Witchcraft-and-the-Gay-Counterculture-1

and discipline that it borrowed wholesale from earlier Christian missionariesand monastic orders (Fitzgerald, 133). It is conceivable thatcommunism in China could end up becoming just another patriarchalreligion, as it already has in the U.S.S.R. Or perhaps China willcontinue to raise penetrating questions about industrialism and sotake socialism on to a new and unprecedented path.Industrial socialism of all stripes has been very uptight aboutsex . As we have seen, homosexuality is now illegal in Russia. InChina, Gay people are said not to exist and the subject is not publiclymentioned. In Cuba, homosexuality was declared a “social pathology”in 1971 and many Gay people were sent to concentration camps.The nuclear family – which is the life blood of patriarchal civilization– has never been questioned in any industrializing socialist society,and in fact has been greatly re-enforced.In addition, industrial socialism eagerly embraces science,views industrialism as desirable and inevitable, and ridicules the oldanimistic religions that have existed in each country in which it hascome to power (which is ironic, since these old religions, if anything,represent the basic values of the peasant masses over the centuries).The leaders of industrial socialism have generally been masculineidentifiedmales who owe their initial success and power to organizedarmies.In the context of the Gay movement, industrial socialistsoften have weak feelings of Gay identity and a shallow concept ofGay culture and Gay spirituality. Typically, they view Gay revolutionas meaning nothing more than supporting the programs of the NewLeft, while also having Gay sex on the side. Too often, they believethat Gay men have nothing more in common than sex (which isactually a lot!).Just like liberals, Gay industrial socialists also have been insensitiveto the true depth of corruption in Western civilization. Thisinsensitivity comes out through such slogans as, “Socialism is theanswer!” This implies that all we have to do is get worker controlover the factories and all other means of production. As we haveseen, however, the problem is not only who controls the means ofproduction, but the means of production themselves. Industrial socialistsstep back from the conclusion that what we need is not a newadministration in Washington or a new economic policy, but a newcivilization.In making these criticism, I am not saying that industrialsocialism has not helped people. It certainly has, far more thanbourgeois liberalism ever did or could. But what I am saying is thatindustrial socialism is not necessarily the highest or only form ofrevolutionary socialism. Even in cases where it has been absolutelynecessary (as in China), we can view it as something to begin with,to build on, rather than as the absolute and final end of all humanstruggle toward liberation. The revolution shouldn’t end when the144The first shamans (or healer priests) in nature societies werewomen (Briffault, II: 518). The first male shamans imitated womenby taking on their roles and wearing their clothing. Wherever patriarchyhas overthrown matriarchy, even in nature societies, the previousreligious power of women is feared as something diabolical. Thepriestess is turned into the witch (Briffault, II: 561). Unfortunately,Robert Briffault, whose book I have been citing so far, freaks out overhomosexuality, which he dismisses as “the indulgence of unnaturalvices” (Briffault, II: 533). And so he can’t imagine there could be alink between cross-dressing shamans and homosexuality. But we willsee later there is such a link, and that as the priestess was turned intothe witch, so the Gay male shaman was turned into the heretic.In stone age Europe, humans probably lived pretty muchlike people in surviving nature cultures. For example, archaeologysuggests that a shamanistic religion was practiced and that womenhad high status. From as early as 30,000 BC we find an abundanceof female figurines and cave drawings that show women leadingreligious ceremonies (Rawson, 13ff) . From about 5,000 BC, theheads and necks on many of these figurines are stretched out to formsmooth dildos, so that the composite figure is that of a fat femalewith a dildo emerging from the top (Rawson, 18). We know fromthe practices of existing nature societies in Africa and India that suchimplements were often used in ritual Lesbian acts where an olderwoman initiated a younger (Rawson, 18 & 71). In addition, theoldest deity worshipped by the Celts, Germans, and Anglo-Saxonsof Western Europe was a Great Mother goddess who was associatedwith womb-like caves.Many bisexual figurines have been found from the stoneage – notably in Trasimeno, Italy; the Weinberg Caverns, Bavaria;the Jordan Valley; and Pembrokeshire, Wales (Rawson, 17). Amongsurviving nature societies, bisexual deities often indicate bisexualreligious rites (Baumann, passim). Many cave paintings show picturesof nude men with erections dancing together in groups withoutwomen. Among nature people, a man’s cum is often thought toembody ancestral religious power, “and this probably explains onemale initiation ritual . . . . during which adult male initiates have analintercourse with novices” (Rawson, 48).Animals (especially horned ones) also play a large part instone-age art, and male human figures appear wearing animal skins .These figures are probably shamans, since nature societies often identifythemselves collectively with the animals they eat (totemism) andimitate their behavior, including their sex life, in religious rites.At the end of the stone age and the beginning of the bronzeage (around 4,000 BC), sacred places came to be marked by the presenceof huge stones, called megaliths. They extended from Ireland,through Brittany, to Portugal, Italy, Malta, South Arabia, India, Malaya,Sumatra, Indonesia and the Pacific Islands (Rawson, 42). These29