporary brain excitement, which continues on to a state of sudden temporary nervous collapse and transient brain inhibition... Relief from the accumulated tension of everyday life is also frequent in the phase of final sexual collapse, when the brain's slate is wiped clean, so to speak, and left blank for new impressions and influences to write on. New loves can readily spring up, or old hates dissolve in states of aroused sexual tension and in the final orgasm." It is significant that among the longest-lasting of our innumerable terms for sexual intercourse have been "knowing, possessing" and "having," expressions which suggest, as the psychologist Wilhelm Reich researched, that the real goal of sexual activity may not merely be procreation or, by extension, not meant to be solely limited to the bounds of heterosexuality, or even erotic pleasure (as divine as that may be) but something thought of in the terms of a blissful union of the soul with God conceived in sexuality, as many mystics have known and shown in the body of their works. Where the Christians would solemnly raise a parched wafer-like host devoid of humanity, gaiety is more direct, literally "eat me." It is both the romantic and sexual ideal of love between human partners as an act of worship. The original EROS, one of the oldest of the androgynous Greek gods, was not some mischievous boy shooting his toy bow and arrows at the grown-ups on Valentine's Day, but an awe-inspiring universal force, which, as the Greek Hesiod said, "unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and men." 4 The androgynous love goddess Aphrodite, who some think was EROS' mother, was said to have been "born from the foam which boiled up when the severed genitals of the sky god Uranus were thrown into the sea." It doesn't take much of a leap to understand foam boiling up as semen, and the severed genitals as the spent erection, and, as a result of such an orgasm the mind is cast into the sea of an undifferentiated state of consciousness - what the medical scientists call the "sudden temporary nervous collapse and transient brain inhibition." Indeed, Robert Heath, a neurologist at the Tulane Medical School found that the experience of orgasm corresponds with a massive electrical discharge in the septal region of the limbic system, the brain's emotional center, located in the right or "primitive" part of the mind. It is no wonder boundaries dissolve, out of which arises the transcendent energy of love - "to be carried the two of us together, far, far from this world." 5 The physiological act of sex and orgasm not only greatly enhances the prospects, but also fires up further excitement. "Repeatedly induced states of orgasmic collapse can produce, and have been used to produce, states of deep trance." 6 This is precisely the sexual purpose of an orgy as religious rite, and, in part, what the Greek God APOLLO fed CYPARISSUS in the wilds. The orgia, from which our word orgy is derived, of THE MYSTERY RELIGIONS of DIONYSOS and his homosexual SATYRS, were (in addition to the magic mushrooms and other psychoactive potions) rituals of this kind. Similarly, in the tantrism of the east, mantras are repeated over and over again as an inducement, part of a ritual focusing of the mind using the quality of sound and breath work, combined with sexuality, to produce a euphoric and often intensely psychoactive state, a response of a sort comparable to religious experience, or what is perhaps more rightly religious experience itself - a unitary experience of consciousness carried in the realms of ecstasy. If the desire of ZEUS for GANYMEDE is a supernatural force, then the ecstatic state of sexual union is one in which man rises, like GANYMEDE, to the supernatural level in which he is possessed by the god and mingles with the divine. In its earlier unwritten form such myth had once been folk-poetry, part of an oral tradition of transmitting knowledge, which itself contained a far-off echo of the same beliefs carried much further back in time. Herbert Spencer, writing in 1876, discusses these older roots as a theory of the origin of all religion, if not all of humankind. Spencer sums up his conclusion in these words: "Behind the supernatural being of this order, as behind supernatural beings of all other orders, we thus find that there has in every case been a human personality." Using the phrase ancestor worship in its broadest sense he concluded that "ancestor-worship is the root of every religion." Writing in 45 B.C., CICERO, the Roman statesman, philosopher, and lover of Emperor AUGUSTUS, wrote in his On the Nature of the Gods that the deities of his time were, among other things, the spirits of departed benefactors. That was but a revival of the theory of Euhemeros who, at the end of the fourth century B.C., said, "the gods were famous men of old, forgotten today." 8 How far back do you go? The Celts were a tribe of nomadic hunters mixed and blended on the one hand from Cro-Magnon European and other pre-historic North African and southeast Asian peoples, with Eskimos on the other - a veritable melting pot. They roamed the broad northern grasslands of Europe and Asia for some 200,000 years until they landed to set up more permanent camp throughout Central Europe and the British Isles. "Polygamous, patriarchal, proud of their genealogies, tent dwellers, filthy, and tough," they were part of the primitive forbearers of white Anglo-Saxons today. Tuatha De Danann was the Irish name for this mother of all the gods, and she is known in many forms. She is Anu, a goddess of plenty, yet also a destroyer of illusions - such as those illusions Einstein described when addressing space, time, and matter. As Brigit, similar to the Greek MUSES, she was the goddess of knowledge, poetry, and the arts. And she had two sisters of the same name, too, connected with healing and shamanic powers. With these two, she came to be known as one of the Mothers, the three goddesses of Fate, and, in the Celtic neck of the woods, the original nature people who worshipped these Mothers became the ephemeral and legendary FAIRIES. The original word for the FAIRIES was "fay," a common euphemism for effeminate or gay. It is derived from the Latin "fata", the individual Fates of men personified as the supernatural power of women. "Fay" itself means both enchanted and bewitched. "Fay-erie" was used for both the state of enchantment and for an enchanted province. The FAIRIES, as part of the evolutionary scheme, mediated the realm of the "primitive" old brain to perceive the particles of nature, so to speak, and they personified it as the natural world of the feminine - thousands of years before neurologists began dissecting our minds. One of the Celtics male deities, yet another of the Horned Gods, is as old as the great goddess Mothers, and his worship reaches equally back into the mists of time. Indeed, the Old Stone Age cave painters of Europe depict this ancient horned figure in their shamanic murals: human beings adorned with animal skins and horns as part of the supernormal totemic and initiatory rites of magic. It was a hunting and vegetable gathering time. As a visual motif, it was - in part - supplanted with more fluent narratives when cattle-breeding and agriculture began. In part, that is, because many of the cave paintings also show pictures of nude men with erections dancing together in groups. And still others depict hard-ons on the Horned Gods themselves, such as with CERNUNNOS for the Celts, worshipped by his male acolytes, fully aroused, too, their penises fully erect. Indeed, Celtic men "[abandoned] without a qualm the bloom of their bodies to others," rolling around on their animal skins with a male lover to either side. 11 In later times, Celtic bardes (poets) were particularly renowned for their powers. They appeared as the young gay men who gathered round and who were successors to the high-ranking pagan priests. And these gay priests, with their magical operations, were themselves often inseparable from the gender-benders who came before, the medicine-men and horned shamans, freely mixing sexuality with the supernatural in their rites. In Ireland, continuing down to the 17th century, it was common for the king or chieftain to turn to the bardes, whose duty it was, just like the Horned Gods or his Two-Spirit native brothers, to mediate the mysterious powers of life. Bo Almqvist, in his study of Old Norse magical verse, tells of some 200 such Icelandic poets from the 16th to 19th centuries, and there are references to magical powers ascribed to such poets among the pre-classical Greeks and Romans, the Arabs, the Eskimos, the Ashanti, in Scotland, among the ancient Germans, in Finland - actually everywhere you look. In the ancient Celtic traditions, or more fully, in the world of the FAIRIES, their way of life fulfilled the natural order, including the earth and moon, plants and animals, and human sexuality. They stood midway been the two worlds of the masculine and the matriarchy. Yet with newer forces of Celtic militarism came new gods who challenged the FAIRIES' traditions, gods from the world of the left brain and the patriarchal frame of mind, "one in which the 'nobler' or 'better' or 'higher' part of human-beings was increasingly identified [with] abstract, discursive reason. Feelings and passions, especially sexual passion [came to be regarded as impediments] to the best of human potentials. Puritanical in morals, authoritarian in government, distrustful of any knowledge based on the senses or feelings," 12 it gradually displaced the FAIERIES' Eden with an alienation from the feminine forces of life. Such a thing as this is hell. And so the stories go that the children of the goddess Tuatha finally withdrew from sight to live in a beautiful eternal place. "Filled with gold and ablaze with the light of glittering gems," it was called the Land of the Ever Young. The very real people and their abilities to perceive all of the reality to be found in the physical world around them were transformed into the magical powers of the ephemeral nymphs and spirit creatures, the genii loci of many lands. As such, the legends of the FAIRIES parallel the evolution of the human mind. That is, the "Seven FAIRIES" of folklore, corresponding also with the seven Lipiki of Hindu esoteric thought, represent each plane of human consciousness: sensation, emotion, reflective intelligence, intuition, spirituality, will, and intimations of the divine - all characteristics of the older, more "primitive" right brain overridden by the left-brained, patriarchal tide. Though long hidden from sight, however, FAIRIES can still be found. They fill an intermediate space between man and heaven, the left-brain and the right. Appropriately enough, FAIRIES hate the greedy and the miserly above all else and are especially friendly towards lovers. They look after the plants, too, and fertilize the flowers, just like butterflies or gay florists do today. As the legends continued to evolve, the FAIRIES, like their kin, the Elves, came to also be known as "the children of Eve," the offspring of the union of Eve and Adam, the biblical Original Man. Thus, too, we find parallels to another mythology in which they are described as "children of the earth." Just as here they were the Children of Tuatha, in other parts they were the Children of Gaia, including those men of the people for whom the feminine principle remained great. Put simply, Gaia is the root from which we derive the word gay. And like the FAIRIES, the Great Mother Gaia's children possessed the remembrance of the paradisiacal higher state. Our present day moniker of "gay" is in this way traced far back into the fog, and it is a distinct name well chosen for a unique branch of humankind. The human beings who were the Children of Gaiety were very much transformed over time, into, for example, the one-eyed Cyclops or the enormous half-man, half-snake Typhon. Yet they are quite traceable, and they are very much a human lot. On the Island of Crete, there lived the CURETES or CUROS, in later times called the KUROI, and they were the mystical performers of a ritual dance in worship of a young vegetation god. Whereas today we might head off to some nighttime retreat, a coffeehouse or a disco, hoping to get lucky or just to dance the night away, the KUROI would head to the caves.
Though their outward times and purposes were quite different, the impulse was mostly still the same. Known by the "dark stories of male fertility," to quote a homophobic historian, the function of their gay dance was to bring about a transformation, "an [ecstatic] realization that divinity inheres in, as well as transcends, every particle of the universe and all its beings." The movement of the Horned Gods and these worshippers follows the paths taken by the men associated with the homosexuality of prehistoric times, persisting in each culture from Portugal on the Atlantic through Europe, Arabia, the Near East, India, and Asia, down to include parts of North Africa, and into the Western Hemisphere. The island cultures of the Mediterranean were founded by the descendents of the Stone Age people who had inhabited the hills of Turkey long before 8000 B.C., the descendents of Homo erectus which evoved from the African cradle. Around 4500 B.C. these Stonagers began migrating to the islands, and over the next 1,000 years, also into Italy and Greece. Their sphere thus included Southern Europe, the Mediterranean Islands, and North Africa, a unified tribe with the most ancient of religions, a worship which continued to carry the imprint of the much older focus on the Great Mother and the homosexual cults of the Horned Gods. The entire tribal sphere, however - Italy, Greece, Thera, Crete, and other Mediterranean Islands - was reduced in status and power when the patriarchal revolution began. A thousand years of invasion and conquests, emanating from from Northern Europe, began the fusion of the old goddess religions with the gods of the north, resulting in the earliest of the Grecian folk tales. They were finally committed to writing with the Homeric Hymn Iliad around 850 B.C. and one hundred years after that, the Odyssey. Homer's source material of folk stories was thus already ancient when the conquerors arrived, and it was another 800 years before he put his pen to parchment, so to speak. By 600 B.C. the patriarchal revolution was a fait accompli, and the old folklore was scrambled. Though there are various versions, the founding stories go something like this: The Great Mother Goddess of all, Gaia, mated with the Lord of the Heavens, Uranus, to beget the TITANS, or "children of the earth." A slightly different version tells us that when Gaia's labor began in giving birth to the TITANS, she pressed on the ground with her hands and from each fingertip, spirits or divinities grew. Herein we find Carl Jung's reference to the Original Man explained. That is, the old folk tales of the pre-Greeks, like those stories of the native Cree's Trickster god, or even the FAIRIES, carry an even deeper collective or unconscious memory of the evolution of the human species itself. Over a thousand years later, the Christians would "borrow" this already borrowed Greek version of humanity springing from the earth in their Original Man, Adam made from clay. Out of this mythological omelet, many historians see the Titan children of Gaia and Uranus as the original inhabitants who possessed the land long before the arrival of any Greek tribes. The successions in the tellings indicate the two waves of conquerors imposing their beliefs on the original ancient people, the struggles of the myths reflecting the real struggles between the worshippers of different gods. The original inhabitants, known as the TITANS, were, in the form of "ancestor worship," embodied in ancient folk lore and considered the old gods of the land, displaced by ZEUS, the new Greek name for the king of all the heavens bearing his trademark thunderbolt. As the islanders were conquered, the human dancing KUROI were similarly transformed into deities, first associated with the gay god APOLLO, then the effeminate DIONYSOS, and finally as the attendants at the birth of ZEUS himself. Indeed, ZEUS came to be known as the
"Greatest of the KUROI," and from these beginnings came the Cults of ZEUS in which the worshippers, like the KUROI, came to feel themselves one with the cosmos as if struck by a thunderbolt. Yet before the coming of the patriarchal invaders, the homosexual KUROI were already spread far and wide. Originally from Asia Minor, roughly around where Syria or Lebanon and parts of old Turkey are located today, they were carried on the trade routes between Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Herodotus writes of a cultic sect long ago called the KABIRI, which means "great gods." The Kabiri were later known as the TYRSENOI, underlying the myth of Jason as the very real, flesh and blood historical people waiting on the shores to greet the traveling Argonauts. Herodotus states the Kabiri originated in Pelasgian Southern Italy and Greece, sometime around 3500 B.C. However, with their arrival from Asia Minor, via an island in the Mediterranean called Samothrace, they are actually traced further back through their religious ideas, rites, letters, arts, and language to the old trade routes, and more of a Semitic or Egyptian origin where they are mentioned as powerful magicians, spoken of as the sons of Vulcan, the volcano god. Connected with the worship of Vulcan, the KABIRI were sometimes portrayed as dwarfs with a hammer, short aprons, and a radiated head, like a halo or a visible kirlean aura of electromagnetic particles. As vulcans with hammers, the KABIRI are thus dated from the earliest days of metallurgy and fire, placing them at the dawn of the Bronze Age, c. 4500 B.C. During this time, the blacksmith was considered a magician, and the transformation into a bird in flight was but another of their callings. Candidates for initiation into the KABIRI were crowned with a garland of olive and wore a purple band round their loins. The dancing was then begun. In fact, homosexuality was part of the ritual, what the historians in their scholarly dungeons called their "most immoral tendencies." Homophobic editorializing aside, the general idea was to evoke a passage beyond earth to a higher life. That is, in their mystical dances, continued leaping into the air achieves a shamanic state of trance, a transfer of consciousness analogous to the transformation of the magician into a bird whereby the apprentice masters his powers to join a gay brotherhood "who, by nature, are superior to other men." These first shamans became the itinerant blacksmiths, who in later mythic lore appeared as dangerous wizards producing "immortal thunderbolt matter" made from crude rock. Miracle of miracles, it was "analogous to that of spiritual, whereby the individual learns to identify himself with his own immortal part." The KABIRI were also the protectors of culture, such as dance and poetry, and theyafterwards worshipped in the mysteries of the Twin gay deities of CASTOR AND POLLUX, originating in ancient Sparta, where they were otherwise called the TYNDARIDAE, merged with a "society of men" to worship the Anatolian Great Goddess. At their center was found the mythological Twin DIOSCOURI, the sacred ones, corresponding again to great gods. Wearing the haloed star of the DIOSCOURI, the nomadic KABIRI smiths also furnish the key to the wanderings recounted in VIRGIL's Aeneas. Here we meet again another set of Twins, in the form of Romulus and Remus, and what have been called by yet other horrified researchers as their "deviant Etruscan traditions." DIOSCOURI, which comes from quori in Etruscan, is equal to kouri in Greek, or "youths" in English, and are thus the dios kouroi, or ecstatic "sons of God" or "sons of Zeus," as found elsewhere in ancient Crete. Gaiety gets around. As old and powerful shamans, the KABIRI were later turned into legendary figures or gods, originally only two in number. The older of the KABIRI was identified with the Horned God, DIONYSOS, and the younger with the Horned God PAN's father, the Greek Trickster HERMES. Their cult was early on merged with those of Demeter and Ceres resulting in two sets of THE MYSTERY RELIGIONS. The early Greek geographer, Strabo, identifies the KABIRI as the hierophant priests, often transvestites presiding over the mysteries as ministers of the goddess Hecate. And as these "showers of sacred things" they were also the cross-dressing MEGABYZOS of the goddess Artemis at Ephesos, and, elsewhere, in service of the goddess Aphrodite/Astarte. As transvestite priests they were the most sacred of the cult of the BEE KINGS, too, and on the island of Paros, they were the ORGEONES - come from another "society of men" devoted to the goddess Demeter. Actually, everywhere you look, it seems, they're dancing in their dresses. So we thus find The Children’s custom of dressing "like a woman," from which the later Christian priests adopted their heavenly skirts. And with the ancient KABIRI statue of a god called Cabeiros, attended by a boy cupbearer, there is also the pre-Greek predecessor to the same-sex lovers of ZEUS and GANYMEDE. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, had it right when he wrote that the gay psyche preserves within itself the archetype of the Original Man, for here, on a separate vase, just as found in Lemnos, in front of the god Cabeiros and his same-sex lover is also shown a small figure, Pratolao, which translates to mean just that - the first or Original Man. It is perhaps The Children that came to be called the DAKTYLS who may even predate the KUROI of ancient Crete, for they are thought to have introduced fire to the islands of Atlantis. Indeed, they originated in the same old prehistoric haunts of central Turkey, which was later called Phrygia, where the great Hellenic-era gay poet PINDAR places the KUROI in Theseus, site of the cross-dressing MEGABYZOS, and where the DAKTYLS discovered minerals, too. In all likelihood, the three - Kuroi, Megabyzos and Daktyls - are one and the same, bearing different names from differing times. The DAKTYLS, being the Greek word for "fingers," are the humans depicted as spirits born from Gaia pressing her fingers into the ground. They are thus thought to be the real people who sprang from the earth, placing the folkloric memories of the DAKTYLS, like the KABIRI representation of Original Man, deep into the evolutionary past. It is said that the first wise men descended from the DAKTYLS. Were they the first to introduce language back in 500,000 B.C.? Homo sapien, recall, does mean "wise or intelligent man." We'll probably never know, but they did invent the notes of the musical scale and introduced musical instruments into the Pelasgian region. As soothsayers, sorcerers, and conjurers their magical practices and mysteries traveled to Italy and Greece. The CORYBANTES also hailed from Phrygia around the time the Great Mother Goddess and mother of the TITANS was called by her Asian name, Cybele. She was worshipped in their cult of ATTIS. CORYBANTES literally means "whirlers," from which the later ecstatic Whirling Dervish sect of Mohammedan priests evolved. Dwelling in ceremonial caves, these mystics began with chanting and prayers, escalating to a wild dance, an ecstatic frenzy of jubilation and song as they ushered in a spiritual rebirth. The CORYBANTES had healing powers, too - magical cures of mental disorders - and so they are yet another example of the original prehistoric miracle workers, only later thought of as gods. Indeed, they came to be conceived as immortal beings, "[presiding] over the universe, [directing] the sky and the world like a good pilot steering the perfectly prepared ship in which nothing is missing." Whatever they were called and wherever they were found, The Children of Gaiety all shared the same attributes - a connection with the feminine power, the mother of the gods; a working of the magical arts and warding off of harm, all dancing down the forces of nature in the midst of a great din. In fact, the ancient writers often used their names as a synonym for the "magician." Plutrarch says they were the astronomers and astrologers of Chaldea around 3200 B.C. According to Herodotus, they surfaced some 2,000 years after that as an effeminate priesthood in what is now southern Russia and present-day Ukraine. They were called the ENAREE, "endowed by the goddess Venus with the gift of prophecy." 18 Five hundred years on, they were holy priests telling the future, still dressing like women as they worshipped the mother earth Nerthus in the cult of the ALCI, the German version of the gay Twins CASTOR AND POLLUX. The variations of the cults that evolved are infinite and can be found beneath upwards of thirty or more of the FOUNDING MYTHS OF HOMOSEXUALITY in the Greek pantheon alone. Be they CURETES or KUROI, they became the later masked SATYRS and SILENI or THYIADES in the thesauri rites of the Horned Gods. Their emphasis on music and dancing, such as with the BACCHI and TITYRI, was dotted throughout the land. They were the TELCHINES of Rhodes, dancing with musical flutes to rouse a religious fever. They can also be found transformed into the wild young goat man, PAN, frolicking through the glades. The Children who grouped around the grove of the androgynous Etruscan god VOLTUMNA were later the Etrurian LARES and the original Roman PENATES. As the GALLI priests with (according to another tight-assed academic) their "revolting sensual rites [and] the hermaphroditic element," their drums thundered and cymbals clashed, spreading magic among the onlookers lining the flower-strewn streets. JULIUS CAESAR identified them in 52 B.C. as the young men gathered about the Druid priesthood where they worshipped the Celtic GIS or the "good god" Gallic CERNUNNOS. The most famous of the Druids became the legendary wizard MERLIN, himself said to be "a demon child" and born of the FAIRIES. In even later times they emerged as the minstrels and bards, and, still further on, as SHAKESPEARE's legendary PUCK. The evidence everywhere present is of an ancient continuity derived from Minoan Atlantis, spread from the prehistoric hills of Turkey, and before that, along the trail of the Horned Gods. Wherever they landed, in the early Celtic or Greek, or in the later Roman and Germanic zones, they were homosexual in their passions, men who knew the masculine, while at the same time maintained the feminine. In India, as in the European mysteries, the descendents of The Children worshipped the Mother Goddess. The HIJRA sect dressed like women, too, as did the PARDHI and the SAKHIBHAVAS. They were all known as sacred, invoking "an injunction of their individual deity," the feminine powers of nature or an androgynous third-gendered god. The DO’NG BONG shaman, dressing in drag in the Vietnamese countryside, ministered the pre-Buddhist folk religions. The kalimantan and sea dyaks on North Borneo and the manang bali on South Borneo, all kept alive the ancient call of sorcery and healing, wearing skirts in rite. The manang bali, like their native Two-Spirit brothers, were initiated by supernatural instruction conveyed in dreams and were the most highly regarded shamans. Whether they were the Burmese boy-priests of the temples, as also found in Ceylon, Malaysia, Japan, and among the mainland Chinese Buddhist monks, they were the educators and keepers of the sacred flame of "neitherness." The Fujian Province of old China worshipped a patron rabbit god of homosexuality similar to the North American trickster, HARE, and they maintained organized cult activities in the service of same-sex religion. Japanese mythology suggests that the great cultural hero Kobo Daishi, founder of the Singon sect of Buddhism, was himself a queer. And those old cave people who stayed behind during the migrations across the Bering Straight kept alive the Two-Spirit traditions throughout much of the rest of northeast Asia, too. The ancient folk religions of Korea, like those of their Siberian brothers, maintained the psycho-mythological heritage embodied in their androgynous hwarang shamans, revered for their prescience and healing powers. In the Himalayas of Nepal, among the Nomads of the Persian Steppes, and the Tartar Hordes of Timour Khan, they were, as everywhere, regarded as an integral part of life. For The Children who stayed closer to the cradle - the African origin of humankind - they were also by all accounts found. In Angola, all the medicine people were gay transvestites, initiated into the magical world through a femininization of the masculine. Among the Angolan Kwayama, Ovimbundu, and Kimbundu tribes, they were the healers and the seers. In Kenya, the mugawe were the religious leaders. Among the Lango tribes of Uganda and the Konso of Ethiopia, they practiced magic medicine in their skirts. In Northeast Africa, gay shamans and cross-dressing medicine people were recognized in the Otoro, Moro, Nyima, Tira, Korong, and the Mesakin tribes, dancing to the sounds of chanting and drumming to be spirited off to the netherworld in an ecstatic shamanic trance. In Morocco they were the sahacat, the sacred fortunetellers. In West Africa, they played a role in the Fanti's of Ghana and the Senegalese Wolof's religious rites and traditions. In central Africa, the Basangye's third gender was called the kitesha. Found in the Congo, they gloried in the title of "Grandmother," working as sorcerers and healers, and among the Ba-kongo villagers they claimed as their own the moon. The Thonga of Rhodesia, like their neighbors the South African Ambo people, had their third gendered omasenge. Among the Zulus, as in Zanzibar, and off the southern most continental tip, too, where the tsecats of Madagascar practiced, they were all what we now call "gay," all sanctified people of an intuitive, right-brain nature, drawn down to earth in the glory and service of their two-sexed androgynous being. The Children were endowed with the "real knowledge of things," and as that great adventurer and explorer RICHARD BURTON noted in his journals, "these people, functioning in connection with the magico-religious life, existed all over the world." As FAIRIES rolling amidst the flowers, or doing the Hawaiian's bump and grind; as ancient Chinese priests and practitioners of a divine ficky in the monasteries of the hills; as the mystical dancing sorcerers and shamans or showers of sacred things, or as their Two-Spirit native brothers dreaming down the moon, they had more in common with your everyday you and me than the academicians would have you think. Dancing in the light of the sun and stars and the galaxies far beyond, their's was a magical unity bridging the divide to live at once here and there and everywhere to influence the entire human race. End FOOTNOTES: Full Citations Sex, Gods And Gay People Underlying Myths
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