Sunday, March 1, 2020

Shamanic Cross Dressing & Spirituality

We frequently misunderstand homosexuality in the non-Western and ancient West. I'd like to focus on the concept of Two-spirited genders and the likes that are being used by postmoderns to legitimize a lot of the revolutionary ideas about gender, and point out that these things are understood in a different context. 

This Twitter thread by Survive the Jive (that I've converted into a single page) is a good starting point: people in these cultures know that their shamans and spiritual guides dress up like women or otherwise play with gender -- perennialist philosopher and occultist Evoa explains it as the feminine form giivng 'birth' to whatever the other world wants to give out, and so the shamans in these communities occasionally act as women. 

This is, of course, not all that they do -- some shamans act like animals. In voodoo, the voodoo houngan or mambo appoints a 'cheval' (horse) or acts as the horse h imself which the spirit rides, and basically acts in a very crazy fashion while also revealing information that the spirit wants to be known. Sometimes, though, they simply act as the god themselves, and not as a spirit, and this requires them to do things like get drunk, chew glass, swear, threaten, etc. 

To reinterpret these things in the LGBTQ context is not always correct. They are primarily religious and while, of course, this can be accompanied by some tribes and groups having shamans that fully embraced the role and did breakdown gender norms and barriers by Western and perhaps even local standards, to suggest that this is proof of a greater trend in human sexuality is absurd when we know that, more often than not, this is not the norm. 

It is interesting to see that this is not so distance from myself. The Korean baksu (male shamans) will wear mubok (shamanic clothing) that is highly feminine:




It is not explicitly stated to be feminine, though. The Shaman's clothing, according to this Namu Wiki article, will differ based on the region, the ceremony or god/spirit being communed with, or even by the shaman's own personal preference. The clothing tends to be overwhelmingly colorful, some suggesting that the colors and dancing were enough to make some people faint back in an era when seeing such a colorful array of clothing would be uncommon, and at least five colors are worn to show a harmony among Taoist spirits... 

Regardless, the man is wearing clothing that would normally be associated with a woman: a fancy, bright colored dress that differs form more typical men's traditional fashion. 



Korean men traditionally wore pants and shirts,  and while wealthy Korean men did wear far more ornate clothing, it was along the same lines. 

In the image below you can clearly see that the mubok is similar to a noble woman's clothing more than it is to a nobleman's. 

The shaman's clothing flows longer, while the nobleman's clothing does cover his legs to a degree, but not so much as to be radically different. It also has to be emphasized that men in the Joseun era tended to dress very monochromatically, while women would be adorned in a greater diversity of colors. 

I would consider this to be evidence that there is, to some degree, the vestiges of shamanic cross dressing among Korean shamanism, and it is merely that Korean shamanism was largely eradicated and had even existed in the late Joseun period as a folkish tradition distant from the intellectuals that little is reliably recorded and it did not survive in a more robust form. 

If anything is true of shamanism and paganism in general, it is the tendency for these traditions to go far into the past and to be lost to us. You hit some primordial element that is completely unexplained and requires us to read into it to some degree to make sense of it. Because these societies did not leave many written records and what they left was rarely about this, and just like us, they tend to forget their own traditions and origin stories, particularly of the more folksy things, we are left to our imaginations. 

Unfortunately, whenever we are allowed to speculate, we tend to see whatever we want, and to utilize it to suit our own purposes. 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Old Testament Interpretation & the Midianites

Understanding how to interpret the most controversial section of the Old Testament can be a challenge, but I think that once we get a good g...