Echoes of a past life: New Moon

New Moon New York was an open Pagan circle in New York City in the early 1990s. This footage has surfaced, bringing back some memories, a surprising memory hole, and a bit of personal embarassment. This video includes footage of several events, only one of which I attended, the probable “Lughnassadh” ritual that begins about at the 11 min. mark, held in either NYC's Central Park or Inwood Park. Yours truly may be seen at heard about 16:35, bearing that fuzzy red wheel. Yeah, we took ourselves pretty seriously, but we also had lots of fun. As silly as this looks to me 20+ years later, I learned a lot about myself and the world in that period. I'm pretty glad I graduated from this sort of Cosplay/LARP scene, now in my mid-50s I'm sort of mortified by the trappings of that chapter of my spirituality. That said, that moment of spirituality healed me of some fundamental life hurt and I wouldn't want to erase that chapter of my life even if it seems so curiously foreign to me now.

But these were good people. I note with sadness several faces no longer among the living, not least the legendary Alexei Kondratiev and his partner Len. I see my dear magical partner C, and my incredibly handsome but deeply conflicted and closeted boyfriend W, nicknamed by C “Mr. Outdoors.” It's good to remember my friends from New Moon. I'm surprised at how little of this event I remember, it all seems just out of reach. Which is okay, it was a really long time ago and I have moved far far away from that moment in my life.

And now, back to life as a 21st-century communist.

Echoes of a Past Life - Is This the Boy Side of the God/dess?

This is another piece from Queer Pagan days, and another polemic, if you will, against the gender division central to much of modern Pagan belief.

My attraction to Paganism was initially to its idea of the immanent and female Goddess that is the living planet earth around us. I was attracted to the work of many feminist scholars (some of whose work has been discredited in "scientific" circles) who interpreted early human religious beliefs as worship of an Earth Mother, alive and present in the world around us. This, all in counterpoint to the Judeo-Christian concept of transcendent, invisible, and male God figure living somewhere up in the sky, ie, in heaven. Many of these feminist scholars portrayed human history as an extension of a struggle for male-female dominance, suggesting that modern alienated and male-dominated society was the fruit of the victory of "male" sky religion over "female" earth religion. As a gay person and a feminist I found a lot to admire in that concept; and I still think there is some validity in it. Certainly it's a fact that history is written by the victors, and it's tremendously productive to reexamine history through a lens that rejects the triumph of Judeo-Christian values over "primitive" ones as necessarily progressive.

But as my spirituality deepened I came to think that viewing everything through the duality of gender was about as productive spiritually and politically to me as it was to me personally, which is to say that as a non-heterosexual, flipping male-dominant spirituality on its head didn't get any closer to the way I experience the world as a same-gender loving individual. In Santeria, the religion I wound up adopting (although I would say my belief-system remains personal and idiosyncratic beyond somebody else's particular definition), gender is more fluid, and so to me a more accurate reflection of reality. It's not that I think my own gender is fluid, it's not, but that I think the world around us, especially its spiritual aspect, is not as easily split into clear male and female halves. I'm less interested in the division but in the unity. I don't see that counterpoint between sky God and earth Mother Goddess anymore: it's all one amazing, glorious, living presence, multi-faceted and miraculous beyond measure. It's not useful for me to see God the supreme being as an old man sitting on a cloud somewhere, though I certainly don't reject the image of Santeria's Obatala as an old white-clad man up on a mountain. And frankly it's no longer useful to see a Supreme Goddess as merely a fertile and fecund Mother hiding in the dirt beneath us (though again I don't reject the image of Santeria's Yemaya nurturing us from her ocean lair). All these ways of trying to describe the barely describable spiritual experience are simply not counter posed. They can all exist together. In unity. And in complete inadequacy for anything actually approaching accurate description of the mystery that is Life, that is God.

The halves of the yin and the yang, those are all present everywhere in us and around us. The productive tension of male and female aspects is not all external: it's not all about men and women. Sometimes it's about finding a unique balance point inside ourselves, as solitary individual beings, enabling us to find productive fulfillment in living out our lives, no matter the literal or metaphoric genitalia attached to ourselves or the ones we love.

Anyway, my original essay is below. I note, this time, the absence of a pseudonym!

(Artwork note: the photo above is from a gravestone in northeast Pennsylvania, photographed by me about 1995. The art below is a woodcut of witches dancing around the horned god).



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Is This the Boy Side of the God/dess?
by Ian Scott Horst
Originally appeared in the Heartfire 9994 (Winter 1994) issue of Queer Pagans Newsletter

In traditional Wicca, priestesses are supposed to wear a moon crown to suggest their incarnation of the female Goddess, and male priests are supposed to wear a stag-horned crown to suggest their incarnation of the male God. Some time ago I took to wearing to certain rituals as a talisman a piece of antler I had long ago bought in Finland. The amulet is a piece of reindeer antler, and it became to me a powerful magical tool. Then I discovered something important about it: In reindeer, antlers are found on both the males and females. And this fact became emblematic of something for me, and this knowledge increased the power of the tool.

For me the idea of the Horned God is an idea full of paradox. His energy is energy I know I possess: energy I have felt myself channel in ritual, energy I have surrendered to whilst thrashing about in bed, energy I have faced as I stared into the eyes of other Priests. When I look at my own sexuality and mortality, I find in this idea of the Horned God tremendous strength in seeing my own sensual alive-ness as the presence of the Divine. Its presence within me in the fuse-short minutes that are this life, my life, is a gift. But I find myself questioning, who, or what, exactly, is this Horned God?

I spent years as a political person on a trajectory from hard-core leftist to queer activist, and so when I found in the convergence of my feminist principles and awakening spirituality the concept of God as Goddess, as Great Mother, as Cosmic Female, I found myself in a moment of harmonic epiphany. Like most of you, presumably, I found my rejection of an invisible male authority-figure-God and my embrace of a materially-present loving Goddess a liberating, empowering act. And here on this path I found not anti-sexual judgment but a commitment to the idea that all consensual acts of sexuality and sensuality were celebrations of Divine spirit.

There are many paths that might be considered Neo-Pagan. Orthodox Wicca holds that the Goddess is half of a male-female divine couple, the Lord and Lady. Wiccans love to divide everything into male and female correspondence: The Lady is, I suppose, the female Deity I've described above. The Lord is the Horned God. His images are powerful, based on an amalgam of ancient paleolithic art, Celtic and Graeco-Roman myth and medieval English folklore. He is represented as being half human and half animal. His stag horns suggest the vibrancy of the wild animal, the mortality of the hunted, and the literal "horniness" of a rutting beast.

I call myself a Priest/ess now. I am male: and like you, I celebrate my gender because it's who I am. I am proudly and openly Queer, and like you I celebrate my sexuality because it's who I am. Like you I find Divine inspiration, validation and connection in the way I live, in the way I will die; in the way I fuck or get fucked, in the way I walk down the street, in the way I eat, shit, and sleep. You, man or woman, are you different? Is this a boy thing? Or is the lesson of the Horned God more simple: you better live and fuck now while you have the chance. I don't know about you but I don't think the Horned God is half of anything.

Echoes of a Past Life - Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow

I wrote this little blur of Pagan poetry for the occasion of Stonewall 25, the 1994 celebration of the anniversary of the Stonewall riots; the beginning of gay pride. It appeared unsigned on a Queer Pagans flyer. (The photo is by me: a detail of a tombstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, Czech Republic).

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We weren't then who we are now, nor then, did we know who we would come to be.
Imagining, once, we almost dreamed, and then forgot, the possibility of becoming who tomorrow we must discover in our bathroom mirrors,
and then, pretending, seeing no longer visions of unfolding design,
nor dust now remolded into plastic imitation,
but forging anew, like steel from iron,
like earthy coal from unaffordable diamonds,
like a ride on the subway from a pillow-tossed morning dream,
the stain on our hands, the dirt under our fingernails,
all proving gloriously our miraculous aliveness, and the inevitable perfection of Her world,
and the spiral that appears before our feet, like a precipice, yes,
but like a memory too,
and so we dance together, now, us,
in this place, here, who we are,
feeling each other's warm moving blood through thin membranes of palm and seeing all as it should be,
perfect and infinite.
No, not yesterday, today, now, the way to tomorrow unfolding as we walk.

Echoes of a past life: A Ball of Mirrors

It's a cold and rainy day after Christmas. I spent part of the afternoon ripping Madonna CDs to my computer so that I could listen to them at my desk; it was a little like watching my life flash before my eyes. Sure she's celebrity at its worst: the fake English accent, the African child-stealing, the atrocious acting, the overall narcissism. But she's actually a talented musician with a point of view and a shrewd sensibility for brilliantly surfing trends in pop dance music, leaving her junior imitators floundering in her wake. I can wax rhapsodic about obscure spiritual jazz, Brazilian art music, and obscure seventies gay disco, but somehow Madonna, as mainstream as she is, has held my attention over the years.

I actually remember the first time I heard of her: it was shortly after I moved to New York City, I believe. A graffiti artist named Michael Stewart had been killed by NYC cops. This was the era of Keith Haring and that whole East Village art scene, and the artsy counter-culture looked out for one another. I was walking in the village and was handed a flyer for a benefit in Stewart's honor: there would be a quite unknown singer at the benefit and her name was Madonna. To my regret I didn't hang on to that flyer or attend the event; shortly thereafter I heard her name again on the radio, singing this catchy new tune called "Everybody" that was becoming a big hit: a catchy urban sound with just a schmear of new wave and NYC proto-hiphop. I'm sure she never looked back.

I used to love to go dancing; and dance music, being so tied to its age, paints an easily-traced story of the decades. While Madonna stepped onto the scene after the heydey of disco and my youth, she's been there ever since. For the record Madonna and I are about the same age, and I can't imagine putting my own achy 51-year-old body through a night of dancing like I used to; I'm surely in awe of Madonna's physical regimen.

I wrote this essay on the power and meaning of dancing for the Queer Pagans zine back in the 1990s. In Madonna years that would be about the time of "Bedtime Stories." (For the record my favorite Madonna album is probably "Ray of Light" from 1998; its spirituality and rock- and trancemusic-influenced intensity has really held up for me more than some of her more sugar-coated earlier material.) Anybody following my writing here will note a repeated reference to an episode recounted in an earlier piece "Will the Gay Movement Survive AIDS." I'm happy that the point of view in this piece some ten years later is so much less bleak.

I opened this article with a bit of ancient Greek pagan poetry: an excerpt from Euripides' "The Bacchae" beginning "When shall I dance once more with bare feet the all-night dances." Click on the graphic to read this full size; this is a scan from the original QP zine.



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A Ball of Mirrors Like the Moon,
Communion, Like With God
by Ian Scott Horst
from QP #11, Ice & Promise 9994 [Feb. 1994]

I remember my first visit to a queer disco. It was in Chicago, probably late 1978. The place was the Bistro, located in a near-north noman's land home to low industrial buildings, drag clubs and leather bars. The crowd at the Bistro was mixed, a combination of gay men dressed down with fag-hags and adventuresome heterosexuals dressed up.

Near the entrance was a bar for serious drinkers and lost singles, but everyone else headed for the labrynthine arrangement of tables, potted palms, and velveteen divans circling the raised light-box that was the dance floor.

If I remember correctly, the dance floor was a checkerboard of flashing under-lit panels and shiny black gloss. At its edges were vents through which a dry ice fog would be pumped in the peak of our ecstasy. Hidden in a false ceiling above were trap doors from which confetti and feathers would swirl. Huge thumping speakers vibrated at the corners of the floor. Hanging from the rafters amidst a tangle of spinning colored lamps and flashing strobes was the mirrored ball, the ubiquitous idol we would worship there. For this disco was not just a place to socialize, but a place to lose oneself to the dance, to vibrate to rhythm until we soared through the very clouds to worship physical and spiritual ecstasy. Of course, a little LSD helped too.

Since it was the late '70s and not the late '80s, our dance was sexually charged ina way uncomplicated by mortal fear. And this was when we could dance to the entirety of Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park" suite without pangs of guilt or pains of betrayal over her as yet unuttered quips about "Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve."

It is interesting to me that pre-AIDS gay male culture was wrapped so inseparably with the dance. The disco become a kind of ritual religion, a spinning, whirling rite, a prelude to sexual abandon, a cultural center, a meeting ground. It was also, of course, self-absorbed, inward-looking and narcissistic. It was as though the mirror ball was not just a mechanism for spinning colored rays about the dance floor but a glittering symbol intoxicating us with our own images. For as we spun about the floor we found ourselves pulled in, to our center, finding our souls touched by the fire but in a way that left each alone, as though dreaming. It is an odd thing to be able to dance in a crowded floor and find the crowd melt aaway and disappear as the music seizes control.

Those were the days, you may remember, of the great schism between boys and girls. Chicago, like New York, is a big city, and there was little of that brother-and-sister-under-fier camaraderie of 1970s small town queer America. We dancing queens assumed at the time that lesbians were all stomping around the woods with their shirts off criticizing us for our puerile humor and hedonistic excesses. I suspect the truth is that queer women were undergoing their own formatice ecstasies, dancing in new found and self-shaped freedom.

Who would have dreamed this future, there, under those circumstances? Yet that which is dear to us now grew from seeds in those times. Even Queer Pagans as both people and thing owe direct lineage to those times of the dreaming dance. Starhawk's "The Spiral Dance" was first published in 1979, and is to considerable extent a product of the separatist lesbian feminist culture of that time. "The Spiral Dance" was a major force in opening Paganism to an audience beyond the heterosexist orthodox English traditionalist Wiccans. The Radical Faeries were officially founded also in 1979,a product of the new gay male self-awareness albeit in rejection of its materialism. And from the Faeries Pagans learned much about ritual innovation.

And so eventually the world spun on. I remember in the mid '80s going out with a friend to soem short-lived dance club in Manhattan. It was a weeknight, and the place was empty. Alone on the dance floor was a man with a pair of fans, lost in music. He was beautiful, his face a portrait of rapture, his solitude exquisite, lost in an act of inner communion both furious and serene. By chance we found out his name, and to sum up the 1980s, a month or two later we read his obituary in the gay press.

But the dance that is life continued, and something happened, at least to me, at the turn of the decade.

Jutting off the edge of Greenwich Village into the Hudson are the remnants of several abandoned piers. For years these piers were a kind of seedy sexual Disneyland. Even when there was no more privacy when the buildings on these piers were dissembled and carted away, the sex continued. Eventually the organizers of lesbian and gay pride day decided to throw an after-parade party, a dance, on one of these piers. And it was magic.

Under the sky, with laserbeams and fireworks instead of spinning lamps, with speakers two stories tall, thousands of us danced together. Queer people, men and women, survivors, entranced together, raising a powerful energy. It was different this time: we were high on adrenaline and pride. Instead of feeling like a vortex, pulling it all inside, I felt like bursting, like exploding with queer fire into an expanding, sweaty mass of brothers and sisters. Our mouths were open, roaring joy. Within the year I became a Pagan.

Dance is madness. Invisible bonds spring from music, wrapping themselves about your limbs, writhing around your hips, pulling and turning, transforming your body into the manic puppet of energy, of ecstasy. It is a seizure of the spirit. Open yourself to the invisible fury. Surrender to it. Cut the bonds of self-consciousness. Let it go. Become invisible. Dream a new world.

Accept communion.

Echoes of a past life: Healing Darkness

Here's another piece from the Queer Pagans 'Zine: the longest one I wrote. It covers a lot of ground, touching on some pivotal moments in my spiritual journey. It's interesting to me that I chose not to identify the specific goddess archetype I felt I was interacting with until the last portion of this piece. Although I felt devoted to Hecate/Hekate, it became less and less important to me that the spiritual energy I experienced bore any name tied to a specific pantheon. My spiritual practice yielded more information about this divine force than my attempted research of the historical record of the ancient Hellenes or medieval witches. It's also ironically funny to me that as far removed as I now feel from the Neo-Pagan path and its community, the tattoo of Hecate's wheel that I had etched into my arm in this period is still there begging explanation from those who see it and ask about it. Anyway, the word "God" is much shorter and less suspicious, and if it causes its own kind of confusion, these days I much prefer it to the more exotic and complicatedly capitalized constructions of these earlier words. Note: I've added a few parenthetical details here and there in this piece to flesh out details, noted in italics.

Healing Darkness: A Meditation in Three Parts
By Ian Scott Horst
from QP #15, Halloween 9994 [Fall 1994]

Part 1: Vows and Promises

Of all the God/dess, one came to me first, and for that I will be ever grateful.

A friend of mine lay dying. He was thin, and his skin seemed tight and brittle. I tried talking to him, but I wasn't sure he heard me. His gaze was no longer full of the man I knew, but something focused far away from where I sat, holding his flaccid hand.

It would make a great story to say that as we sat there, a goddess descended into the hospital room, bore him aloft, and held me in her healing embrace. But it was not like that at all.

He died a couple days later and his family repossessed his body, shunned his gay friends and lovers at his funeral, and tried to throw his lover out of their apartment.

John's death happened at a time when I was trying to figure out a lot of things for myself. I found myself outliving some important friends and many treasured beliefs and unsure of my footing. The spiritual crisis I had been dodging for several years descended upon me, forcing me to examine who I was, what I was doing, what I wanted, why I was.

The short version of the story is that I discovered Paganism, and immersed myself it it, this new part of myself aware and longing for satiety. But I didn't understand a lot of things: while the Divine presence was easy enough to feel alone under a Full Moon in Prospect Park, it was harder to pull from the myths and rituals of the traditions I was trying to understand.

Then I discovered Her. As John [Moroney -ish]'s death became a part of my life, I realized that death is always a part of life. In fact, without death there is no life. Without the darkness there is no lightness. I meditated on these things and pondered what happens in the crossroads.

And all of a sudden, that which had felt abstract about Paganism became real. And suddenly She touched me in such a way as to convince me of Her beingness. And Her touch was not sweetness and light, no, but the darkness of sleep and the night, the power of She Who Changes.

Her darkness was not the darkness of evil or the macabre. I was not tempted to trade my chalice for a skull goblet or festoon myself with black lipstick. But She was about death, about understanding its place in life, about accepting its challenge, about the balance which is the natural order of things.

And although the truths She taught me began to heal me from the wounds I had suffered, Her presence began to be a bit more than I could bear. To consider death at every turn, to marvel at its purpose, to wonder at its finality, to embrace its inevitability; these were not easy things.

And so I conceived of a plan: I volunteered to perform a public ritual [for New York New Moon, an open circle--ish]. She Herself had taught it to me: a re-creation of Her crossroads, a place to meet Her, to appease Her, to open to Her healing touch, to offer and to learn.

I would organize this ritual, I would introduce Her to anyone who came, and then I would say goodbye to Her, ridding myself of what was beginning to feel like a burden.

It was the first public ritual I ever led, and it was a great success. Many people came, and to the surprise of those of us who organized it, it raised tremendous power; power which I felt but had no idea what to do with. When it was over many people came up to me to say how grateful they were.

The following weekend I went to a Pagan gathering [the Earthspirit Community's Twilight Covening--ish]. Also attending were many of the people who had organized and attended the ritual. But there was problem, my friends said. One woman had had a traumatic experience in the ritual. An old health problem had resurfaced, and she felt that the poorly grounded energy of the ritual was responsible. I apologized for my inexperience. But no, it's not just that, I was told. This woman thinks that she has been cursed by Her, the Goddess invoked at the crossroads in the circle. Would I, they wanted to know. please ask Her to remove the whammy that this woman had received.

And so I went alone to cast a circle, to recreate the crossroads, to call Her down, to perform the ritual I thought I was free of.

Exhausted from the gathering, and in choking clouds of incense I called Her. She came. And She spoke to me. She told me that it was an illusion to think I could be free of Her. I must embrace Her, and only then would I find healing and what I sought. Each dark of the moon, she made me swore, I would call her. I would honor Her. I would recreate Her crossroads, burn Her a black candle, sing Her healing song. She would be my friend and companion. She would be the night that I carried with me into the day.

No I was not free to refuse. I made the promise, the vow. And I waited for morning.

Part 2: Crows

I called it, in my journal, crow-woman, but it never felt comfortable around my neck. And maybe that was the point.

I bought it because I had been working, I thought, with Her crows. It had yellow and red and black beads, and three black crow feathers dangling from it. And a dozen withered black crows' feet spaced between the beads: grim amputated curling claws. It was a necklace. It had been made out west, by an Indian, I was told. It was much too intense a thing to be called jewelry.

I waited for it to come alive. I carried it to our dark moon rituals, where we called Her to come to us. I waited for its whisper. The scratch of its talons on my flesh when I put it around my neck made my skin crawl, but it remained silent.

When I went to the mountains of North Carolina one autumn, the whisper came. It said: take me along. And so I packed crow-woman with my ritual essentials and flew off -- no black bird but silver steel -- to a gay spiritual retreat.

Let me say here only that the retreat [Gay Spirit Visions --ish] was life-changing: an exploration of gay spiritual consciousness and a lesson in personal self-worth and affirmation.

At the retreat I met a man, whose full name I now struggle to call to my mind. He was called Raven. He had pale pale skin and jet black hair. He was an Indian, he said. He was not beautiful to me, but he was strangely magnetic and compelling; hos face bore traces of many burdens. He was one of the organizers of the retreat, and he had much cause over the weekend to speak to the hundred or so of us gathered there.

One of the climaxes of the retreat was a dance around the fire to the beat of drums. The beat was not wild and free, but carefully measured. And I could hear it from the distance as I walked the path from my cabin toward the central hall, the high mountain night wrapped dark around.

And in a spot of light -- my memory does not tell me if it was moonlight or starlight or flashlight -- I heard a whisper. It said: "give it to him."

When I hear a whisper in that part of my mind I usually try to dissuade it. If the whisper responds "OK, do what you want," I know it to be one of those little voices called self-doubt that are best ignored.

But the whisper said, "Yes, I'm sure. You know who I am and I say give it to him." By this time I knew what He was talking about, who he was talking about, and Who He was whispering to me in the mountain night.

So I turned around and went back to my cabin, and pulled the necklace from its black cloth wrapping. And I returned along the path to the fire. There gay men in various stages of trance and undress writhed in the orange light of a crackling fire.

I went up to Raven and said that I needed to talk to him. The whoops of the dancers and the pounding of the drums made us strain to hear.

I said, "I don't understand this. But I have to give you something," and I held up the necklace, its wrinkled claws dark and shiny in the firelight. "I have this god who follows me around. I don't know why, really, but I think he's Eleggua, an African deity. Anyway, he said that I have to give this to you. It's not old or anything. But it is sacred, and I have never learned to use it."

He looked at me oddly, as anyone in that situation would. But he took the necklace. He told me that he had heard of the god I was talking about. He said his teacher was a Heyoka, the Lakota word for trickster. He said to me, "You know this is a very heavy thing to give to me."

I could only nod and shrug.

He thanked me gravely, and returned to the fire. I returned after a while to my cabin. I felt like something had happened that I didn't quite understand. Something karmic had passed, it was clear, but mostly I felt that I had done a justice to crow-woman, freeing a sacred object whose power needed to be undestood from an unfortunate fate as a trinket bought and sold for money.

In the remaining day of the retreat Raven and I did not talk, in fact, I would say he avoided me. My own burdens seemed oddly lightened, though, and I experienced in the gathering's final ritual an important revelation (the reporting of which I'll leave to another time} which has strengthened me since.

But I learned, finally, the message that Her crows bring.

More than a year passed. I was unable to return for the retreat's annual gathering. Already it was Spring and I received a mailing from the retreat's organizers about a memorial gathering. A memorial for Raven, who had died of AIDS in the winter passed.

The crows are black, and their voices are loud and shrill. They fly in flocks, dark and shiny. Wrinkled and curved talons curl around branches, around bone. Their beaks are sharp, singing songs that cannot be sung. The crows fly carrying Her message. Their burden is unbearable, yet it must be borne.

Pay attention to the crows.

Part 3: Hekate, She Oh Mother, She

Her season is High Autumn. Amidst the falling leave, the shortening days and the chilling air, we speak of the veil between the worlds growing thin. At this time the dead walk the earth as our memories are stirred. At this time She calls to Her children to embrace Her, to walk with Her for a season.

My coven [called the Coven of the Middle Pillar--ish] was planning our ritual for Halloween, for Samhain, for Her holiday, and it was this we leanred when we needed Her presence in a more real, more dramatic way. We realized that one of us would have to agree to take Her on for Her season: that is, to open ourselves to Her, to invite Her to stay with us, speak through us, to change us. And so the crows cawed.

The second year it was my turn to embrace Her, and like my predecessor, when the time came I put on the snake rings that were Her symbol.

In one week I called to Her in three rituals; in each one invoking Her presence in me for the duration of the ritual and for the season. Despite my vow of three years before, I was no prepared for the intensity of the experience. Despite the fact that my coven had formed around our mutual devotion to Her, I was not prepared for the vividness of living with Her in that way. There were many surprises.

What happened was that everything in my life was put on the crossroads. As though a jeweller examining facets through a glass, I was given cause to examine each and every facet of my life. Some I left at the crossroads. Some I gathered up. A flaw here or there led me in search of correction. A particular flicker led me to prideful satisfaction. Fortunately the deaths in my life proved only metaphorical this time, though many of them were painful, as change is wont to be, necessary thing that it is.

And so the winter passed into spring, and the changes began to sprout roots, to depeen.

And then in a whirling moment, the unexpected. It was another ritual. Though I carried Her in my breast, it was not She whose name we called. But I remember being in a trance, moving, maybe singing; dancing among my covenmates also moving, making noise, all of us directed to that inner place where we find our link to Her.

And a voice began to whisper in my head: "Now is the time," it said. "The time has come for changes. This is the crossroads, now, and you must choose." And I found myself ripping snake rings off my fingers. And snapping pentacle chains off my nexk. And She released me.

She, Hekate. Oh Mother, She.

She let me go. She flung me out of her dark embrace, changed, healed. And I realized a time in my life had ended, a season of trial and change passed. I went for a kind if psychic reading, and the man who listened to the whipser of spirits told me to wear more white clothing. He saw me leaving a veiled black figure behind. My path now feels different than before, and while this year I will not don Her black veils and robes, nor light Her black candles, I can never forget that I owe who I have become to Her dark whispers.

On the surface of things Hekate's message is very simple: Without death there is no life. That is, life feeds on life; in order for new life to come into the world, old life must end, and pass its spark of life-force on. The truth of this is revealed in as simple an act as eating, when one being (animal or vegetable) consumes the lifeforce of another -- vegetable or animal -- in order to sustain its own life force. But what this reveals about us, people, queer people, you, me, is the divine part: We're part of a sacred dance of the stars: the life force that fires suns is the same that grows cucumbers and animates our bodies. In this knowledge is a healing gift. The mud and the crows and my dead friends (and yours) and me and you we're all the same, really, the spiral dance of our atoms showing, in miraculous imagining, Her presence in all things, and bearing, in the richness of its season fruit of grace and balance and patience and inner peace.

But words are only signs. Words and symbols are not the things themselves, nor their true knowing, and these words, while shared, are certainly mine and not yours, and this is why Hekate is mistress of magic, the only real way to understand Her voice. Go to Her Crossroads and dare to listen. And in the tears and trials and wonders, may you find... yourself.

Echoes of a past life: She/The

On one of the gay blogs I follow, Joe.My.God, there is a lot of hostility to religion. A lot of this is justified in that certain religious organizations have been in the forefront of organizing attempts to deny rights to lesbians and gays. But such a negative experience with religion is really not my own experience. Granted, I grew up in a liberal, largely secular atmosphere, in northern urban centers. But it's clear to me that many people have ceded spirituality to the fundamentalists, accepting their limited and intolerant views as being the true representations of religion rather than something else altogether. Fundamentalists may think they're being "truer" to the spirit of their religion than people who view religion more progressively, but this is only true if you believe that burning witches at the stake, stoning "sinners," or waging genocidal war under the banner of God are fair expressions of religion. But it's not the time of the Old Testament, or the flight from Mecca, or the Spanish inquisition, and the sun will rise tomorrow without the mass sacrifices of humans on stone pyramids. Thankfully, human values have evolved, just as our own views as people evolve over the course of our own lives.

This piece is another from the Queer Pagans zine. It's an attempt to define what God is, from a time when I was trying to move from what could be called book-learned polytheism to experience-taught monotheism. I remember the day my friend Cayte and I had this amazingly profound discussion when we both realized that all our of NeoPagan friends thought we were all being polytheists when we had both come to a realization that that was, for us, a superficial understanding of the world and a kind of impossibility. I offer this up now as a reminder that God, that religion, are not what the forces of reaction and hatred say they are. Their cartoon vision of judgment and sin and hatred and punishment might brighten their own worlds, but it need not darken our own. Let us drown our own baby in their dirty bathwater at our own risk.

Anyway, it's difficult to describe things that can only be experienced. But I think I give it a pretty good try.

She/The
by Ian Scott Horst
from QP #14, Harvest 9994 [Late-summer 1994]

It is an obvious fact that the human heart beats to its rhythms whether our minds tell it to or not. If you look inward and try to still the beating, it will return. Some might believe that it is the awesome electrical hardware of human anatomy that keeps the heart beating; the miraculous machine of brain, blood, lungs and body. The conclusion of such a belief is that the heart beats because of what is inside us. Yet external stimulation is absolutely essential to its steady and continued rhythm. Without the beauty of things outside our bodies, and without the proximity of other beating hearts, our own hearts grow thick and dull; hardening until eventually ceasing. Gaze at an orange sunset over the Hudson river and you wil feel your heart come to life and renew itself. So we might also say that the heart beats because of what is outside us.

My heart beats to the same rhythm as yours, though we do not always listen together, nor are the beats aligned to precisely the same moments, nor does the beat move us each in the same way. My cats have hearts that beat faster than mine, and intenal and external realities vastly different than mine. But they lie close to me, occasionally gazing into my eyes with recognition, absorbing the warmth of my heartbeats and offering the warmth of theirs in return.

I own a smooth black stone that fits neatly in my palm. It is wonderfully cool and perfectly shaped. I do not think that inside this stone there is a beating heart; tough I will not crack it open to find out. But when the stone fits into my palm and my fingers close around it the sound and feel of my own heartbeat become clear from the din of life's sensation. The gift of the stone is the boundary that enables one small part of infinity to be found and named.

There are god/desses of stones. And of hearts. And of cats. And of rhythms. There are god/desses whose names ring in my ears and fall flat in yours.

We Queer Pagans seek to understand the god/desses. We seek to align our lives with their miraculous and rewarding presences. We invoke them, we pray to them, we find them becoming near to us and as present in our lives as our shadows.

But sometimes these god/desses are not enough. Sometimes their miraculous personalities are too limited; each mythos too restricted; each shape both inadequate and too complex.

It is at that moment then that I ask you to find the space between the palm and the stone. Find the rhythm with which all heartbeats mesh. Find the world in which all things exist: both the ones you can see and the ones you can't; the ones you know of and the parts unknown.

This God/dess I worship by a simple and common name, as ubiquitous as She is. I call Her The. And I call Her, The God/dess, to be here now. And my invocation cannot fail.

Echoes of a past life: Learning to Be an Edgewalker

Somewhere between being a revolutionary and today I got religion. To the dismay of my family, rather than knocking on the doors of churches and seeing whether I felt welcome, I took another left turn and explored the world of Goddess worship, or Neo-Paganism, especially a vaguely-feminist vaguely free-thinking unorthodox form of Wicca, the re-created "Witchcraft as nature religion" that had been codified by English occultist Gerald Brousseau Gardner in the mid-twentieth century. I ultimately found a lot to dislike about Wicca, and it proved to be only a station on a longer spiritual journey. But my years exploring, studying, practicing, and innovating Neo-Pagan ritual became a transformational experience.

After a couple years involvement I joined with some co-practitioners and created a group in New York City called "Queer Pagans." It was about the time of post ACT-UP "Queer Nation" activism, and while I have some misgivings now about what "Queer" has come to mean--and how it has come to almost denigrate mere gay male identity--at the time it seemed like a miraculously inclusive and liberating word. We tried to incorporate that inclusive and liberating spirit, and held open rituals, mostly at New York's Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, that regularly drew dozens and on at least one occasion hundreds of participants. The rituals drew gay men, lesbians, transsexuals and transgendered people, and all sorts of people along the "LGBT" spectrum. Along with the open ceremonies, we published a zine. It started out mostly as a calendar, but expanded into a small showcase of "Queer Pagan" theory. I designed it on a Mac staying late after work; wrote much of it, and collected other writings from friends and co-thinkers. We even managed to get it professionally xeroxed. Before QP collapsed for a variety of reasons--rather quickly but mercifully without drama or accusation--I found myself in the midst of an explosion of creativity.

As with my early political writings, re-reading the QP zine there's plenty to find that seems dated or, well, almost cloyingly ingenuous. I was certainly a true believer. But there's a lot here I'm proud of: I wanted to communicate not some kind of religious orthodoxy but the authenticity of spiritual experience: the conviction that mystical experiences, that faith--no, certainty--in God's presence in the world, that deep ancient wisdom was something free for the taking, not off library or bookstore shelves, but by living life and daring to explore and play with otherwise dusty ideas on the solid earth of the real world.

Here's one of my articles; many more to come later.

Learning to Be an Edgewalker
by ian scott horst
reprinted from QP #13, Sun & Rainbow 9994 [Mid-Summer, 1994]

It occurred to me the other day that from a certain vantage point, the story of my life would make a lurid and bizarre tale. Its telling would be fantastically picaresque: episodes laying shock upon shock, revealing me to be a denizen of a kind of secret society, a connoiseur of perverse comraderies and purveyor of dubious morality and eccentricity.

So OK, it's true that my friends and I used to call each other "comrade" and were once pursued in a high-speed car chase through the highways of suburban Chicago by a gang of swastikaed Neo-Nazis. It's true that for a handful of months I was a member of a political group organized into anonymous cells where none of us knew each other's real names or phone numbers: we would meet at six in the morning to pass out subversive flyers to factory workers It's true that for a year, twice a month at midnight, I would venture alone deep into Prospect Park to call forth the spirits. It's true that I went to a gay club where the bathroom had bathtubs for urinals and bathers in the bathtubs (well, ok, I only went there twice, and that room wasn't to my taste). It's true that me and my friends get together now in rituals where we wear the oddest clothes and whirl in circles and talk to the air, and shake and mumble uncontrollably, and listen to voices no one else can hear.

But really, I work for a living. I have a nice apartment and I pay my rent. I only have pierced ears, and my tattoo is very discreetly above the line of even very short sleeved shirts. I don't smoke, don't drink to excess, don't do drugs. Hell, I don't even watch much TV. (Well, OK, maybe I do have more CDs than anyone else I know.) Like most people, I hope one day to retire in style and comfort; I'd love to visit Hawaii, and I return my Publishers Clearinghouse entries when I remember to. And all my stories -- and the ones above are just a teeny portion of them -- at the time didn't seem so extraordinary. They just sort of, well, happened along the way.

But in retrospect, I see a kind of razor's edge that I have walked along. And by this I mean not just a path along a thin edge between social underworld and the dominant culture, but also a shining and compelling sharpness with a hypnotic fascination. I remember once as a very young child finding a razor blade in the bathroom wastebasket. It was a grown-up thing, and its edge was smooth and sharp, tempered by unimaginable forces into a tool that would be willfully used and then discarded with no afterthought. I remember feeling the uncontrollable need to understand its mystery: I ran my finger along the blade, amazed to find thick red blood bubble to the surface of my fingertip. And at the moment where my soft flesh met the wonderfully smooth steel I felt no pain.

So you see, we do make mistakes.

What I am getting at here is not just some trite cliche about learning through experience. That, of course, is the human condition. Nor am I offering a cautionary tale about thrill-seeking. What I am saying is that those of us who, by virtue of our twin membership in the Pagan and queer worlds, are learning to find the edge and walk it, and in so doing are making magic.

Here's another story. At the most recent Queer Pagans ritual, we asked participants to bring somthing symbolically male and something symbolically female to ritually place on the altars. Some people would have expected a stack of phallic wands wound have been piled upon God's altar while a stack of holed objects would have materialized on Goddess's. That is, after all, what the Pagan books tell us toplace at such moments. But it wasn't that way at all. There was not a dick-like object placed, nor anything resembling a vagina. I brought flowers for the God altar, saying that flowers were short-lived and beautiful and intense like a male orgasm. I brought a rock for Goddess, saying it was solid and real like the earth. And every participant's offering was like that. None of them were symbols from books: they were pieces of people's lives; a transsexual woman even offered her estrogen pills. You see, the God/dess is indeed within, and to the queer Pagans in that circle, this was only obvious.

I would now no more address my friends "comrade" than I would pull a razor through my skin. The knowledge given to me by these particular experiences remains with me, by the edge has turned away in another direction. My wretched youthful political affinities have been set aside, transformed by the telling into a chapter in my personal mythology. But by the same token, I continue to explore my sexuality in ways that my day-job peers might find shocking, and I continue to listen for voices and whisper to both the mysterious and visible forces of nature. The metaphorical razor's edge continues to compel and hypnotize. As near as I can tell now, the difference is that today, understanding its nature, I seek to wield the razor as well.

Magic involves consciousness. Starhawk calls it the art of changing consciousness at will. I used to find this definition unglamourous. Today I feind it awesome and profound, hinting at possibilities I can scarcely grasp and barely struggle to name. History begins to teach us that queer people have always found and walked this edge, grasping for this magical meaning. The walk is sometimes decadent and self-destructive and sometimes it is liberating and revolutionary. But it is magic and, walker, you will be changed.