I'm a published author writing here on a range of controversial themes some of which I still can't easily get to talk about publicly or have published. I'm currently living in rural S.E.Queensland, a beautiful and sub-tropical part of Australia. This blog continues with some of the issues dealt with on and off since '08 in Rollan's Censored Issues Blog.
The recent decision of the Church of England and its archbishop to accept blessings on gay unions (not celebrate gay marriages as such) has sparked yet another major controversy. It is one that has prompted calls for a split from Canterbury by some third world congregations who feel scripture and tradition are being radically denied.
Amid all this a writer, political broadcaster and would-be priest (but refused orders for his views), Calvin Robinson, delivered an impassioned speech to the Oxford Union against any Christian acceptance of gay marriage ever. The effect has left many reeling for the implications. His statements have rendered him almost overnight a poster boy for conservative Christianity with its associated frank hostility to gay claims and identity. The first and special shock talk can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymbTb2HS5Rc&t=14s
TO BE FAIR
To be fair, Calvin R’s argument is well presented and even comes across as courageously sincere. Within its terms it’s reasonable enough. It is, or can seem, “prophetic” in that it reminds churches and gays that Christianity is a way of the cross and repentance, not compromise and indulgence. Besides which, it is insisted the whole weight of tradition, which should count for something, has always condemned “homosexuality”…. So if you want preachers, reformers, and prophets functioning in the modern secular arena, what more could you ask for than this bearer of the Word? Some have called the novel outburst “perfect”. But it isn’t really.
TO BE CRITICAL
For a start I would suggest what is needed is some real historical and contemporary understanding of what the gay issue actually has been and is. There have been too many suicides, breakdowns and generally spoiled and confused lives, bullying and discrimination for anyone to praise “tradition” at all costs. Historically, “tradition” has let saints like Bernadino of Siena have gays burned at the stake and African ecclesiastical bullies call for the execution of gays.
If Christianity is about denial it is also about healing, the two principles need to be in balance and they haven’t been. If gays should repent, then so should the church, but that’s not part of Calvin R’s call. He might even think of me as woke here but I’m not.
For such as Calvin R, tradition gets defended at all costs because conservatives believe “God’s Word” – a term they apply more to the Bible than as, originally, to Jesus as himself God’s Logos – cannot be questioned. But within reason it can if things are not working out. Even under Moses, in Numbers 27 the daughters of Zelophehad petition for a more just ruling for women’s inheritance and have it conceded. The church has been reinterpreting scripture ever since the Council of Jerusalem in the first century was concerned with circumcision and kosher food.
Same sex issues exist like a hidden stream in the bible as witness David and Jonathan having a berith (covenant, can read marriage) between them, while the prophet Jeremiah for a variety of reasons betrays a distinctly gay personality and eros (as indicated in a poem on this site).Christianity itself has its own traditions like the one that attaches significance to a close relation of Jesus with John and in medieval times some Eastern churches had little understood ceremonies for the union of brethren.
For conservatives “tradition” as regards “homosexuality” scarcely sees beyond some controversially extreme words of St Paul in especially Romans 1 – as often translated and read it could be thought he blames the same sex attracted for most of the evil in the world! Not only should it be borne in mind that even the apostle spoke of “seeing through a glass darkly” in some areas; but it’s possible believers may risk doing the same on the gay theme. At any rate, to judge from some earliest Christian writing, which would have known the apostle’s take on the Roman decadence, what is especially forbidden to believers and condemned is paedophilia, sex with boys.
It is a confusion and rather insulting to maintain with Calvin R that all the church is now blessing is “sacred sodomy”. It cannot be sufficiently stressed that gay in many cases describes a whole character and worldview that is present whether intercourse is practised or not (and the often cited abomination verse of Leviticus is first and foremost about temple prostitution such as King Josiah’s reforms banned from Jerusalem). This is why across history so many creative, original people have been gay. Their difference and special contributions stand to be suppressed (cancelled out) by the kind of religious systems that want no mention of a difference factor and that accordingly imagines to speak in terms of “gay Christian” is only to advertise failed faith and cure, a mark of shame!
TO BE MORE POSITIVE
Where I most agree with Calvin R’s position is his critical position relative to trendy woke and the related surrender of Christian customs and theology to Queer with its siren calls to “inclusion” and “equality”. These don’t correspond to Christian and spiritual ideas in those areas, not least marriage. It is largely the equality fetish that has demanded marriage as opposed to the simple legal union that even the current Pope has recommended. A union would better serve a species of gay vocation to difference while leaving procreation to the marriage union always religiously associated with it.
Queer is in effect hard left materialistic and atheistic in inspiration. It lacks acknowledgment of an essential self or soul that could express a certain character such as gay; one’s being is a rather community related experiment with many or any possible roles promiscuously realized.
Personally, as in my gaythoughts blog (which should perhaps have been called gaytheothoughts!), I have always avoided identity with Queer. And I have arguably paid for that ever since two decades ago a critic suggested I was alarmist about Queer. I certainly rightly detected its growing power and potential to mislead. And it is a fact that despite obtaining the first doctorate in gay spiritualities from any religious studies dept and having the doctorate published and even praised by an associate of the then Archbishop of Canterbury as probably the best writing on gay theology, I have gone almost wholly unsupported by those persons in the LGBTQI community, not so much as graced with a reply, from leading voices in the religious push to gay/queer acceptance.
By way of excuse for the degree of neglect one could speculate some of my writings and statements had been examined and dismissed as too spiritual and/or “occult” to be considered by academics. So here, in parenthesis, I shall cover a point that can well be stated and clarified, and which I believe to be crucial to resolving the gay and difference problem, at least in religion.
THE SECRET CALVIN ROBINSON DOESN’T KNOW AND CONSERVATIVES IGNORE
It has been the likes of Jewish Christians such as the late Bishop Hugh Montefiore and Canon Paul Oestreicher who have speculated that to moderns Jesus could well seem like a type of gay person. My contribution to that line of speculation is to suggest that a) as regards incarnation this makes more theological sense than might be imagined and b) that the matter is even provable.
If you maintain with St Paul that Jesus is representative humanity (God’s Logos and male) but also God’s Sophia (Wisdom who is female) ideally you need a formula like that of the earliest German Gay Liberationists, namely a female soul in a male body and vice-versa for lesbians. You also need this kind of understanding to cover other details in the gospels I needn’t outline here like Jesus’ curious (incorrectly translated) reference to the fool in the section of the Sermon on the Mount on anger harbouring violence (Matt 5 :22).
Sufficient to say when Jesus speaks of those who are eunuchs from their mother’s wombs, he does so at a time when no precise equivalent of the modern “homosexual” existed. The eunuch word could be more lightly and widely used than for just castrate or exalted manservant, it needn’t even automatically signify celibate, in comedy it might hint at gay, but it would somehow signify some degree of out of the family and common way, difference. We should assume Jesus knew and understood that any gay/different condition could be inborn and lasting, not temporary and curable (although of course there will always be people who will change or appear to, another subject beyond present scope).
The mentioned theological perspective has its own consistency and clarity that doesn’t have to be “proved”. However, in this strange case proof is available. It is simply a matter of how open minded a person is prepared to be about examining and acknowledging the evidence.
I have long maintained that in development of the thesis of notable astronomers Ferrari D’Occhieppo and David Hughes about the Bethlehem Star, it is possible to obtain a still working pattern for Christ’s birth and life. And applying the latest kind of astrology which can employ such as name, place and concept asteroids, one can make the heavens speak with unprecedented accuracy. Go to this article, (https://rollanmccleary.wordpress.com/2022/12/07/new-proofs-around-bethlehem-star-theory/ ) which says nothing at all about sexuality, and attempt to disprove its incredible, statistical probability-defying data which has caught and placed Jesus clearly as a photo.
EASY DISMISSALS AND MISUNDERSTANDINGS
If you can accept the truly astonishing findings it is neither quite possible nor reasonable to discount all the other data one can add and which would point to Jesus being (on the human side) like some Renaissance genius figure such as Leonardo or Michelangelo who were in essence gay. For Jesus the asteroid Saris ( Heb. Eunuch) is even conjunct Mercury, the “ruler” of his chart pattern and his image. When Jesus declared some are born eunuchs from the womb he knew what he was talking about and arguably not least about himself. When Jesus spoke of contempt and anger against gays he also knew what he was talking about. The skies even supply us such details as a racah asteroid in stress aspect to the Part of Sexuality to help fill out a picture (something witnessed or suffered?) in a work as precious in its way as dealing with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In over thirty years I have never gone out of my way to promote any gay Jesus theories. I have never profited from it, nor out of respect for the subject, do I go with any begging bowl to those who should be supportive. There is anyway little point in pressing the claims. I early learned either that the subject mostly engages disinterest or airy dismissal (neither the gay world nor publishing have been interested) and media is such a landmines-ridden field in treatment of complex subjects, by now I avoid it. Every now and then something or someone crops up as in the case of Calvin Robinson who unwittingly renders apparent how far from a satisfactory resolution for the gay issue the churches remain. And not least because they will not perceive the whole hidden stream that runs through their own bible and traditions.
Just such pointers have nonetheless been a focus of at least some of the articles across recent years on this site…..which I think can at this point be suitably retired from the gay fray. Let true seekers seek and find!
[This article was originally issued on McCleary’s Alternatives as Trans, Truth and Peterson Issues]
Times have changed and quickly. Back in 2019 when gay identified political commentator Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds was published, it raised no major controversy with the observation that, left to time and themselves, eighty percent of trans people turn out to be homosexuals.
Recently indicating similar but with the addition that doctors who operated on vulnerable young people were criminals, had Jordan Peterson, a Canadian clinical psychologist and prominent public figure, banned from Twitter. Peterson is however not banned but commended on The Daily Wire which has been promoting YouTube’s Matt Walsh of the Matt Walsh Show, Walsh is star and director of the at once hilarious and sobering What is a Woman? docu film hit. This trans thinking critical film is sobering because of the implications for the kind of truth and freedom issues that Peterson and others are increasingly confronted with in a democratic society. (In Norway a feminist is even under threat of three years jail for insisting that based on biological facts men cannot truly be lesbians or become mothers and so on).
FORGETTING THE ORIGINS
Politics apart, and there’s a lot of politics around trans issues, there is a special irony in the new and trendy public agnosticism or just silence the film reveals around what constitutes such traditional fundamentals as male and female. It accompanies growing acceptance of the notion that you are whatever gender you feel you are with rights to be addressed as such without challenge.
The LGBTQI leadership which strongly backs trans aims and values has all but forgotten its gay origins and that history’s possible lessons. It does so in favour of Frankfurt School inspired critical queer theory politically inclined to neo-Marxist aims of social destabilization and domination through culturally and sexually rather than economically oppressed classes.
KARL ULRICHS
The origins of Gay Liberation lay in nineteenth century Germany and the work of a pastor’s son, Karl Ulrichs (1825-1896). Ulrichs had a specific formula to describe homosexuals and homosexuality, anima muliebris in corpore inclusa – a woman’s soul in a man’s body – a lesbian would reverse the formula. The perspective had been derived from medieval Jewish mysticism, not any post Enlightenment materialistic philosophies. Over time Ulrichs recognized and tried to define the types of gay, but all were essentially offspring of the one original formula.
The similarity of Ulrich’s formula to statements of gender dysphoria today are obvious, but the modern development is by comparison literalist and “fundamentalist”. Whereas the first ‘homosexuals” reckoned unapologetically to integrate and live with their difference, the modern trans wants to give themselves a new body and justification of identity based on a more complete subjectivity.
The first homosexuals were simply different, exceptions to the social norm. They soon came to be called Urnings or Uranians because it had soon become apparent via German astrology, (a practice more respectable and sophisticated than some versions elsewhere ), that gays appeared to be more related than most to the newest found planet.
The first modern homosexuals inhabited a world in which – like ours until recently – it was assumed that, short of rare conditions like intersex, sex was what one was born with and gender was how one enacted it. They might also have assumed that claims to radical dysphoria were likely a problem more common to societies with rigid and punitive gender expectations of the “Me Tarzan You Jane” variety long prevalent in America, a country Germany never quite warmed to on the cultural plane.
NORMAL AND PERENNIAL HOMOSEXUALITY
Though a conservative thinker in many respects, in his role of clinical psychologist Peterson maintains that homosexuality and homosexuals are a regular part of the order of things. They don’t represent the contra naturam irrationality many conservatives, especially in religion, would argue was the case. Peterson’s standpoint is thus like throwing trans people a lifeline they don’t quite see or want and one that religionists would anyway not recommend whether as a truth or life saver.
I would nonetheless agree with Peterson that homosexuality is “normal”, and even as per Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae, vital to civilisation (the Renaissance was almost a gay movement). I would further maintain that “homosexuality” is not exclusively about a sexual act but a whole mindset, a temperament and imagination with its own fund of symbols and archetypes. This is not, besides, any irreligious or anti-religious position and I don’t refer to the often cited David and Jonathan attachment to support the statement. As indicated in especially my Apocalypse as a Gay Issue feature (see link below) there is something ignored in the book of Daniel which would indicate same sex attraction is intended and divinely used.
Practically, however, acceptance like Peterson’s counts for little if it cannot be based today on something objective beyond the radical levels of subjectivity and relativity to which trans theory now draws people and even compels them to go. (Peterson’s Canada especially has become punitive to the point of hefty fine and even job loss for those who explicitly or implicitly question trans values by not addressing an individual by their chosen gender. This can be difficult, and for some a matter touching conscience if – as in the English case of a six foot bearded man requiring his doctor to address him as a woman – an individual appears notably unlike their claimed gender).
The question I would ask is: are there any grounds to assume like Murray and Peterson that many trans persons could well be considered unrealized gays? The question more broadly is, was Ulrich correct, and if he was, what might that do to trendy questions like that of the film “What is a Woman?” (the book version is now refused promotion by Amazon such is big business’s woke style sensitivity to trans philosophy!).
MISSED OR DISMISSED BY PETERSON?
When he talks religion and philosophy, as he often does, it is apparent that Peterson is strongly influenced by Carl Jung. What is less clear is if he accepts the astrology to which Jung was indebted to the point he would cast horoscopes for patients (as I am aware quite a few psychiatrists now do) to encourage patients to help understand and discuss complexes they wouldn’t otherwise engage with. What Jung may have thought about astrology as regards homosexuality I don’t know, but the old Urnings theory gives indication of being true.
Objections immediately arise that even if the much derided practice of astrology was valid and Uranus did have something to say about innate character, how could the system possibly account for the reality of sexual variation, of change and bisexuality or trans? And what about different kinds of gayness from super feminine and arty to hyper-masculine bikers and leathermen and others in between?
Full summary is impossible here, but a few points are worth absorbing if one is to reply to the above objections, as is nonetheless possible.
Every planet has positive and negative potential for expression. (Contrary to some representations, astrology does not deny free will, but does limit the number of choices through which freedom can be exercised). And planets can be helpful or unhelpful through aspects and thus trines (120 degree aspect) are fortunate and squares (90 degrees) limit and frustrate. The inner planets from Mercury to Saturn are mostly material in reference, the outer planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are more spiritual. (In specifically religious contexts this trinity is, I believe, the trinity of Christianity, the Spirit, the Christ and the Creator respectively).
TYPES OF GAY
Uranus is unquestionably the planet of homosexuality which is, as Ulrichs implied, a condition of soul – or perhaps aura – the psychically inclined maintain gay identity can be seen. Without Uranus strong and highlighted the person will not be gay. It’s said the commonest gay male aspect is Uranus to moon which makes sense given the separatist tendencies of Uranus. With moon to Uranus there can be dissociation from the lunar feminine principle (yet not necessarily from the mother with whom the relation can still be close).
As to types, the Uranian gay is the most “out”, political and “eccentric” of the types of gay. The Neptunian gay is more romantic, feminine, artistic sometimes martyrized and abused, the Plutonic gay is more hyper male, the biker type….and/or the type most prone to extreme life and death type situations and projects like sex change. But Uranus is central, so that if Uranus is strong and the person is not gay, one could assume a related variation….like they could be homophobes or that gay persons dominate their life and work, or that their life and thought take some notably unusual turns.
BOUNDARIES ISSUES
But….the real dividing line, and a regular major cause of identity issues involves Neptune which is positively the planet of dreams, mysticism and compassion, negatively of lies and intoxicants. Lacking normal boundaries, with mystical Neptune under “affliction” (square, opposition and sometimes conjunction) the danger is that common boundaries are not seen or observed with the result addictive loves and bisexuality can develop. Claims to radical orientation change under gay conversion practices owe something to those under a difficult and pliable Neptune.
A classic bi case is Oscar Wilde who besides showing the common if in his case stressed moon to Uranus aspect ( Lady Wilde was a difficult woman!), owned a ghastly affliction square of Neptune to Saturn. It forms this in relation to his sectors of reputation and relationship besides.
That poster girl of trans, Caitlyn Jenner, presents a strong and complex natal picture. Could doubters and critics of her choice maintain she was really gay? That idea is not strictly possible given that like Wilde she has been married and fathered children which is more like bi than gay. She could almost have been gay given the very close trine of the sun to Uranus; but then she also has the bi capable conjunction of Mercury (thoughts, mind, ideas,) with Neptune. I should say her thoughts went often towards the beauty favoured by her Libran planets, and since there is an opportunity aspect between her Pluto (extreme transformations) and the Libran Mercury, she followed beauty’s call to a high degree.
Caitlyn is engagingly Libran fair about the whole trans subject, but finishes more poster girl for trans to society generally than the trans community itself which has been quite critical. With Saturn square Venus it is likely that both before and after the op she has not been entirely happy in relation to society or even herself.
CENTRAL FOCUS
I will not multiply examples and analysis; the aim has been merely to certify astro-analysis is possible. And because it is, instead of thinking in queer theory style of completely malleable human selves open to any and all experiences and roles, one can instead still reasonably enough think in terms of male, female and what the French have long called “le troisieme sexe”, a third sex, the latter being in practice the likely basis for any variations such as bi or trans or poly.
While all this may help bring things closer to Peterson’s homosexuality thought of in more essentialist terms, a norm of existence and a central focus in awareness, it won’t satisfy religious claims it is less positive. Is there any hope of attitudinal change and resolution here? I rather surprise myself with what I am realizing after years of leaving the subject academically alone, namely some ideas that largely dissolve the problem.
ST PAUL AND THE GAYS
Popular reading of the often cited Romans Chapter One, (helped in English by the often inaccurate King James Bible), assumes that the apostle perceived Rome as decadent (which it was, even if not in quite the way or to the degree Paul’s rhetoric might indicate). And symbolic of this evil were the burning lusts of ‘homosexuals”, a word he and the bible don’t use, but just “males” who wilfully reject the natural to become almost symbol of all evil and idolatry past and present, society’s true and original black sheep. They are guilty of “abandoning” the natural (an idea with some connection to ancient ideas of same sex desires as an excessive addition to straight sex, but without connection to claims of the born gay variety).
The legacy of this picture has been less than fortunate over time, puzzling and alienating many, and today discouraging absorption of the more memorable teachings of the rest of this epistle. But should readers be quite so confident about what the apostle said, meant and believed and if not, what did he really assert?
The apostle had not visited Rome when he penned Romans and was not familiar with Latin culture and life. Thus in Corinthians he says (1 Cor 5:1) that incest was something not even mentioned among pagans. Among the Greeks he knew perhaps not, but not among Romans. Centuries later the Roman born St Jerome could mention how half Rome turned out for the funeral of the poet Catullus (d. 54 BC) and this poet did cite and mock incest among the Roman elite.
But how much is Paul really talking of this Rome he hadn’t visited? Given certain references to a more cosmic hidden history of human fall fuelling universal idolatry (false religion), it appears Rome is seen as temporary vessel and current symbol for this ongoing fall and a pretext for mentioning it. Rome is used rather like the image of Babylon in prophecy and an epistle of Peter does refer to Rome as Babylon. It becomes apparent that in rabbinic style Paul is commenting and conflating texts touching on elements of tradition in this case as regards accounts of human declension in the apocryphal tradition of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, The Testament of Naphtali, The Wisdom of Solomon etc
This alternative fall tradition in enlarging upon both the Genesis reference to fallen angels having congress with women (Gen 6:2) and the Sodom story of men desiring angels (Gen 19), has both male and females in Sodom having congress with fallen angels. This perspective incidentally has implications for Paul’s statement in Romans that some regard as denouncing lesbianism – “even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature” (Rom 1:26). This lesbian reading is nonetheless implausible since there is nothing in the bible that forbids or condemns lesbianism in the way some claim male same sex is verboten in Leviticus (whose reference is essentially to cult prostitution). Accordingly, the apostle could just as easily be condemning heterosexual women anywhere who submit to sodomy as a form of birth control or in satisfaction of Lady Chatterley type pleasures or, more occultly, had congress with fallen angels as per apocryphal sources.
What links the story of progressive and ongoing idolatrous fall is notions of stigma and shame, which is true enough to how ancient society tended to regard at any rate the receptive partner in any same sex relation. Prisoners of war were sodomized to shame them and masters had rights to the sexual use of their slaves.
Though various non sexual sins are biblically attributed to Sodom (Ezek 16:49), there is no question any congress with fallen beings would be regarded as the most presumptuous worst; and this may well be Paul’s primary understanding of unnatural sex as it surely is in the (biblical) book of Jude with its people going after “alien flesh” (Jud 1:7). But not only this. Enoch 2 includes a vision of hell with a list of punished vices against nature, this headed by child corruption in sodomitic fashion. In short, paedophilia, is highlighted.
That this could be the elephant in the room and main target of Paul’s condemnation is suggested by how the earliest Christians must have read and understood the apostle. The earliest known catechism, the Didache, is against adultery, visiting prostitutes and boy love. The apocryphal Epistle of Barnabas is also against boy love. I am not a Greek expert but one also notes as possibly relevant what seems like a loose usage of the male arsen word. The same word for the raptured “man child” of Rev 12:5 is used for men with men of Rom 1;27.
But…say the doubters, doesn’t Paul in Corinthians (1 Cor 6:9,10) condemn “sodomites” (“homosexuals” and “effeminates” (KJV) to perdition? Given what we know about Corinth as a major centre of prostitution, it is highly likely Paul’s effeminate malachoi signifies the local cinaedi, or cross-dressing, noisy male exhibitionists, often prostitutes who worshipped the gods. Such would be the kind of male prostitutes King Josiah banned from the temple grounds (2 kgs 23:7) in line with the original Leviticus ban against sacred prostitution that some still controversially consider relevant to all and any “homosexuality”.
With this type of passive homosexuality located, it has been easy to make out that arsenokoites must be its opposite, the active homosexual or Sodomite, though the word’s range of meanings is wide. Depending upon context and usage it can signify rapist of male or female, murderer or extortionist, but always it seems something violent. Granted it could be speculated that Paul considered anything same sex in itself a violence. But that would be controversial, an example of his only “seeing through a glass darkly” ….and seeing wrongly too as when the bible’s most gay prophet, Jeremiah, (according to Jerusalem Bible translation and see link below to Jeremiah poem) in a tormented moment accuses God of raping him. Sufficient to say the clear and universal opposition to all “homosexuality” is not found in Pauline writings though with his and the KJV’s “effeminates” he may come closest to a type we might recognize today.
But now from what Paul arguably didn’t say to what Jesus arguably did, a subject so liable to attract angry dismissal or serious distortions one hesitates to treat of it.
JESUS AND THE GAYS
There have been Jewish Christians like the late Bishop Hugh Montefiore and Canon Paul Oestreicher who have speculated that humanly Jesus could have been of gay orientation. Many register that as only blasphemous, but in fairness….if Jesus is to be understood as the Logos (Word) of God (masculine) and also the Sophia or Wisdom (feminine), can that, along with belief that incarnation is truly representative of all humanity, male and female together, be quite consistent if something like the Ulrichs formula cannot be applied?
Also, some of Jesus’ less cited and explicable sayings evade meaning if a gay piece is not added to the puzzle. It makes little sense to declare calling someone racah and fool (something people do all the time) could involve everything from the Sanhedrin (a sort of Jewish Supreme Court) to the hell fires (Matt 5:21). The context of this strangeness is the Sermon on the Mount which aims to internalize the Law including as regards murder and the unchecked anger which can give rise to it. Notes to the Peshitta Bible of the eastern churches informed me that the fool word was an Aramaic slang abuse for something like “effeminate pervert” – in short the subject is about cursing someone for a faggot.
Until quite recent times the murder of gays was acceptable and privileged – “gay panic” (the horror and shame of being thought homosexual) could even excuse it at law. Jesus probably took this situation, one so sensitive in Middle Eastern cultures, to be representative of all the other racisms and prejudices easily leading to violence and damning murder. And to the extent the Leviticus ban being theoretically a capitol offence which might well justify hate and anger, by implication a tacit cancellation of the Law could be in involved.
JESUS AND THE GAY OUTLOOK
Did Jesus ever directly mention gay people? Arguably he did when referring to the eunuchs of the kingdom of heaven . Biblical and Jesus sayings are allowed more than one meaning and application. It is perfectly reasonable to hold with widespread tradition that at one level in referring to those “become” eunuchs for the kingdom Jesus signalled the desirability of celibacy in disciples while conceding the ideal wasn’t possible for everyone (Matt 19:11,12) and certainly not meaning men should castrate themselves – the church father Origen later called it a sin that he had done so, and it is in any case against Jewish law.
But as scholars like Norway’s Ragnhold Schanke have pointed out, by Jesus’ time the eunuch word was no longer confined in meaning to castrate or even celibate. It seems it could even cover for the nearest the bible and the ancient world has to the gay word as we understand it. Think of traditionally loaded expressions like “Confirmed Batchelor.” Notice that Jesus describes some of his eunuchs as being such “from their mother’s wombs”. Realistically, how many men are castrate in the womb?! In every likelihood “born gay” is the meaning. But if so, Jesus was being highly original since in the ancient world anything same-sex related tended to be regarded like St Paul’s unnatural persons as pursuing excess or having a mental add-on, not a fated disposition.
Whether gay or straight, Jesus’ eunuch is someone (like himself) not in the family way and most essentially they are “outsider”/”different” which the Uranian gay person almost spontaneously and automatically is. The challenge for the heterosexual is for themselves to become more outsider/different for the kingdom of heaven. Christianity could even be called a gay spirituality of sorts, something realized through separation from “this world”. And notice that “the kingdom of heaven” is the kingdom of ouranos, the Greek word for heaven and name of the planet that most relates to any gay theme.
TRUTH NOT QUEER BUT ESSENTIAL
Despite all the claims that Jesus said nothing about homosexuality,in fact not even the above exhausts all that can be said about Jesus, gays and gay issues from the gospels. It merely demonstrates that such can be found. The reality is that one is dealing with a whole hidden stream of reference within the bible…. which is almost to be expected if as Peterson has it homosexuality is a human norm of existence.
Research and detective work through the scriptures and the lives and writings of saints and visionaries have been mainly the province of queer scholars. Some of their findings when not sensation seeking are original, insightful and needed. But however queer in the popular sense of odd and surprising they may be, they are not necessarily queer in the political sense.
If I have ever engaged inquiries along hermeneutic of suspicion queer lines (such as in my Gay Reading Pilgrim’s Progress article), I have only done so under precisely the banner of the more essentialist gay word. It’s an inconvenience since it invites dismissal given academe is currently so sold on queer, but I believe anyone of religious affiliation can hardly do otherwise.
Gayness is at core a spiritual condition of sorts so that surrender of its awareness to a drifting agnosticism of the self, one that moreover serves a destabilizing identity politics can be dangerous for gays and others, not least trans people whom as individuals one can only wish the best. But truth and the quest for it is always the basis of freedom and when it can be said like one academic interviewed in What is a Woman?, that talk of truth is “condescending”, alarm bells ring for almost everything the West, Christianity and science stand for.
I will include here links to a few of my articles related to some issues touched on in this feature
When I came across the date the homosexuality word was first used (14th April 1851 in a submission to the Prussian government), I expected it could be revelatory. It duly was so in its very unusual pattern which can be sufficiently characterized by just three main features
1) Sun and Saturn closely conjunct at the late middle of Aries 23.56 /23.59
2) Pluto and Uranus very closely conjunct at the very end of Aries 29.11 /29.54
3) Mercury, words, news, communication in positive aspect to Neptune 7Taurus18/ 8 Pisces 22
Prior to 1851 the “homosexual” was effectively an active or passive sodomite The reason for that is summarized and symbolized by Aries, chief sign of the conventionally masculine, the patriarch, the warrior, the extravert, the action man and raw sex. In the age of Aries, (the two millennia BC and even after it), prisoners of war were sodomized to humiliate them (i.e.by womanizing them) and the passive homosexual, often a prostitute, was particularly despised.
Homosexuality was associated with status, active and passive roles, the active sodomite often excused if not approved (In Rome servants could be sexually used by masters as a matter of course). Despite Greece and the Symposium, relationship and feeling were rarely considered, and even in Greece, age and status governed the rules of association.
So Aries is the problem, the tradition, the law represented by a Sun (the will and identity) conjunct a strict, limiting and often disapproving Saturn in the sign.
But at the very end of Aries, super-transformative Pluto and individualistic, freedom-loving Uranus are close to moving into the more introverted and philosophical-by-nature Taurus. (And in nineteenth century Germany gays would be called Uranians – suitably enough since Uranus is so emphasized in the birth patterns of the gay orientated).
Within Taurus stands Mercury, the sign of languages and words, and in positive, opportunity sextile aspect to Neptune, sign of the unconscious, suffering, compassion and romance. This Neptune is in its natural sign, Pisces, sign of the era between Aries and Aquarius. Since Neptune also has a variety of associations with Christ and Christianity, the aspect is like a promise towards a new note struck in religion, towards church debates on homosexuality and developments like gay theology.
It is not irrelevant that the virtual founder of the idea of “homosexuality” was the Austrian born Hungarian Karoly Benkert(1824-1882) who was himself a Piscean who wanted to change attitudes away from those that had made a friend the object of the then all to common blackmail occasioning his suicide. The fact that Mars (anything male and sex and action-related) is in Pisces points both to Piscean Kertbeny taking action and images of a gentler wider masculinity being birthed.
Kertbeny
It is also relevant that on the day the moon, like Jupiter, was in Libra, sign of the law and of fairness.
A WIDENED SEMANTIC RANGE
Modern and post-Benkert “homosexuality” partakes in the breadth of Neptune. It may as in some S/M groups include some of the role rigidity of historic sodomy, but today the word is essentially a preference for one’s own sex and the kind of sensibility, psychology, philosophies and aesthetics that accompany this and which prior definitions worked to suppress, silence or even denied existed. To favour one’s own sex was taken as an insult or perhaps threat to that sex at large.
The homosexual orientation can be expressed sexually or non sexually, but its essence and claim is to the fact of a certain difference. It is this even though in order to hasten change and reform such as towards gay marriage, especially American gays would emphasize an essential happy families sameness with everyone which is not quite the case, And at the opposite extreme, the academically popular materialist, neo-Marxist Queer theory would assume an almost limitless openness to any sexual preferences.
It is easy to forget that the truth and value of the homosexuality word/concept is to indicate simply a general difference which is not more blameworthy than heterosexuality. Of course it can be that gays like straights behave unethically, unspiritually etc in many ways, but the matter cannot be assumed and judged in advance.
To maintain, as remains the case not least in conservative religious circles, that “homosexuality is sin”, a sign of evil times and therefore something to be wholly rejected, is misinformed and dangerous in its tampering with individual’s integrity of feeling. It means “homosexuality” is nothing but sodomy and immoralities great as Sodom and Gomorrah as for many long standing and often cruel discriminations.
I won’t repeat issues and conclusions mentioned in various articles on this site, but I will say the valuable meaning of the fair and useful “homosexual” word is increasingly compromised not just by ongoing religious conservatism but the kind of queer theory openness to all and any experiment. This plays into the confusion of many and conservatism’s view that everyone can and ought to change to heteronormativity. There is no need to deny that some, usually few, people do and will change or seem to, but who will do so is also fairly predictable if one examines the matter.
The homosexuality word was and is meaningful and its introduction marked an important development in social and religious history.
[This article was prompted by my reaction to a recent depressing and ill informed youtube debate around religion and homosexuality. I decided I wouldn’t even highlight it by answering but indirectly answer with a wider perspective. Finding the relevant date I did was serendipitous )
Any “lesser known” Oscar Wilde will usually mean the writer of those forgotten years before the celebrated plays and the fiction of Dorian Gray, the Oscar of especially his poetry. Despite the confessionalism of De Profundis there is no autobiography, so it is the early poetry offers a few clues to the character and outlook. It takes the reader across the development towards assumption at Oxford of Walter Pater’s aestheticism and “art for art’s sake”. This is behind the frank enough self-evaluation of Helas which concedes:
To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play
Is it for this I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?
It is a little surprising how neglected Wilde’s poetry (a first collection published 1881) has been, because while it is a mixed bag with some weak entries, especially among the shorter poems, it also contains some highly accomplished work, especially from any beginner.
Although in finding his voice Wilde proves stylistically versatile imitating many masters of the poetic from Shakespeare onwards, the early “just plagiarism” critical charge was always excessive and severe – some of the work is on a level with Spenser and Byron. Convinced of his romantic nature Wilde plainly aspired to take the baton from that leading poet of the Romantic, Keats, often referring to Keats’ figure of Endymion and even calling himself (in “The Garden of Eros) “the last Endymion”. Since Endymion was the love sick devotee of the moon goddess Cynthia, this in itself tells us something about Wildean psychology which will be fitful and changeable as the moon imagery of which would be so interwoven with the notorious Salome of his later drama.
Reasons for the ongoing neglect of the poetry and its messages are various. Today even just the swanky titles of so many poems in Latin, Greek, Italian and French might in itself be off-putting, along with the thee and thy, dost and hast archaism which was at the verge of going from usage. (The only modern touch is some occasional enjambment of verses rather than lines).
Dismissal and neglect were nonetheless well set on the way by something beyond connections with English Romantic verse, namely connection with French decadent poetry as of Baudelaire. It was youthful in-your-face folly beyond the issues of morals and taste inevitably raised, to have issued the long poem Charmides. This involves the tale of a youth, who, not as in an odd Greek tale from Lucian, “embraces” an image of Aphrodite, but instead desires the virgin goddess, Athena, whom he undresses. When Wilde was successfully entertaining America, the judge T W Higginson declared the poetry prurient and akin to work from Walt Whitman whose output was homoerotic.
Mixed messages and allegiances are almost a feature of the early work. Despite everything Charmides is a well-wrought significant poem, but like numbers of other offerings can only increase the impression Wilde was a person who came both too early and too late for his particular talents. He was plainly a too late-arrived full-blown Romantic, at the same time as he was a generation too early to dominate, as he could so easily have done, the Irish Hellenism associated with the circle around St John Gogarty (Joyce’s Buck Mulligan).
Only quite late and in response to the Parnell affair(1890) and the political sympathies of his Anglo-Irish wife, did Wilde express any trace of Irish nationalist sympathies; but then in “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891) he will speak of “the stupidity, and hypocrisy and philistinism of the English”. Prior to that time Wilde thought of himself, or at least performed himself, as an Englishman, including by accent, from the time he arrived to study in Oxford, albeit the poems betray some underlying doubt. Ave Imperatrix celebrates the range of empire Britain has achieved while regretting the human cost concerned “Ruin and wreck are on our side….Where is our English chivalry? “But this and any mixed signals are overtly or implicitly most likely the product of family confusion and religious tensions.
I take it that the early rejection of any Irish identity was at least partly a deliberate rejection of Lady Jane Wilde, Wilde’s extravagant society woman mother, an early figure in Irish nationalism and related cultural studies. Esperanza as she called herself, (on the basis of some fictional claims to Italian descent!) was lining her son up for some nationalist political role he plainly didn’t want. He didn’t have feelings either towards cultural nationalism though his fairy tales (The Happy Prince and other tales 1888), while not set in the world of his mother’s Ireland and its myth and folklore, are nonetheless distinctly hibernian in their sense of fate, doom, prophecy and melancholy. Irish fantasy and the pagan/druidic legacy were never notably cheerful (the reason St Patrick was not seen as the dark cloud neo-pagans imagine). As for Wilde’s father, a descendant of the O’Flaherties, like the native psyche he could swing towards the darkly depressive, and, as in Vita Nuova and elsewhere,the early Wilde will write of himself as tormented. “Alas, I cried, my life is full of pain”.
At the summit of Anglo-Irish society both parents were strongly Protestant in allegiance and feeling despite the fact Sir William Wilde had easy Regency morals and sired several illegitimate children – the intrigues of Wilde’s plays owe something to this background. The paternal threat of being cut off hung over any possible conversion to Catholicism, but for the young Wilde this would still have been a potential way of asserting himself through rebellion or even actually finding the spiritual fulfilment he was long in quest of, including through the Freemasonry he joined in Oxford.
There seems little doubt that the pomp and ceremony of both Catholicism and Italy held a strong attraction for Wilde from early on, and Italy was as much or more a second home imaginatively than (supposedly chivalric) England. His first poetry prize was for the long Ravenna which enthuses about the land “where Dante sleeps and Byron loved to dwell). His Sonnet on Approaching Italy looks back to Petrarch’s very special and patriotic Ad Italiam, and one of his first plays is The Duchess of Padua. The Italy list goes on – as can questions about the poet’s early decisions.
Though later Wilde would flippantly maintain conversion to Rome was never really an option for him because his true gods were money and fame, it had been a serious enough option for him to cancel his reception into the church on the day he was to proceed; and, as we know, on his death bed he did finally turn to Catholicism. The early poetry in its baroque intensity suggests the option must have been real enough in his mind real enough and a case could be made that Sir William stunted his son ‘s spiritual development by blanket opposition to anything Catholic. The late Wilde made a charge of the sort (1) Some early poems resulting from a trip to Italy, (admittedly funded by someone hoping for Wilde’s conversion!) sound sincere or tormented enough to suggest real crisis as in E Tenebris with its
Come down O Christ and help me, reach thy hand
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon in thy lake of Galilee
All the same, there is something odd in any such addresses to Christ then and later because it’s not clear from the poems whether Wilde ever quite believed in Christ in the first place –at the end of his life one of Wilde’s most faithful friends, Robert Ross, was divided about calling a priest as he wasn’t himself as a Catholic convinced Wilde truly believed – he had even told Ross but perhaps to shock and be theatrical, he didn’t. A classic definition of a Christian going back to St Paul (Rom 10: 9-10) is a person who believes in and affirms the resurrection of Christ. Wilde hardly does this. In the Sonnet: on the massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria he asks:
Christ dost thou live indeed or are thy bones
Still straightened in their rock hewn sepulchre?….
…If thou in very truth didst burst the tomb
Come down and show thy might
Lest Mohamet be crowned instead of Thee!
The Sonnet’s title consciously echoes Milton’s Sonnet XV111 On the late massacre in Piedmont and it may come as a surprise that Milton was ever an important figure for Wilde as for Wordsworth. (He even devotes a sonnet to Milton as some exemplar of democracy). It is apparent from early poems that Wilde, who would have preferred a republic for his distantly praised imperial Britannia, regarded Milton as some kind of possible model for him if he were to assume a public role. The republican ideas however would seem irreconcilable with other ultra-Romantic, almost Tennysonian, notions of England as home of Arthurian chivalry. This idea, despite one or two ballads like Ballade de Marguerite didn’t and couldn’t be seriously developed. But nor quite could other images. In Quantum Mutata wearing his English persona and anticipating the drift towards his essay The Soul of Man under Socialism he laments
We have thus fallen, save from Luxury
With barren merchandise piles up the gate
Where noble thoughts and deeds should enter by:
Else might we still be Milton’s heritors
The sense of disgusted alienation increases and is oddly and memorably resolved in Theoretikos. Victorian England is now a “vile traffic house” with wisdom and reverence sold at mart, the heritage of centuries despised so that
….“It mars my calm; wherefore in dreams of Art
And loftiest culture I would stand apart
Neither for God, nor for his enemies
But what about the gods? The poetry swings between, and never quite resolves, whether the ancient gods are in some sense real as archetypes we could awaken, or just a dream. The long poem The Burden of Itys ambitiously declares the Thames is holier than Rome and thinks the gods are not dead but need awakening. Almost querulously he asks why he should still behold “the wan white face of that deserted Christ/Whose bleeding hands my hands did once enfold” but who in his dishonoured House weeps, “perchance for me?” (Is it possible Wilde has sold, or fears he has sold, his soul?)
However, any raising of the sleeping gods is basically illusory or worthless, Apollo isn’t interested to hear his pain and Thames “creeps on in leaden sluggishness” and it’s all a dream he wakes from. Even so, a bright moon drifts across a shimmering sky and haunted Endymion thoughts recur.
Archetypally I feel that Wilde’s imaginative affinities were less with the classical gods he knew so well than the Hindu or Asian ones. For their air of splendour and savagery the late plays Salome and La Sainte Courtisane are “oriental” in feeling. If so, possibly the most meaningful call of the Itys poem is
…“Sing on and I will wear the leopard skin
And steal the mooned wings of Ashteroth..”
Arguably this is to identify with Shiva and Kali type energies beyond those of the classical gods – the leopard skin belongs to Dionysus, an outside member of Greek gods. Outsider gods fit Wilde. Pan is nowadays deemed to be archetypally a Shiva figure and in Pan: A Double Villanelle, the poet calls on Pan as an energy for here and now that a grey world needs. So I think there is a pattern here.
The nearest to an actual early credo is contained in another long and complex poem, Panthea which also raises the self-fulfilment and guilt question. It begins
Nay, let us walk from fire unto fire
From passionate pain to deadliest delight
I am too young to live without desire.
Just what is conveyed is hard to summarize, but basically Wilde seems to say he wants the energies of the gods, However, if they exist they themselves are as in the Itys poem indifferent to or bored by human sins and failures and we in turn are
…..wearied of this sense of guilt
Wearied of every temple we have built
Wearied of every right, unanswered prayer…
……For man is weak, God sleeps and heaven is high
Though we are bound to accept death, we should be comforted we are a part of nature, which like us has its passions. We become one with the elements
“We are resolved into the supreme air
We are made one with what we touch and see..….
And thus without life’s torturing pain
In some sweet flower we will feel the sun
Here something like Pythagoreanism (which Caesar associated with the druids) takes over, or perhaps the spirit of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
We must look back at Charmides for a bit more on the tensions suggested – a whole Catch 22 of sex
“The joy of passion, that dread mystery
Which not to know is not to live at all
And yet to know is to be held in death’s most deadly thrall.
It’s a fair surmise, especially as one of the poems is “The Harlot’s House”, that the sexual and emotional tensions of the early work are based on the experience of visiting a prostitute while still a student at Oxford and fearing, but wrongly, that he had contracted syphilis – his later health problems and cause of death were not linked to this.
Although the Itys poem refers to Narcissus
“who is not boy nor girl and yet is both
Fed by two fires and unsatisfied
Through their excess, each passion being loth
For love’s own sake to leave the other’s side
Yet killing love by staying….”
we don’t get many or any clues to the origins of gay Wilde. Various references in the poetry to such as Hylas or Antinous, are mentioned almost more as decoration, variation or curio, not special hint – at Keats’ grave he even calls that perfectly hetero poet “fair Sebastian” though later Sebastian was a favourite gay image. But arguably this very absence of meaningful reference allows one to make certain speculations.
It’s true that poets like the early Auden could bury reference to gay love beneath a fake straight imagery, but that’s unlikely in the youthful Wilde’s case. He has described himself or his root dilemma in the Itys poem when he uses the image of the heron. He is at this stage drifting, and confused only, but as usual miserable.
“She”[the heron] does not heed thee, wherefore should she heed
She knows Endymion is not far away,
T’is I whose soul is as the reed
Which has no message of its own to play
So pipes another’s bidding, it is I
Drifting with every wind on the wide sea of misery.
WEAK AS WATER?
Constance Wilde
Constance Wilde in horrified reaction to the almost inexplicable post prison resumption of relation with the troublemaking and vicious Lord Alfred Douglas, described her husband as “weak as water”. One can’t entirely dismiss this verdict. And arguably astrology can help explain in this area what regular biography and critique can’t and won’t account for.
Wilde can be “explained” as a notable example of the weakest kind of Libran (which also his Bosie was). Libra, the Venus, marriage and partnerships sign, is often also deemed the most bisexual of signs. This however is often due simply to its will to please. The Libran may or may not want sex, but they will always want relation and to please and impress within it, a kind of general vanity replacing the normal role of ego. Not necessarily insisting on its own way, it wishes to supply what the partner wants, or will admire. The most important thing is to have a partner, even at the cost of a certain self-annihilation….unless or until something gives and there may be memorable reversal or revenge.
The perfect theme and almost the truest image for the later Wilde is his Salome. Salome wants relation with Jokanaan (John the Baptist), or at least to have his attention, which he always refuses. In the end something snaps and she wants both to possess the prophet and be revenged by having his head – this is archetypally correct because the opposite sign for Libra is Aries and Aries is the sign of the head so, subconsciously, revenge directs towards it. ”And all men kill the thing they love” is a line from the conclusion of Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
Wilde as Salome
However, obviously not all Librans are bisexuals and the stronger signal for an inclination towards that orientation is some form of stress or affliction aspect of a natal planet to Neptune. Which with Saturn in close natal square to Neptune Wilde notably had. This aspect risks various addictions, not least to drink and drugs (such as especially in later years manifested in Wilde), a weakening of personal boundaries and a tendency both to guilt and pity, often exaggerated and inappropriate, such as was demonstrated in the poisonous Wilde/Bosie relation. The latter began when Wilde was cooling to, even disgusted by, his previously adored wife because she had put on weight following childbirth.
Although Wilde’s legal defence was couched in terms of same-sex gay/Greek love that Wilde the classicist was familiar with a defence that would subsequently render him the image and spokesperson for all things gay, it is more exact to see this married poet, including poet of female beauty, as a bisexual. In modern terms Wilde was “queer”, his sexuality more choice than “born like it” gay. And more guilt or tension surrounded this accordingly.
The “born like it” gay person tends to be less guilt ridden and more frankly protesting their rights against prejudice and discrimination because their worldview and options are defined by gay. For the bisexual, overt expression can be experienced as an add-on, an excess, temptation away from something, a crossing of borders, a satisfaction of curiosity. Taedium Vitae speaks of “where my white soul first kissed the mouth of sin”. We can’t know the context of this, but the turning to Bosie would savour of this feeling. Wilde is a Neptunian savourer or connoisseur of erotic experience much as he savoured the flowers that so entranced him and that incidentally was the most English feature of himself and his poetry – Yeats claimed English poetry was too full of flowers and he avoided them.
Though Wilde was a far nobler person than the Libran bisexual Satanist, Aleister Crowley, there is some comparison up to and including a depiction of temptation as delivering a true knowledge. It has been said sheer weakness, a lack of normally sensed boundaries took Crowley into the states and situations he less arrived at than almost fell into. His apparent strength was reliant on a special weakness. However great Wilde the artist was, the “weak as water” verdict has some grounds. The Wilde who admitted he might have been a better person under Catholic practices virtually concedes this. Libra is also the sign of Law and Libra can like or even crave the structuring patterns of Law and associated rituals more than the average person.
TWO GRAVES: IMAGE AND STYLE
Roman grave of Keats
I am not a Wilde scholar but I think a study of Wilde’s lunar imagery in the early poetry and later oeuvre is material fit for more exploration, books or doctoral studies (or even astrological – asteroid Endymion degree exact conjunct Wilde’s Jupiter, his beliefs). In conclusion it is instructive to note the contrast between the poems inspired by the graves in Rome of the Romantics Keats and Shelley. Keats is beautiful, a victim, a martyr, “the poet-painter of our English land”. His name may be writ in water but tears like Wilde’s will keep his memory green. The picture glories in pure passivity. But the same may be said to apply to Shelley for whom it is sweet to rest ”within the womb/of earth, great mother of eternal sleep” though in a nod to Shelley’s drowning at sea, a restless tomb in the sea deeps might be almost better
However unintended, the absorption of Shelley to some Keatsian/ Wildean sleep and passivity ideal borders on insult. Ironically the very active and campaigning Shelley virtually began in the Ireland Wilde had cast off. The pioneering Queen Mab epic was composed while in Killarney and Shelley, who had been horrified by what he experienced of conditions in Ireland, his atheism despite, would always be a supporter of Irish liberties and Catholic Emancipation. If any bridge between Irish and English literature exists, Shelley is that bridge. He was the model in English language for Yeats as regards vision and a politically engaged kind of writing. And in developing a national poetry Yeats evolved a more colloquial English verse of the kind from which Wilde’s poetry with its archaisms and sometimes embarrassing identification with all things English, could have benefitted.(Yeats also greatly reduced the reference to flowers he deemed excessive in English poetry) .
Wilde had the ability to have been a great poet but he abandoned the task just as he lost or ignored many opportunities – the mind boggles that after a friend had travelled to France specifically to give him the original of his drama La Sainte Courtisane he promptly managed to lose it in a Paris cab so that the world has only a few pages of the work. We rightly enough pity Wilde for his quite excessive sufferings and spectacular fall from grace, but one of the messages to be derived from the poetry is that Wilde was at no time especially happy. The poetry often speaks of pain, misery and confusion so that despite the brilliant comedies there is a lot of the sad clown to the life pattern while the poetry seems to participate in or foreshadow the wrong choices that would lead to the ultimate fiasco.
POSTSCRIPT
34 Tite Street, Chelsea with blue plaque commemorating Wilde
I have often vaguely mused on Wilde, what he means and represents. It was easy to do because in the days before it inexplicably recently became the most expensive street in England, I once lived round the corner from Wilde’s 34 Tite Street Chelsea home with its blue plaque commemorating him. Recently I thought I should get down to this article in the course of which I surprised myself with suddenly seeing Wilde in a different way. He seemed more like a mild version of Crowley, a bit sold out and satanic. Surely, I told myself this couldn’t be true? But the unfamiliar emphasis looks to have belonged with something rather odd in the heavens encouraging the new perspective.
I realized the decision to write this followed a recent red moon eclipse in the sign of secrets, Scorpio. This fell in Wilde’s supposed third sector of writing but definitely to the degree exactly conjunct his natal Lucifer. This is on an axis with an asteroid I have found has a lot of association with the dark side. While I don’t believe Wilde formally sold his soul, I think some of his more Christ-rejecting verse statements borders on separation to the point Wilde may even have believed he had virtually done the deed. If so, that could be a factor in what I see someone has called the “faithless Christianity” of Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism, which envisages an entirely self-referential religion, a bit like “atheistic” Zen. I also see an academic essay has proposed, Wilde simply substitutes Art for the traditionally entrapping devil in The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Perhaps it’s small wonder his friend Robert Ross had a few doubts about Wilde and religion.
Returning to read Wilde after years of absence and hoping to enjoy this, I feel I have encountered a figure less gay and more occult than I would have supposed. But whether I’m right or wrong, it’s a sad and mysterious story.
NOTE 1
The standard Ellmann biography, p 548, records the late statement: “Much of my moral obliquity is due to the fact my father would not allow me to become a Catholic. The artistic side of the Church and the fragrance of its teaching would have cured my degeneracies. I intend to be received before long”
Recently there has been a lot of controversy around the “ex-gay” declarations of the sensational right wing activist and former Breitbart journalist, Milo Yiannopoulos’. He has rediscovered his Catholic faith and rejected his gay self in favour of celibacy (though he’s same sex married since 2017) and affirmation of his “essentially heterosexual self”. He has, at least in this interview where he rather incongruously appears with fancily coiffed and dyed hair (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39S-HBlDmp4 ) portrayed his gay self and any related sodomy as all just part of an act. One could wonder what the partner makes of this!
The reconversion may be genuine enough as far as it goes. I believe Milo is sincere, and undeniably he is committed enough to put his money into supporting the widely banned gay conversion therapies (htttps://nypost.com/2021/03/15/milo-yiannopolous-to-open-conversion-therapy-facility-in-florida/ )
But sincerity doesn’t mean the new position can’t contain elements of powerful and concerning deception that reaches to the heart of the ongoing gay identity argument.
The impression given by Milo is the one that especially America’s evangelical Christians espouse, namely that gay (“homosexual” as they call it) is nothing but a “lifestyle” or perhaps even just recreational sodomy. It is something learned, imitated and can be cast off like a garment under conviction of sin: in short the “pray the gay away” idea that has caused many psychological problems and had unfortunate political and legal reverberations. But undeniably it’s also the case that a small but vocal minority of people rightly or wrongly do claim to have made a change. Can this be explained (and beyond the fact that there seem to be more cured lesbians than gay males and surely for the simple reason women are more sexually adaptable then men ?)
THE ESOTERIC KEY
As indicated in the course of the first and longest article on this site, it’s a regrettable fact that issues of gay identity are regularly liable to be held hostage to the possible significance of the less common phenomenon of bisexuality – which is anyway never a 50/50 thing. It’s also hostage to a minority of mutable persons whom anything from childhood abuse to youthful addictions narcotic and alcoholic have left without usual boundaries and consequently open to various changes.
In both cases the mutability of fate, conduct and/or character is signalled via an esoteric factor that academe, science, the churches, queer theorists, etc will cheerfully ignore, namely the astrological. Bisexuality (and many addictive tendencies) are linked to so-called “afflictions” (i.e.harsh, strained planetary aspects) to or from the normally widely inclusive Neptune factor. By contrast, the placement and aspects of Uranus determine whether a person has an inborn same sex orientation they will need to work with because it is their nature as in the case of artists like Michelangelo. His positive Mars trine Uranus aspect bespeaks the function of a creative gay eros through sculpture, painting and poetry and indissociable from his spirituality too. (1)
There is one other leading celestial factor describing alternative character and that’s through sign rather than planetary aspect. This factor is an emphasis upon Libra, the sign of unions, the partner….and Milo himself. The almost Buddhist emptiness of which this sign is capable, is liable to affect its response to society and associates in its wish to please or impress. For many Librans the question is less what do I want than what do you want to do. Accordingly relationships and sex easily become a service or performance.
It is the Libra in Milo which imagines he can throw away the gay in favour of a really and truly heterosexual self, albeit one hard for most of us to see – his self-expression looks set to remain an aspect of a less examined Uranian gay self which his dress, appearance and general style bespeak to the point of flamboyance. However it’s sodomy is apparently seen as what “homosexuality” virtually, essentially but disposably is. The assumption is something of a Libran myth helped along by the fact that in traditional medical and sexual astrology Libra is the sign of the buttocks.
Be that as it may, nowadays questions can be asked, especially with the advent of gay tantras, just what a gay eros is, could or should do independently of sodomy. (See the article on this site “Gay Sex, Pleasure and a Paul Problem” which could easily be the basis of a whole book length study given the largely uncharted territories it explores). Especially if one is already partnered, the question is posed how much right one-sided celibacy decisions should enjoy.
MILO AND OSCAR
The Greek-Irish Milo Y, born Hanrahan, is in many respects another Oscar Wilde, a provocateur, a poseur, a wit. So busy travelling and living around the world, Dublin remains unexplored but is surely almost his truest home. Like Wilde, Milo is a Libran with the difference that whereas bisexual Wilde (who was married with children) has the tell-tale afflicted Neptune of the bisexual, Milo has Neptune well aspected releasing charm and imagination at a certain level. But as regards self and soul, both writers subscribe to the notion that repentance can change, beyond conduct, root character itself. This is dangerous and an invitation to tragedy like that of Wilde following his De Profundis conversion.
Many Librans have a hard time understanding what and who their true self is. Gay philosopher Michel Foucault stands as a father of Queer theory for wishing not to define himself and others as gay. It’s in resistance to potential domination by the other and evading the responsibility often imposed by precise definitions, that Librans may abandon the courtesies more typical of the sign to become enfants terribles of protest like the notoriously rude poet Rimbaud or John Lennon on occasions.
MARKERS OF CHARACTER
Very briefly, (including because with neither a birth time nor place of birth beyond Kent no precise birth chart can be erected) I will mention a few telling points about Milo’s birth pattern.
A crusading and fortunate conjunction of Jupiter with Mars in conservative Capricorn is the key to Milo’s conservative beliefs and opinions in many areas and his financial success.
Mars in opportunity sextile to radical, extreme and gay Uranus has allowed him to combine gay and conservative interests
The Sun in Libra in positive sextile to Neptune supplies charm and imagination or art at the same time as it heightens Libran tendencies to question the self and regard it as malleable.
The moon, virtually guaranteed to be in theatrical Leo heightens any Libran tendencies to perform himself.
Libra’s ruler, Venus, though conjunct the fated nodal axis, is not strongly aspected for strong love affairs with the opposite sex, but is in minor aspect to Neptune thus again prone to suffer Libra’s tendency to dissolve the self.
Homosexuality in most cases is an inborn orientation affecting the whole response to life and not for the changing. It can be confidently assumed there is no real “heterosexual self” for Milo to discover or affirm whether he is celibate or not. He is not an “ex gay”, he is a gay Catholic and hopefully for his own and others’ benefit he can live happily and well within that definition. To do so will be of more benefit to society than the likes of gay to Jesus Becket Cook who visits churches and colleges to assure people it is unworthy to call oneself gay and Christian and that “Gay Christian” is even an oxymoron.
Such basically well-intentioned but misguided people need to read more carefully the bible they quote so freely from and in which Jesus speaks of “eunuchs from their mother’s womb”. And by Jesus’ time the word didn’t automatically mean castrate or celibate but it did mean some form of different and out of the family way. One of the points made in Job 39 is that the ostrich is one of God’s different, one might say unnatural, creations born without normal wisdom.
Contrary to the position of some conservative Christians, there is not just the theme but the variation upon it and accordingly there actually is room for Adam and Steve. Such things and much more of the kind need to be born in mind, Some of them have been included on this site from the first.
NOTE
(1) Some will protest that many people, many of them straights, will have been born with strong Uranian aspects. The point is that Uranus is plainly relevant to sexual disposition when that is in question for character and destiny. In practice one finds strong Uranus in heterosexuals may express itself in denial and homophobia or be prominent wherever the “electricity”. excitement and high originality of Uranus is in question so that. original thinkers or great thrill seekers could have strong Uranus.
AN EXASPERATED PS
I feel even more exasperated at the wrong thinking and wrong messages given now that I am aware the ex-gay status was declared at a ceremony which would better not have taken place.
Milo apparently chartered a boat to take him out to sea off Hawaii in order to throw away his 150K gold engagement ring. This was supposed to have left the once multi millionaire with only $880 in his checking account but presumably, if only because he is promoting conversion therapies, he is not completely out of pocket.
With people starving in this world and unable to afford necessary medical treatment it is controversially self-indulgent to toss away an object (which he called a “Sodomy Stone”) that could have been sold to support the varieties of human need. And this supposedly holy act was prepared for by much downing of vodka.
I am satisfied I was right to maintain Milo is more Celt than Greek (and it’s a fact a Greek relative had originally recommended accepting a gay identity.) This misleading unfortunate episode partakes of a type of Celtic recklessness which echoes the extreme gestures of some early Celtic saints, who however did not mix holiness with alcohol. It is the Leo side of Milo’s character, whether Greek or Irish, which favours performance of grand gestures.
[This article was first published on McCleary’s Alternatives but also belongs here]
ONE HELL OF A CONTROVERSY
In case you weren’t aware, rapper Lil Nas X recently triggered controversy over a raunchy video, Montero, and sale of a batch of 666 Satan’s Shoes. These had suitable symbols on the outside and a drop of human blood encased in the soles and they sold within a minute at $1000 a pop. The video includes embracing a huge Edenic snake and lap dancing with a suitably sinister and unpretty Satan in hell descended into via a stripper pole.
Theoretically the song is about self-acceptance, “Montero, call me by my name” is the rapper speaking to himself as his birth name, Montero. This person identifies with the Edenic snake as simply a form of himself, basically accepting the shadow in the Jungian sense, But more can be involved when one ventures down this particular path. Indeed it’s fundamental in psychology that the shadow cannot be fully integrated or we could end up criminals. So should anyone, especially gays, affirm the self as demonic simply because some regard that nature as demonic, or agree to hell because some believe that’s one’s destination. Is the self to be chiefly anchored in a bravado and rebellion akin to surrender?
It’s interesting that like France’s notable and for much of his life satanic poet, Charles Baudelaire, Lil was born on the 9th April. Like Baudelaire, who desired revenge on his unreasonable step-father, Lil is happy to be revenged on Christians who reportedly made his life miserable with self and body hating feelings because of his gay orientation which he couldn’t pray away. Of that point presently. As to Baudelaire, he was not gay but he did sometimes let it be thought he was paedophile to lend himself a greater aura of evil. Satanism gay or straight can be quite theatrical.
Satanist Poet Baudelaire looking evil or perhaps just sad
UNINTENDED CONNECTIONS
There is an expression “speak of the devil and he appears” and events like the Paris Bataclan massacre and the deadly Ariana Grande Manchester concert could be said to lend weight to the idea. What may be launched for financial gain, as revenge or even just a joke, can still touch real powers. Victim though Lil may have been to a degree (but aren’t many people victims?) that doesn’t automatically justify what can now be almost counted upon to increase morbidity in young fans (till now Lil has even cultivated a child audience) and augment the ever growing number of persons seeking exorcisms or delivery ministries. There are other ways to register protest, sound complaint and claim liberation.
That Lil, whether for himself or others could be touching some negative energies is suggested by a few points in his birth pattern. In the oddest of coincidences. Lil’s Venus (his art, what he likes) at 26 Taurus is closely conjunct fixed star Algol, traditionally called “Head of Satan”, itself in easy/positive trine to the Hell asteroid (Hella) at 26 of Capricorn, traditional sign of the goat devil. This isn’t all.
Lil’s Uranus (the planet of anything gay and ruler of things Aquarian) is minutes of a degree off conjunct the natal sun of “The Child from the East”, the Anti Messiah according to the vision of that person’s birth and career by the late seeress, Jeane Dixon. (It’s subject matter beyond present scope, but if Dixon saw right, a real case could be made for the idea this person will finally emerge this year; ….in which case Lil becomes like a herald or silly synchronicity for this person whom Dixon saw as promoted through especially America). The rapper’s chart also shows a triple conjunction of the asteroids, Malus (bad), Lucifer and Achristou (which last over time I have become convinced has various dark side and Antichrist associations) at 22, 24 and 26 Aries respectively. Lil’s sun like Baudelaire’s is at 19 Aries.
BAD NEWS FOR GAYS
Be all that as it may, practically, Lil is bad news for gays unless the more insistently exhibitionist. Lil is bringing back all the radical conservative Christian prejudices against gays and gives the false impression to the young and impressionable that there is no way to be gay and liberated short of selling the soul and pursuing addictive extremes. (it has been said by the straight founder of America’s new Temple of Satan, that 50% or more of its devotees are LGBT people who have felt religiously disenfranchised).
It’s disagreeable to hear yet again the tired, in essence untrue, claim that gays (“homosexuals” in evangelical parlance) do not truly exist but represent nothing but a sinful “lifestyle”. It IS however a sin the way and extent to which so many people have been taught by especially the more cultish evangelical churches, self-hatred and body hatred. In words which plainly don’t represent twenty first century conditions with society suffering a veritable plague of body hatred and abuse, St Paul suggested “no one ever hates his own body but nourishes and tenderly cares for it (Eph 5:29). But beyond the apostle’s rhetorical exaggeration lies the more important implied principle that as a matter of course people should love and care for the body. And that includes gays…..
A SERIOUS NEED FOR CHANGE
…….It also very much includes blacks whose experience, especially outside America, is a horror tale that almost summarizes the problem. Notoriously, in blind refusal or serious ignorance of anthropological fact and keen not to antagonize some Muslim groups hostile to Christians, leaders of some African churches like Uganda’s have made for complete erasure of identity and meaning They have claimed homosexuality never existed in Africa save as a colonial import, and have favoured the severest social treatment of gays if need be including the death penalty.
A small minority of gay persons may change or appear to change orientation for reasons I believe can be explained. The vast majority of gays remain as they are in a state at least somewhat intuited by them since early youth when they felt in more than just sexual ways, “different”. Some churches still desperately need to be educated to accept this (troisieme sexe, third sex) reality and work with it. Even the most spiritually inclined and devoted gays like Wesley Hill, have never been able to pray the gay away, but neither have they been given any real help to integrate their orientation. https://gaythoughtsblog.wordpress.com/2020/05/01/fresh-towels-for-washed-and-waiting-wesley-hill/ (this website contains a variety of perspectives on gay theology, psychology and spirituality)
I don’t care to say a lot about the Lil controversy. Sometimes silence is better than generating what only makes for more argument and publicity. I simply believe it’s wrong to trendily praise Lil, or to unduly excuse him out of misplaced pity (recall he’s commercial and making a pile out of controversy), or for churches to use him to re-ignite old issues (and falsehoods) around gays, or to ignore the sign of our troubled times this rapper represents. Now is more a time to learn and understand. In Lil’s case wisdom might be to realize the last laugh may yet be on him, as he can be engaging more than his theatrics suppose.
[I am including this article on this site – which I am not expecting to keep adding to because of difficulties with the new WordPress – because it does reach into the method of reading and understanding scripture for gays who want answers to the sort of issues I have been broaching here]
Only belatedly after years of putting out sometimes theologically related WordPress articles and noting responses has it become clear to me why there can be such levels of dismissal, hypocrisy and often unpleasantness in the evangelical branch of religion, especially America’s. Ironically the answer is, very largely, the bible…..How come? Since I have no desire to undermine faith or diss the bible, whatever can I mean?
Calvinistic legacy
The problem begins with Calvin and Presbytery, the true parents of American Protestant faith. In commentary on certain words of the Apostle Paul (2 Tim 3:16), Calvin introduces a radical idea. I shall give first in traditional KJV and the Revised English Bible version the words of Paul on which Calvin enlarges.
All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof ….
All inspired Scripture has its use for teaching truth and refuting errors…
From this basis Calvin, the most Catholic and not to say inquisitorial of the Reformers (his behaviour in Geneva anticipates American cultishness) jumps into commentary with…
“we owe to the Scripturethe same reverence which we owe to God; because it has proceeded from him alone, and has nothing belonging to man mixed with it.“
Nothing and not ever?!……
The “Word of God” means..?
Not even Luther would have agreed. (We know he had doubts about the Epistle of James) and even Methodist John Wesley’s strongly bibliocentric position implies through his Quadrilateral system of assessing truth that inspiration could have degrees. It’s an idea explicitly or implicitly assumed within much western Protestantism.
But with Calvin is birthed bibliolatry, the infallible, inerrant Paper Pope bible of a type of fundamentalist Protestantism. It favours an inflexibility that has got in the way of “what the Spirit says to the churches” (Rev 3:22), and spawned a host of unedifying disputes when not shut down needed conversations because anyone with a different opinion on literal “plain sense” reading of a text must by definition be a false teacher to dismiss, or a heretic to be condemned. What’s literal counts, poetry like the music suspect to Calvinism, does not come into consideration.
Under this Calvinistic influence the bible would become everywhere deified by evangelicals as “The Word of God”. I don’t suggest in many respects it isn’t that. But not fully and not even on Jesus’ authority. It is Jesus himself who is supposed to be reverenced as the Logos or “Word of God”. He even indicates the scriptures are principally significant as a pointer to himself (Jn 5:39) an affirmation that itself indicates the real subject of the bible is God and salvation, not some of those issues of lesser weight and relevance such as the book of Proverbs contains as mentioned presently. In his answer to the tempting Satan who cites to him the all-protection declarations of of Psalm 91, Jesus implicitly refuses any automatic and literalizing application of poetic scriptural generalizations.(Luk 4:10).
Whereas in the early church to be Christian was to believe the creed, for the evangelical the true believer is one who believes every word of the bible (a book which exists in its present familiar form through the fiats of various traditions and church councils attempting and claiming divine guidance). Distributing and if possible reading the bible cover to cover, genealogies and all, is almost a sacrament and ascetical practice for devoted evangelicals. I forget which person claimed on youtube that in vision Jesus had told them he wished people to read John’s gospel as central but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was genuine vision. People can’t be expected to read and absorb the whole bible without commentaries and help and very good translations. When I lived in Hong Kong I would hear many locals preferred to read the Bible in English as the Chinese translations weren’t clear enough. A truly evangelical impulse would probably do better to arrange for shortened, bibles which cut out the hard bits like Leviticus and Chronicles with their rituals and lists as opposed to pouring money into poorly translated versions people imperfectly understand!
Simple questions and proofs
Since the Enlightenment people who doubt and dislike the bible have often attempted to undermine it by introducing questions of dating, true authorship, archaeology etc. Over time these problems usually find their reasonable answers and even to the bible’s advantage because it is a basically authentic reliable work. Frankly however, if you want to undermine the bible at any rate as regards arguments for paper pope infallibility and inerrancy, all you need do is read its text and ask and answer some questions that shouldn’t confuse even a schoolchild. If you then refuse and dismiss the obvious you risk finishing as many evangelicals and fundamentalists do, namely dishonest as you strive to defend the indefensible. Consider the following (happily exceptional) cases Consider the following (happily exceptional) cases below which I am quite prepared to believe are even meant to be there as a check to bibliolatry and an invitation to wrestle with textual meanings and messages like Jacob with the angel.
A lot of OT imagery we rightly overlook and dismiss as only in cultural harmony with its violent and militaristic age of origins (age of Aries for astrologers) but should we dismiss the occasional gratuitous violence? If the Holy Spirit inspired the entire bible, did the Holy Spirit inspire….
“When your enemies come cringing to you/ you will trample [stomp ] their backs underfoot” (Deut 33:29) ?
Or against the Babylonian oppressors and their offspring
“Happy is he who takes and dashes your little ones against the rock” (Ps 137:9).
The book of Proverbs contains real wisdom but also occasional dated prejudice which if believed would cancel out whole areas of religious and cultural life.
“A man who isolates himself [ lives alone ]seeks his own desire; He rages against all wise judgment”. (Pro 18:1)
Proverbs is usually right about the dangers of alcohol but hardly speaks from God in every instance as in …
Give wine…to those who are bitter [sad] of heart/Let him drink and forget his poverty and remember his misery no more” (Pro 317:8). This is like a prescription for alcoholism!
Inspiration is something that ebbs and flows. An author is not necessarily under the influence at every moment and also speaks as and for themselves. If the bible is every word dictated and perfect from God, did the Spirit cause Paul to write
“Come to me at Nicopolis for I have decided to spend the winter there” (Titus 3:12)?
A high level of inspiration attaches to the Corinthian epistles, especially the often cited 2nd, but that inspiration is not necessarily absolute and continuous is certified by a simple factual error at one point. 1 Cor 5:1 suggests that incest such as has happened in the congregation is of a kind not known among pagans. Hardly! Incest is far from unmentioned in ancient literature. Centuries after Paul St Jerome mentions that Rome turned out for the funeral of the poet Catullus (d. 54 BC). This poet famous among Romans, (and many Romans lived in Corinth and would have known of the poet) had mocked the bad morals including incest “Mother lying impiously with ignorant son” among Roman high society. Obviously pagans did know and mention the kind of things Paul says they didn’t.
Levels of Inspiration
It would be simpler and more helpful if, Lutheran style, evangelicals were prepared in cases of doubt to rate the words of Christ above those of Paul; that they don’t do so this has complicated numbers of issues past and present, especially present. The apostle is not entirely reliable and without all self-contradiction on the sensitive issue of sex – if he authored the statement (authorship of the relevant epistle is disputed) and believed it at the time, namely that widows who seek to marry are wanton against Christ (KJV 1 Tim 5:11), that would only be to contradict much else he taught about marriage.
I wrote in this article https://wp.me/p6Zhz7-2M the status and value of the problematic, supposedly anti-gay passage of 1 Romans is put in question by the accuracy of certain statements that precede and support it. This sort of thing, never mentioned should be discussed but is liable not to be so as the legacy of Calvinistic bibliolatry has ruled that out for many in advance while the prejudices in relation to the gay subject remains often quite breath-taking.
From the evangelical standpoint contemporary American society is in a bad place having rejected God. This can actually be true up to a point – the secularism, materialism and indifference is marked in some areas – but sometimes the nightmare of unbelief is one that has been virtually courted. Rejection of faith is a direct product of brittle, inflexible views that invoke rejection from incredulity and despair in whole sections of society. This happens as when gays are automatically the enemy, the black sheep, destroyers of society pursuing nothing but a chosen “lifestyle” (insistence upon curing a gay orientation can be as daft as insisting an introvert become extravert), or every woman who has an abortion never has a good reason but is a guilty of murder or even sacrificing to Moloch.
I don’t wish to end on a sour note or naming names, but it has been not just disappointing but troubling to register the degree of dismissal or silence I associate with American evangelicals if and when one answers them sensibly or invites them to read opinions expressed in this or that article. For example, though I say it myself, an article hardly unbiblical but original like Lot’s Wife and the Meanings of Sodom(y) merits consideration https://wp.me/p6Zhz7-fL but is regularly overlooked if suggested for consideration. The assumption is doubtless there couldn’t be anything new to learn, plain sense literal reading covers for everything.
In the final analysis, Christianity is the religion of the Word. This also means the religion of discussion and free speech as even St Paul implies when he concedes there must be divisions and factions “for only so will it become clear who among you is genuine (1 Cor 11:19). But little will be clear where there is no open expression of views which differ from the narrowest sense of obvious. The Geneva of the soul that is evangelicalism American style is ultimately not healthy and not to be approved as any way for the future.
Many of us have long believed for everything from legal to theological reasons that gay civil unions were desirable. But it belongs with something like the unpredictable dark/light character of President Trump that we hear Pope Francis lending support to the idea at this time.
This is human rights LITE. All said and done Francis has failed to speak out in dark times against even the most appalling Chinese Communist treatment of Christians in China, indeed has even cooperated with the Chinese government while churches have been attacked across the country and priests abducted. This, while in the West there has been delayed reaction to sex scandals, makes the Pope’s declaration more the scandal it is to traditional Catholics than the point of progress it is to others.
Francis, who is prophetic St Malachy’s last in the line of Popes, last Pope before the Antichrist (https://mcclearysadditions.wordpress.com/2019/02/14/st-malachys-last-pope-ringing-down-the-curtain/) is well and truly playing up and springing surprises. And strictly speaking he is being heretical too. I don’t mean by accepting gays. Strictly speaking it is simply incorrect for the pontiff to declare gays “children of God” because that is a status no one gay or straight is supposed to have but needs to acquire through faith in Christ (Gal 3:26). However, that’s a teaching Francis implicitly denies when he proposes on various occasions that everyone is praying to the same God under different names, by this rendering void the meaning of Christ’s parting commission to evangelize and making light of today’s many Christian martyrs to Muslim extremists in Burkino Faso, Cameroons and many places in Africa.
However….just as Trump may get a few things right by accident, there is this surprise. If we are to answer the question, “what would Jesus do?” in this case, the answer is, yes, Jesus would endorse civil unions.
DEFINITELY AN HISTORICALLY GAY MOMENT
I have long claimed to possess the working data for the birth of Christ and that it reacts to major Jesus events and issues and it is doing so here. It is hardly accidental that on the 20th Oct (when the docu appeared which declared the Pope’s position) we should be able to see these points.
Venus (any love and unions) was at something 21 Virgo near enough conjunct Jesus’ 20 Virgo birth sun – it was also conjunct Gay Liberation’s 22 Pluto in Virgo which is in the unions house of the chart I use for Gay Lib’s spontaneous foundation in 1969.
This natal sun and transiting Venus are fortunately trined from 19 Capricorn degree of asteroid Chant, (Song) at Christ’s birth by messianic Jupiter, the Bethlehem Star, a register of truth in issues.
The sun that day at 27/28 Libra, sign of unions, was fortunately trine Jesus’ Part of Homosexuality at 27 of individualistic, different, surprising Aquarius.
Aquarius is Uranus and Urania associated, so since Urania conjuncts Jesus’ sun at birth, gay marriage and spirituality issues will always recur, and Venus’ position on Oct 20th would correspond to one such time, Moreover…
In the chart of Christianity (taken from the Pentecost of AD 30), revolutionary and often gay associated Uranus at 9 Taurus makes conjunction with the Church’s 8 degree Part of Marriage. When Mercury (any media/news) passed opposite, the news comes out.
It’s another whole subject, but the current growing crescendo of people having Rapture dreams (i.e. the time of the Marriage of the Lamb) is involved with not least Uranus’ approach to Christianity’s Part of Marriage.
Of some relevance to speculation, symbolism and Christianity’s relation to homosexuality is the article “Apocalypse as a gay issue” https://wp.me/p6Zhz7-4p
[Though this article has been published on another of my blogs and isn’t directly gay themed, it can be included here because it’s a fact that gays who are at all religious – which many more are than supposed – are also more questing and experimental with it than some. Accordingly they can also finish up rather confused. This may help clarify at least a few points ]
THE YOGIC MISTAKE AND DEVELOPING ONENESS RELIGION
Contrarian thinkers can exasperate, but they can also keep us on our toes prompting us to a few unexpected insights. America’s anti- feminist feminist, Camille Paglia, has shone light in dark places and raises important questions. British writer, cult figure and former broadcaster and journalist, David Icke, when not letting fancy roam too far, has defended free speech, been fearless and sometimes censored, for lambasting corruption and madness in high places like the BBC that covered for Jimmy Saville. Despite conspiracy theory charges against his ideas he takes some credit for forecasting in the early nineties the outlines of today’s developments and globalist trends which, like some Christians who favour prophetic perspectives, he regards as dangerous.
Some of us curious about from where and how Icke derives his standalone chutzpah in the face of dismissal, ridicule and sometimes censorship, have been answered – somewhat – in his youtube statement “It’s Coming ” and he makes it all seem very simple.
It basically entails a yogic power of a demythologized or labels-free kind. What supposedly everyone needs to do is open to the energy field of the heart chakra and the heart’s (Intuitive) intelligence. This can be superior to that of intellect or head. From this (rather Buddhist/Tantric position) you will wish the best for everyone and realize your root connection to all that is, has been and ever will be of which you are just a point of attention within the totality.
LOVE AND FEAR
Once you realize this situation you will know that there is nothing to fear. You will be assured that love is the absence of fear and fear is the absence of love. Death itself is not to be feared; it scarcely exists and is merely like the “changing of a headset”. Once you are properly aligned with the totality, you will automatically know what is right and can do it without fear of consequences or care for people’s opinions.
It is not explained how people would get in touch with the heart chakra (a centre of energy, one of seven, that are only psychically visible and exist parallel along the body with the body’s endocrine glandular system). Usually the breath and breathing would be involved with concentration on the relevant zone. In Christianity where there is no overt yogic system (though Greek Orthodox mysticism approaches it), the breath is nonetheless important. The resurrected Jesus breathes on his disciples (Joh 20:22) and the Spirit, who will soon descend at Pentecost, is very much breath and air associated and at that with both heart and the solar plexus region, the Spirit’s usual residence.
Normally a good deal of practice and exercise is involved in yogas, but it emerges in another Icke statement (“My Awakening”) that he himself gained clarity, strength, indifference and heart feeling after he began to feel an inexplicable presence. It kept returning until he was eventually pointed to a book authored by a psychic whom he subsequently met and who promised him a unique and influential future guided by “they” – whoever they were. Over a period of several months in which Icke might feel he had like a spider’s web mask across his face, he reports deep changes took place within him.
Most people with aspirations to heart knowing and who practice yoga might question access to major “enlightenment” arriving quite so quickly and so much as a gift and they might not care to travel on or endorse this path. It lends support to Christian objections to yogas, namely that they can open body and soul up to the influence of spirits (“ministers of darkness” masquerading as light like their leader Lucifer) rather than God. Some critics claim that yoga positions are in fact ritual ones with specific connection to worship of hindu deities. Anyway, it follows that what gets described by Icke as simply doing what comes naturally when you’re rightly wired to the all-that-is, may in fact be closer to doing what “they” suggest and reveal. (Christians as per 1 Joh 4:1-6 are supposed to test any spirit, 1 Joh 4:1-6 that might manifest and testing would involve asking the spirit if Jesus is Lord which if they deny, avoid or respond to in some too roundabout way would be a reason to reject them).
THE ONENESS PROBLEM
The possible role of “spirit” and spirits is however a subject in itself. What I want to emphasize here is a point which it strikes me gets ignored amid the talk of “oneness” from Icke, various mystics and religious ecumenists more generally. It could nonetheless finish paramount in support of the one world religion, not to say globalist and totalitarian agendas, that Icke himself is hostile to.
This mystical “oneness” must be suspect and even rejected as too simple but also all too real in the wrong way. For a start, are we and everything really all ONE if only we could see and connect to the totality? If everyone and everything is “one”, then we are at some level at one with every murderer, torturer, tyrant and paedophile on the planet. Also, is it really true as Icke holds, even while we and the bible may agree that love is the absence of fear (1 Joh 4:18) and similarly fear the absence of love, that there is nothing at all to fear as regards death? Biblically it is advised some fear in this area is appropriate: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, but rather fear him who can kill body and soul in hell (Matt 10:28). (Understood in that statement is that just as there is a spiritual or resurrection body, so there is a body of death that can reside in Hades).
For Christianity, there is a level at which we are indeed one. Speaking of Christ we are told, “For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible….He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together (Col 1: 15, 17). This would indicate there is a kind of all-inclusive, Christ “layer” of existence, a sort of anima mundi (world soul) underlying and holding things together. And theoretically anyone could touch and feel it through a variety of means, even sexual as in some tantra. It is one of the reasons, possibly the main reason, that non-Christian gurus and yogis can make statements, policies and feelings of a broadly Christian kind like world service, Motherpeace, unconditional love, and the refusal of all prejudice and distinctions. (See my poem The Hidden Deityhttps://wp.me/p2v96G-wZ )
The reality is however that the level touched is itself imperfect or impurified, even in its way “accursed” like Christ on the cross who becomes sin for the world (2 Cor 5:21) and is temporarily cut off from his relation with the transcendent Father/ Creator in his perfection. This sacrificial separation, which even affects nature (the sun dims at the crucifixion) given faith, acts like a door for fallen mortals to proceed further, to claim some righteousness and connection with the Father.
INTERPRETING AND CORRECTING “SOUL”
For as long as we live, what is really needed and which is broadly understood within ideas of “second birth”, is a relation to both soul and spirit. The level of spirit needs to be activated to interpret and dominate the soul level and link it to the will of the Creator. It needs to do so if soul, (which in some respects is Paul “flesh” or more broadly and accurately lower nature generally) is not to dominate and misguide soul, sometimes with regard to apparent love and truth itself.
A very simple example would be this. Soul’s oneness feelings, however arrived at, might suggest we go onto the street and in unconditional love for humanity give all our money away to just anyone when God’s will might rather be to donate it to a deserving, worthy immediately needed cause. In short, the para-intellectual force of Spirit, is activated to provide discernment in the face of feel-good thoughts and look good policies of emotion linked soul which might still be as “fallen” as sin itself for the misdirection involved. Hence the strange statement, “The word of God… is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow” (Heb 4:23).
There are all sorts of implications. I think this theme touches on implied “esoteric” dimensions of the self and even the nature and effects of sex as I indicate in some articles such as the review of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Shameless https://wp.me/p4kNWg-nD Soul and spirit should be regarded as actual light “bodies” which our beliefs and practices in the body can variously affect.
Be that as it may, I would say that presently the most vital relevance of yogic oneness claims is almost a political one driving policies. In these, as even the controversial Pope Francis has suggested for religions more generally, we are merely calling the same God by different names, (a notion which if true would deny the Jewish belief in the covenant given name of God and then the entire Christian mission to the world and the related insistent claim to difference of the first Christians). Obviously however this new credo can be made to serve various one world ideals. But these can still be unspiritual, a kind of human wisdom masquerading as ultimate Truth. It’s the sort of thing understood by the number of the Beast and in the false and last human kingdom of prophecy and Revelation, an earthly, Babylonian system whose number does not express or reach the spiritual 7 but is just a glorified humanism or human pragmatism.
It is a real and ironic possibility that Icke’s version of spirituality may be contributing to the very sort of things he seeks to warn followers against and encourages them to oppose.
The following could sound odd, even queer in a non queer theory site. I will propose that a major key to understanding the biblical story of Sodom and beyond it larger biblical attitudes towards “homosexuality” (a word the bible doesn’t use), is via implications that develop around the strange detail of Lot’s wife.
This won’t be yet another argument about historicity of the story. The Dead Sea region is very salty, and ruins in the supposed area of Sodom do reveal the world’s purest levels of brimstone (i.e.sulphur) such as is reported to have fallen on Sodom. Beyond that no more need be said here than that the story is too complex and nuanced for it to represent nothing but a folk tale around one of the salt pillars near the Dead Sea. The concern here is with important truths via implications and features of the narrative just as it stands and that arguably make for greater consistency and light.
We all know that in disobedience to an angelic command, Lot’s wife looks back at the destruction of Sodom that she and her family are being delivered from, and in consequence is turned to a pillar of salt.
Tradition, sermons and commentaries on the Genesis account would assure us that Lot’s wife (rabbinic commentary blessed her with the name, Edith) is the type who loves this world, the kind of individual who as Jesus (not in reference to Sodom) has it, is unfit for the kingdom because once having put a hand to the plough they look back (Luk 9:62). And it’s undoubtedly in relation to those people lacking suitable priorities and alertness, Jesus does say “Remember Lot’s wife (Luk 17.32). You can hardly miss it. Apart from the “Jesus wept” verse in John’s gospel, this is the shortest verse in the bible. Due to what looks like some editing issue, it’s also highlighted by being rather oddly placed. It stands between two contrasted passages of disputed reference – one addressed to perhaps mainly Gentile followers, the other to perhaps mainly Jewish followers and referring respectively to, (some maintain), a pre Tribulation Rapture of the church and a later Tribulation deliverance of Jewish followers. Whatever the application the importance of readiness is accentuated by the abrupt midpoint placement.
While there’s no reason to question that Lot’s wife was likely in love with the familiar world as represented by Sodom, one can well ask why. Wasn’t this a corrupt, oppressive place, a seat of crime? Why would she, a woman, be in love with this city of ill-reputed men, and why should her husband, without being insulted or molested, be sitting peacefully at the gate of the Sodom, whose unspecified conduct so troubled him (2 Pet 2:7), when the angels approach him? There are mysteries to this story. (With regard to Lot it has been suggested he can only sit at the gates because he is a person of authority in the city and the only reason he will offer his daughter to the men of Sodom is because his position will require in any arrangement she will not be raped. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WZ0S6VBvek).
According to the prophet Ezekiel, God declares: “This was the guilt of the your sister Sodom: She and her daughters had pride, excess of food and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did abominable things before me, therefore I removed them when I saw it (Ezek 16:49).
As often pointed out by liberal commentary and ignored by conservative, there is no stress here (and likewise not in early rabbinical commentary either) on sexual excesses as such, unless perhaps there’s a hint of it as regards “abominable things”. However, even if unacceptable sexual conduct is implied, note it is women rather than men that suffer the prophetic condemnation; not only that but the OT has no mention or law anywhere in it against lesbianism. And although some people think so, nor does the NT unless you read St Paul as breaking with the OT in Rom 1:26 about women giving up natural intercourse as indicating lesbianism – there are reasons against ancient sex traditions to suppose the meaning is the women permitted themselves to be sodomized by men for contraceptive or whatever reasons. This fits better with some observations I make later about Paul and violent sex. But if in whatever way women were to blame for something at the heart of Sodom, (adultery? but that’s not “abomination” which usually has ritual associations like the Torah-banned male sacred prostitution), all the more reason that at the end of the story it’s a woman, Lot’s wife, finishes a punished example.
God says to Ezekiel, “I removed them when I saw it”, which could make Sodom seem a simple example of immediate divine judgement, but the original Genesis story indicates God sees because he is invoked to do so. “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah. I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me” (Gen 18:21). Early Christians understood this Lord who goes down as inquirer/informer for the Almighty to be the pre-incarnate Christ, he who says “Remember Lot’s wife”, itself an interesting emphasis from Jesus. There are, after all, so many other OT examples of punished hubris, lawlessness or indifference in males who could have been cited in the course of his preaching.
RECOGNIZING ANGELS AND DIFFERENCE
So we gather that while citizens like Lot’s wife may not have been suffering within Sodom itself, others had been suffering outside of, and because of, the city. That the inhabitants are at very least no keepers of common rules and values is betrayed by the way they are prepared to treat the visiting angels. This is with contempt for ancient and more recent middle eastern values as regards the hospitality it has long been taken as a virtual crime in these regions to refuse (travelling desert peoples need to be able to claim food and water from strangers).
But on even just this point, it cannot be said in mitigation of the Sodomites’ ultra-inhospitable behaviour that it was enabled by failure to recognize and respect that the visiting “men” were really angels. If the visitors did not appear as precisely angels, they certainly stood out as different.
Lot himself does not immediately recognize the angels as such. However, Lot plainly registers a difference. He calls the men “my lords” and bows to the earth before them and goes off to prepare what would seem like a Passover meal since it includes unleavened bread. This detail is possibly a symbolic hint in the narrative that judgement will fall under the season and values of fiery Aries, whose new era is dissolving the powers of the more matriarchal, preceding era of luxuriating, “feminine” Taurus.
NOSTALGIA FOR CORRUPTION
In parenthesis and before going further into the subject of the men of Sodom, I want to speculate trans-historically on just what kind of “culture” type Sodom could represent, so wretched in one way, yet as Lot’s wife would see it, in another way attaching, perhaps peaceful and secure. Jesus describes the citizens as eating, drinking, buying, selling, planting and building to the moment of their destruction (Luk 17:28). In some respects living the normal life of nearly normal people.
There can of course be no exact equivalent, but one example of a corrupt, oppressive society yet one engaging the intense nostalgic attachment of many, would be the France of the last half century or so before the Revolution. According to the diplomat and priest, Prince Talleyrand (pictured above), “those who have not lived,,,,in the years before the revolution do not know the sweetness of living and cannot imagine what is was like to have happiness in life”.
The age was certainly stylish and refined, but to enjoy it one would need to have belonged to the first or second estates comprising around 150.000 members who depended on the support of an around 27 million, largely peasant, third estate. This dependence gave scope to living life as a long banquet or party that privately included games of seduction up to and including real life liaisons dangereuses. (In the above delightful but controversial Fragonard picture, his mistress kicks a young bishop her slippers. Less elegantly there are pictures of society women stuffing themselves with food like Ezekiel’s daughters of Sodom). The philosopher Diderot rejoiced at the death of the Louis XV’s mistress, Mme de Pompadour, who had wasted national fortunes on luxuries and unnecessary building projects. But women like the Pompadour were as never before celebrated in society, often guiding its mind and tastes through the influential salons they hosted.
As in especially rococo art, the period glorified women – Marie Antoinette was said to be the only man in Versailles – but domestic architecture might include secret doors and staircases for women to receive lovers, while their men might be out doing whatever, driving from Versailles to visit the brothels of Paris or out hunting. Even the much maligned Marie Antoinette expressed concern to Louis XV about hunting parties which rode roughshod over the fields of peasants destroying their crops. The king opined she was sensitive and did nothing.
Sufficient style and eloquence covered and ignored almost anything from the numerous abandoned illegitimate offspring of the ubiquitous affairs, (unfortunates not allowed even to claim bread from their progenitors) to the libertine pursuit of almost any sexual activity with persons of any age, sex or social station much as in the real life exploits of the likes of the pornographic author, the Marquis de Sade.
A ROMAN CHANGE IN EMPHASIS
Viewing Sodom in this way as a type of “culture” became common from especially the first century onwards and especially under the influence of the Hellenised Jewish philosopher, Philo. Faced with the loose Roman imperial age morals and the un- Jewish open (though never universally approved) homosexualities of Greece and Rome, Philo began to read the story of Sodom through the lens of his own times. Some myth and gay panic attached to his views like the notion that if same sex attraction is allowed it puts the world at risk of being depopulated. More importantly and beyond this eccentricity, as individuals read contemporary conditions through the classical lens, there would emerge a new moral emphasis, one based on the objective Aristotelian reason that distinguishes natural from unnatural. What happens between men becomes less like male temple prostitution, namely a ritual pollution, than something contra naturam for anyone anywhere.
St Paul, himself raised in Tarsus, the birthplace of the Stoic philosophy which was theoretically against whatever is contra naturam, may be said to have taken this ball and run with it, Notoriously declaring in Romans concerning Romans in the city he had not yet visited, “in the same way the men, giving up natural intercourse with women were consumed with passion for one another….(Rom 1.27). Of course, most gay persons across history would insist they either never gave up intercourse with women in the first place, or else had had it but without fulfilment. The apostle would need to be describing his impression of a high society recreational bisexuality and at that through a value judgement coloured by certain classical notions of “excess” in which same-sex attraction was still mostly deemed an add-on to normal heterosex).
In quite a departure from both the Genesis text and Ezekiel’s words, Sodom for NT writers virtually becomes another Rome. The women of Sodom along with Lot’s wife disappear from the picture and the inhabitants are now an example of “the “licentiousness of the lawless” so vexing to Lot according to 2 Pet 2:11. Genesis and Ezekiel can prooftext for so little in this area, it has be that the city’s decadence is simply linked to the men of Sodom’s presumed intended sodomy.
It was customary by Jesus’ time to refer to Lot as “Righteous Lot” and Jesus refers to him in that way, but one could feel that Peter on Lot gilds the Genesis lily to the point it can be read, as by conservatives it is liable to be read, to support the idea any man is good who isn’t gay and violent! Years ago when my studies took in a wide swathe of gay issues, I recall reports about how gays are mostly less aggressive than straights and police officers even like gay as opposed to straight celebrations because they’re easier to manage and less likely to produce mayhem. But the men of Sodom are of a type that does create mayhem.
For its historical effects any Roman era revisioning or additions to Genesis and Ezekiel mark a dangerous interpretive swerve, the more so when it derives from prestigious biblical authorities. Taking a page from the Lutherans who have always been more willing than some to place statements of Jesus above those of the apostles, I should wish to know what Jesus thought or said of all this. And arguably we have at least a clue from the book of Jude, who is understood to be Jesus’ brother, thus necessarily a direct party to some of Jesus’ views over time.
THE MEN OF SODOM
But back first to the men of Sodom. They may well have been promiscuous and insolent with it – Isaiah though not like Ezekiel under direct inspiration describes the Israelites like Sodom for not hiding but proclaiming their sin (Is 3:9), in short being brazen about what they did. Prostitution was likely major in the urban scene. Trafficking for it could even have been an aspect of the city’s oppression of surrounding peoples in the way that systems of prostitution tend to be, at the same time as they remain half invisible while accepted by society as more or less necessary.
Whatever the situation it is in the highest degree unlikely the men of Sodom were, or even could be, all gay. According to the narrative and in what may be a rhetorical flourish, “all” the men of the city, “young and old” gathered outside Lot’s house demanding to be given the men in order to “know” them (the likeliest, though not absolutely secure meaning, is to have sex with them). If this was the score, as often enough stressed in modern and revisionist commentary, it would constitute not gay sex but gang rape by men necessarily of some bisexual capacity and interests. (There have in any case in many cultures historically been a deliberate humiliation of defeated people through rape).
The point should be obvious because not only would the citizens need to reproduce themselves, but Lot offers them his daughters in preference to “this evil thing”, (which could mean the gang rape, the criminal refusal of the laws of hospitality, or both). Presumably Lot wouldn’t make his scandalous offer if he believed none of the men would be interested! But in line with the “pride” of Sodom, (albeit originally attributed to its women), probably taking offence at the unforeseen entry of arrivals of striking presence and appearance, wishing only to satisfy their pride, the men disregard Lot’s offer….
Besides this we know that in ancient societies and especially upon prisoners of war, male rape was inflicted by way of a shaming punishment, namely a supposed womanizing of the person. The whole subject of “homosexuality” before modern times was much confused by notions of social status and various attached assumptions regarding gender that are now seriously foreign to us. Whatever, some degree of punishment surely applies in the Sodom story – more or less. But actually there could be more and we seem to be told it.
THE JESUS TAKE ON SODOM?
The epistle of Jude, Jesus’ brother, supplies the bible a short message whose chief burden is strong opposition to Gnostic heretics who reduce grace to a perverse licence. No need to consider the much disputed Gnostic theology and behaviour. Enough to say that in some of its sects it seems behaviour and rites might include anything from wife swapping to drinking the blood of menses as a sacrament.
In the course of Jude’s tirade, he compares the Gnostics to the fallen angels of Genesis and then he says, or according to some translation appears to say, “Likewise Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities which in the same manner as they indulged in sexual immorality [fornication in KJV] and pursued unnatural lust, serve as an example…..”. I quote from the NSRV which correctly enough supplies a note for an alternative to “pursued unnatural lust” which last is liable to be understood by conservatives in the Pauline way as gay lust. However the meaning is really “pursued alien flesh“, something even the KJV’s translation allows. And “alien flesh” signifies angels.
Hardly could anything else be signified because Jude’s whole argument begins with reference to the fallen angels who in Genesis 6 had intercourse with women and whose offspring were the catalyst of great evil upon earth. On this more cosmic, war-of-the-worlds type reading, the sin of the men of proud Sodom would have to be, knowingly or unknowingly, their determination to “know” and/or degrade angels by whatever means was most convenient to them. It is possible too that, rather like the libertine rococo era males who would try almost anything with anyone we can assume a decadent curiosity to experience something, anything, new. This dimension even seems implied by the way the Sodomites are described as evidently already given to “sexual immorality” – exporneuo is the Greek word for this indicating an excessive or extreme fornication – that inclines them to further presumption.
But given this point, let’s remember what “fornication” biblically and even for many Christian centuries meant in many societies. This was primarily sex with prostitutes rather than with just anyone; and the implication was thus normally heterosexual, not homosexual. Again the picture bespeaks a Sodom and Sodomites more akin to eighteenth century try-anything libertines rather than any kind of homosexual in a modern and formal psychological sense. These men are likely already much familiar with prostitutes and the brothel, but the arrival of the strangely distinctive men presents itself both as an occasion of offence and a challenge to the curiosity of sated imaginations.
RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAL OR…..?
Before concluding on Jesus and his likely understanding of the Sodom story, it is necessary to return to the matter of the first century and its changed emphasis to the reading of the original Genesis story. It’s one that I suggest Jesus didn’t go along with, but which Christians later would do and to the harm of true perspectives and sometimes healthy lives.
The ease and plausibility of the first century transition to a depiction of those today we would call “homosexuals” as Sodomites exemplifying irrational contra naturam impulses, was facilitated by the fact the Sodom story is effectively one of a will to rape, an obviously irrational act.
But the change in emphasis ignores the great gulf between Semitic and European understanding of sex, what it is, does and signifies. For the west most everything, including sex, does tend to be dualistically divided up into “rational” and “irrational”, whereas the Semitic polarity is more like one between states and feelings of war and peace at the same time regarding all sex as an irrationality with even marital sex a rape of sorts for force and excitement.
As it evolved, the Jewish wedding ceremony contained imagery and custom that domesticated notions of carrying off the bride as though by rape/abduction. Even Christ’s end times Rapture or harpazo of the church for the marriage of the Lamb is a sudden snatching away. The sex act was truly an all-defining absolute. Originally there had not even been a Hebrew wedding, there was only simple consummation. There was certainly no rationalized, modern style “living together” on agreed terms; the simple fact of having had full penetrative sex with someone already constituted marriage to them. It’s apparently the reason Paul can warn his Corinthian converts against marrying one’s body with its indwelling Holy Spirit to the city’s ubiquitous prostitutes (1 Cor 6:15).
Can this make any sense to us today? Any answer is beyond present scope and I have touched on some points involved in various articles like https://wp.me/p4kNWg-nD Here I would only say the Semitic view is perennially relevant if one accepts what seems implied of a biblical anthropology of the self and sex with some affinity for especially Asian esoteric doctrines of soul bodies which can blend into one and hence are affected by all erotic experience.
To the extent specifically sodomy could adversely affect the reputedly difficult and dangerous base chakra of the subtle body of esoteric systems, it could always be seen as in a special way a rape in its own right apart from all other considerations and thus wholly negative. I rather suspect that is how St Paul saw things.
Although conservatives are happy to reaad and understand 1 Cor 6:9 as referring to (active) ‘homosexuals’ or “sodomites’ excluded from the kingdom, as one classical scholar points out, in fact the little used arsenokoites word has the meaning of murderer orrapist. 1) Paul probably doesn’t see, as I would maintain Jesus does, the possibility of persons being born and naturally gay orientated; they are simply people defined by doing sodomy; and through the re-visioned Sodom story, Paul then perceives only a criminality that sets apart or even erases the person from all consideration and respect. This dismissal via the notion of a special kind of male rape is a first step along the way to that medieval position peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nominandum (that terrible sin not mentioned among Christians).
Though I personally assume “sodomitical” relations between a committed and sensitive couple can work and don’t automatically engage major psychological or spiritual problems, among the more casual and uncommitted they could and sometimes do appear to present a few problems. Accordingly, from any esoteric angle it’s probably true to say that the increasingly explored more “tantric” erotic alternatives might be more appropriate and fulfilling to the same sex orientated. And more than that need not be said and speculated here on a sensitive, complex subject; but we do have to return to Jesus and Lot’s Wife whom Jesus would have us “remember”.
JUDGING AND REMEMBERING SODOM
Without suggesting Jesus lets Sodom off the hook, undeniably he several times declares it will be better for Sodom and Gomorrah on Judgement Day than for some of his contemporaries. It is virtually guaranteed Jesus saw the story, as per Jude, as one involving a poisonous spiritual evil, an attack upon angels by persons of darkened minds (in which connection it’s relevant that when some of the Sodomites try to force down Lot’s door, the angels strike them blind). But Jesus has nothing to say specifically of the men and their sin (there is nothing about “homosexuality” or sufficiently equivalent ancient indicators for that). Yet he does tell us to remember Lot’s wife. Why?
For Jesus, Sodom stands as much and more as a warning to anyone in relation to awareness itself, especially in apocalyptic terms. Ezekiel had it in for the women rather than the men of Sodom, and possibly Jesus does. Lot’s wife represents attachment and wrong priorities. She is favoured in being delivered yet she disregards the warning not to look back. Given this is an angelic command, she could be considered as spiritually disobedient as her male compatriots are insolent towards higher power. To every libertine Epstein there is liable to be an enabling, encouraging Maxwell, and given Ezekiel’s declarations on Sodom, readers are perhaps intended to assume the men took some of their character from the permission and example of the women – note that even Lot, though he doesn’t look back once started, he does linger (Gen19:16) at the moment the angel urges him to leave.
Once more consider the case of rococo, Enlightenment France which owed so much of its intellectual character to the salons of its society women. The original aim was admirable and succeeded as intended to render dry as dust male subjects more interesting through female input and to set all social life on a more civilised ying/yang basis. But over time the salon movement became as good as an anti-God, anti-Bible one. A leading saloniere, the Marquise du Deffand joked that reading the Bible you could tell the Holy Spirit had “le mauvais gout” (bad taste by salon standards). Britain’s first avowed atheist philosopher, David Hume, found an ardent admirer and promoter in the Prince de Conti’s mistress, Mme de Boufflers. Scepticism and unbelief thrived in salon milieux.
Male corruption is all too familiar. But there is a corruption that is distinctly female. It can involve an easy permissiveness, a kind of decadent democracy of feeling in which any hierarchy of values is lost to an all-inclusive tolerance. While it may be open to hearing any opinion, it is only one more opinion. And that is what we may suppose in relation to Lot’s wife, whom Jesus indicates was unready and implies was undisciplined. What is even an angel’s warning to her but one more opinion, interesting perhaps, but nothing more? How could it matter to satisfy curiosity as opposed to respect a ruling?
The story of Sodom is about presumption, whether against the needy that the citizens didn’t help or the angels they disrespected. But it is cited by way of example not simply of judgement (that association was a commonplace by Jesus’ times), but as an object lesson in something akin to the principle baldly stated in 1 Pet 4:18 (in free paraphrase of Pro 11.31), “If it is hard for the righteous to be saved what will become of the ungodly and sinners?” The lesson is that persons must cooperate with the work of offered deliverance through right thinking or they stand to lose. Lingering Lot half cooperates, his wife not at all.
It is hardly original on my part, revisionist style, to insist that the Sodom story is not one of divine judgement on gays. Today a scholarly and even just common sense reading of the text cannot allow otherwise.. It’s rather a scandal that persons in religion like Franklin Graham will still use their influence to declare the mischievous falsehood that God punished Sodom for “homosexuality” and that society is at risk of judgement for tolerance in this direction (2)
Any originality here simply increases the case against a homophobic reading while it adds a coherence that helps resolve puzzles like why Ezekiel (the only biblical authority claiming to comment on Sodom under divine inspiration), doesn’t even mention the men of Sodom, while Jesus’ main word on the Sodom subject is again not the nature of the men, but “Remember Lot’s Wife”.
This need to “remember” would seem to be necessary because everybody, including not least women whose influence is perhaps stronger than they admit, can demonstrate a Sodom mind-set. Rather like feminist theologians who dismiss resurrection as a male obsession or wonder if a male redeemer could or should save women, this mindset lacks the perspectives that accompany any awakened, deliverance and salvation accepting consciousness. I am not versed in the traditions of alchemy, but I gather salt represents body, and as a pillar of salt the fate of Lot’s wife may additionally hint at how the Sodom mindset ultimately sinks into stasis, becomes motionless, fixed and imprisoned in matter only.
The symbol of salt
1) Ann Nyland Study New Testament for Lesbians, Gays, Bi and Transgender, Stirling Publishing, 2007, p.263.
The symbol of salt
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