Queer Mythological Icons

History is gayer than you think.

And mythology is even gayer than that.

Especially when it comes to shamanistic mythologies. Exploring ancient mythology will open a world of gender-bending, same-sex attraction and a level of queerness even a gay pride parade can’t rival.

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Dragons Love Old Men

Before the influence of Taoism and Confucianism, there was ancient Chinese shamanism. The mythology depicts a slew of spirits changing from one gender to the next based on the sexual preference of the mortal they were trying to seduce. The main characters involved in this hobby were animal spirits. A male deer spirit would transform into a supple female human in order to seduce a young straight man. Most animal spirits would pursue younger targets, male or female. The exception to this was the dragons who exclusively pursued dominant older male partners.

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How Same-Sex Attraction Saved the World

Japanese mythology depicts the story of Amaterasu the goddess of the sun. After a fight with her brother, Amateseru fled to the safety of a dark cave. She took the light of day with her so people were justifiably concerned. The only logical way to save humanity and draw the goddess out of her closet-like cave was to enlist the help of the goddess of dance and humour, Ame No Uzume.

Ame No Uzume went to the mouth of the cave and began to dance. As she danced, she removed her clothes. An entranced Amaterasu slowly walked towards the gyrating goddess and left the cave. While the sun watched the dancing, the townspeople shut the mouth of the cave behind her, and thus sexy dancing saved the world.

It would be interesting to know whether this was plan A or plan B. Maybe they went through a troupe of male strippers before they realized the female goddess was the right bait.

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Adam and Steve

In Inuit shamanistic mythology, the first two humans, Aakulujjuusi and Uumarnituq, were both male. I do not know why mythology is obsessed with only two humans starting the human race, but it pops up everywhere, again and again. The two men fell in love and began a sexual relationship. Disproving most sex-ed curriculums, one of the men became pregnant. While no one questioned his ability to get pregnant, the spirits were concerned about his ability to give birth.

The spirits cast a spell on the pregnant man to give him a vagina, not a uterus though because apparently, he already had one of those. And so, the man (most likely with great relief) gave birth to his baby and became the father of humanity.

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One of the Best Things You’ll Read Today

Everything else you’ve read so far has been nothing more than an appetizer for the main course of queer mythology that is Louisiana Voodoo.

Imagine a whole group of male spirits whose only job is to smoke cigars, drink rum and dress in women’s clothing. It’s not their only job, but it is a big part of the mythology. Some notable characters include Ghede Nibo, who was at times described as a drag queen and other times as a trans lesbian. He was the protector of people who die young, and he looked fabulous while doing it.

Baron Lundy and Baron Limba are the gay uncles we all wish we had. After falling in love, they decided to open a school dedicated to homoerotic wrestling. The mythology states that engaging in this kind of wrestling was good for the magical abilities.

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That Time When Christianity Ruined Everything

I considered, for a moment, not including this part. I almost attempted to keep things fun and celebratory. How fitting, then, that I become a wet blanket by discussing the wettest of blankets: Christianity.

Pre-Christian shamanic mythologies celebrated multiple gender identities/expressions and had deities loving everyone, however they chose. Then, like the angry uncle no one invited to dinner, Christianity showed up and ruined everyone’s fun.

As Christianity spread throughout the world, so did rigid ideas of morality, thanks to the imperialistic lust of England and other European colonialists. Gone were the days that the gods were all androgynous, polyamorous and interesting.

Early Christianity started out by condemning anything but procreative sex. The general attitude towards all sexual acts at the time was that everything was gross and bad, but we still need babies.

The Catholic Church made sure to have strict anti-sodomy laws in place throughout Europe during the Medieval period. Europe used to include England, so when the English set sail for foreign lands, they brought their terrible European laws with them.

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By no means do I think religion is inherently bad, but I do believe that the rise of Christianity and its doctrine of religious conversion negatively affected the worldview on homosexuality and gender identity. And when it comes to mythology, I would rather live in a world where we believe that our gods, as well as ourselves, are free to express gender and love however we so choose.

Make mythology gay again.

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Molly Desson

Molly Desson is a Professional Writing student at Algonquin College. When she’s not busy with coursework, she’s either talking to or about her dog. Some of her non-dog interests include the ancient world, crafts, and being outside.

Etiological Myths and Conspiracy Theories

For years now, humans have been able to look to the internet to get the information they need. What about the years before the internet? Or worse, what about a time when we weren’t that big into science?

This is where etiological myths come to party. Early humans used etiological myths to explain phenomena that they couldn’t otherwise understand.

Science? Who’s that?

Think back to when you were a child: you put a tooth under your pillow, and in the morning, there would be money instead. You believed your parents that the switch had been made by a magical fairy because you didn’t have the background knowledge to suggest an alternate explanation.

When early humans accidently discovered the method of making alcohol, they immediately assumed that it was the work of the gods. They thought that a god had visited their jars of damp grain and fermented it. So when, in much a similar fashion, gross grain water was turned into grosser fermented liquid, early humans were keen to believe that it was a divine act, rather than non-existent science.

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Fun Explanations for Perfectly Normal Things

Drunkenness

Not only were pre-science humans amazed by the miracle transformation of a jar of disgusting wet barley into a bubbling mass of off-coloured liquid, but when they defied common sense and drank the putrid nonsense, they became drunk. Praise the gods’ eternal wisdom!

The Ancient Greeks believed that the god Dionysus visited them and made them drunk. Hausans believed that a spirit named Ba Maguje represented drunkenness and played a large part in that fuzzy feeling after too much fermented jar water.

Volcanoes

Is it a coincidence that volcano and Vulcan (the Roman god of blacksmithing) are basically the same word? It is not. The ancient Greek god Hephaestos was rejected from Mount Olympos because of his deformed leg. When Zeus threw him into the mortal world, Hephaestos landed next to a mountain. He took up residence within this mountain and even set up a forge. The heat and smoke that comes from metal-working escaped out the top of the mountain and thus volcanoes were born.

“What does this have to do with Vulcan?” you may ask. The Romans were generally too busy conquering things to invent their own mythology—they just stole stories from everyone else and changed the names a little. So, that delightful little story about Hephaestos became all about Vulcan.

The Klickitat people of modern-day Oregon have their own explanation for the existence of their local volcanoes. An old woman named Loowit once saved her tribe by giving them fire and was rewarded by Tahee Sahale (or Great Spirit) with the gift of youth and beauty. Well, the god overdid it and now two men from different tribes decided to go to war for her affection. They destroyed a sacred land bridge because they were throwing giant, hot boulders and had terrible aim. The gods got mad and turned the entire love triangle into volcanoes, whose eruptions were long seen as the lovers continuing to fight.

Illness

One of the most prolific topics for etiological myths is illness—mental and physical. For as long as humans have formed semi-logical thought, we have concocted mythological explanations for illnesses. We do this even in modern times, which I promise to explain in a minute.

In broad strokes, ancient people most often attributed illness to one angry god or another. The Bible is full of God sending plagues and making menstruation painful because of Eve’s original sin. Mental illnesses were often thought to be the work of some demon or spirit. Even if we consider post-science time periods, humans still attributed illness to “moral failings” or “going outside without a hat on”.

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In This Essay I Will…

Conspiracy theories are modern-day etiological myths. They are stories created to help humans understand something that confuses us or might be too complicated for most of us to grasp.

Whereas the ancient Greeks believed that it was angry gods that caused illness, some modern humans believe that vaccines cause autism. Science does not yet have an explanation for autism (not that we need one), so some humans have reverted to a pre-science style explanation and have created a new etiological myth.

Another similar (and more fun) idea that pre-science and post-science mythologies share, is the idea of a flat Earth. Many ancient cultures (Greeks, Norse, Germanic, and Mesopotamians, to name a few) believed that the Earth was flat, but the idea was debunked with empirical proof far earlier than most people think. People often have the idea of medieval scientists and their discovery of spheres. Theories on a spherical Earth have been documented as early as the 6th century BC. So, while the flat earth myth made the most sense to Ancient peoples in the beginning, they shifted from myth to science when they had the knowledge to do so.

These days, some people have seemingly decided to shift back. And, while etiological myths were accepted and common place in the past, we now look down on those who believe in them today. Perhaps because the ancient myths served as the best explanation available, while modern myths are generally some of the worst explanations people can come up with.

So, what have we learned today? That the gods make us drunk and volcanoes are just angry. And that conspiracy theories are etiological myths.

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Molly Desson

Molly Desson is a Professional Writing student at Algonquin College. When she’s not busy with coursework, she’s either talking to or about her dog. Some of her non-dog interests include the ancient world, crafts, and being outside.

On Human Sacrifice

What Compelled People to Sacrifice Humans…

And why we never hear about it

Most people are familiar with the Aztecs and their supposed penchant for human sacrifice. But how many of us know the mythology behind this heinous practice?

Well, the Aztecs believed that their sun was the fifth and last in a line of suns. They believed that human sacrifice was necessary to keep the chaos of darkness at bay. Humans would be sacrificed, and their blood would be fed to the sun in order to keep it alive. The Aztecs sacrificed humans to save the world, which sounds like a worthy cause.

In Hawaiian mythology, a human sacrifice functioned as an apology to the gods after one of their divine laws had been broken. The victim in these cases was usually the sinner, so in reality it wasn’t too far off from the death penalty. These laws included things like cannibalism, incest and child murder.

Germanic tribes would sacrifice to their gods when they needed help through dire circumstances. They would turn to sacrifice whenever a tribe faced an agricultural disaster, or a war they knew would leave most of them dead.

Two things were true for all these instances of human sacrifice, it was only done when absolutely necessary and no one actually looked forward to it.

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The difference between murder and sacrifice

This is important to point out, because we also know of many instances in which people were killed by governmental institutions. Gladiatorial games in Rome saw captives of war sent to their deaths and Ancient Spartans murdered Helots (state-owned slaves) on a regular basis.

This isn’t sacrifice.

Sacrifice isn’t simply about killing people against their will. For a killing to be sacrificial, the gods need to be involved. Death needs to have a divine purpose. Murder is something that humans do to benefit humans. Sacrifice is something humans do to please the gods.

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The slanderous side of sacrifice

The Aztecs, Hawaiians, and Germanic tribes represent only a few of the accounts of societies that practiced human sacrifice, but what makes them special is that we actually have sources for their mythological compulsions. In other cases, such as with the Austronesian tribes, accounts of human sacrifice are shrouded in the fog of colonialism and biased history, with the true mythology hidden and distorted for political purposes.

While there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that human sacrifice was part of Austronesian mythologies, our minimal and incomplete accounts of the practice come from biased European “anthropologists”. They do not give accounts of what the mythology suggests as the reason for human sacrifice, simply that it happened and was bad. Europeans used human sacrifice to outline the Austronesians’ perceived barbarism and justify future colonialist efforts.

There are one or two unbiased sources that can be found with a great amount of effort. One Southeast Asian myth provides some context for the necessity of human sacrifice. In this tradition, there is a great flood that wipes out the majority of humanity. A brother and sister escape the flood and then replenish the Earth’s human population.

But incest is taboo and that causes an issue. To rectify this original sin, humans turned to sacrifice. Their blood is meant to help cleanse the living of the affront to the gods.

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Killing people is still bad…

This is where the distinction between sacrifice and murder and the cultural reasons behind sacrifice become so important. By the Austronesians’ own accounts, they performed sacrifice for much the same reason that Jesus sacrificed himself. This sacrifice had the intention of cleansing the human race of their sins in the eyes of their gods.

The depiction passed along by racist Europeans, on the other hand, is murder. Some accounts state that people were killed simply to use as rollers to get a boat into the water. While labelled as human sacrifice in most accounts, that’s murder, and it has a 99% chance of not being true.

The idea we have of cannibalistic heathens killing people left and right comes from Europeans and not the people themselves.

As we’ve seen throughout these examples, human sacrifice seems to have been used as the nuclear option. Aztecs aimed to avoid the apocalypse. Germanic tribes wanted to protect their people from famine. And the Austronesians attempted to atone for humanity’s sinful existence.

I’m not going to sit here and advocate for the normalization of human sacrifice, but I do think colonialist propaganda has tainted our perception of it. The people who practiced this ritual according to their sacred mythologies were not reveling in the act.

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Molly Desson

Molly Desson is a Professional Writing student at Algonquin College. When she’s not busy with coursework, she’s either talking to or about her dog. Some of her non-dog interests include the ancient world, crafts, and being outside.

Beyond Noah: The Many Floods of Myth

When a culture finds itself inundated with miscreants and other unsavoury characters, it often introduces a nice, cleansing, world-consuming flood. Across multiple cultures, from China to Northern British Columbia, there is mention of a great flood, somewhere in the mythology. 

How Many Floods?

At least six.

The most famous version of the flood myth is what we’ve heard from the Christian Bible, but that is by no means the only instance in which a flood cleanses the Earth. Noah builds an ark and saves some animals as well as his family, then goes about repopulating the Earth by some unspecified means. 

The Mesopotamians document a flood myth in The Epic of Gilgamesh, where a man named Utnapishtim is advised by one of the gods, Enki (or Ea), to build a massive boat. This boat would then contain the seed of all life, as well as our hero’s family, and it would keep them all safe from drowning in the massive flood. Once the flood subsides and everyone is safe, they go about repopulating the Earth.

In Greek mythology, there is also mention of a flood. Zeus went down to Earth in disguise to learn about the nature of humankind. Zeus was nowhere near pleased. There was a meeting on Mount Olympus about what to do about those horrendous parasitic humans. The gods decided that a flood was the best choice. Prometheus, the champion of humanity, warned his son Deucalion, who, along with his wife Pyrrha, climbed into a chest afloat in the waves. They survived the flood and moved on to repopulate the Earth. Luckily, they were given a non-incestuous way to repopulate, without relying on the creation of a narrow family tree. Deucalion and Pyrrha were to throw pebbles over their shoulders and as each one landed on the Earth, a human being sprang forth.

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But Why A Flood?

There are further myths to be found from Hindu mythology all the way to the Aztecs. The idea of a great, cleansing flood is so pervasive that it spans oceans. Why are there so many accounts of this one thing found across cultures that likely never had direct contact with each other? It seems to be a far stretch to think that ancient China had much communication with the Nisga’a nation in Northern Canada, and yet, their mythologies both mention the flood.

It might have something to do with the way that humanity views water. We wash ourselves with water, which gives us the idea that it has a cleansing nature. We need water to live, which inspires us to equate water with a sense of divine importance. After the rain, the world takes on a poetic sheen, allowing us to think for a moment that perhaps this is something sent from the gods.

As much as humanity has a collectively positive view of water, we tend to have the opposite view of humans. If we can all agree on something, it’s that humans are awful. We also have a flair for the dramatic and love a good apocalypse.

It makes sense then, when you think about humanity’s collective thoughts on water and humanity, that we would want to use one to wipe out the other. If you were to cleanse a surface of something bad, no matter what your religious background, you would reach for water.

One possibility for the commonality that I quite enjoy is the idea that there really was a large flood. Who’s to say that these stories are mythology at all? Maybe in the distant past, a great sea of water rose and conquered the land.

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Molly Desson

Molly Desson is a Professional Writing student at Algonquin College. When she’s not busy with coursework, she’s either talking to or about her dog. Some of her non-dog interests include the ancient world, crafts, and being outside.

Mythology Abroad

From natural disasters to animals and monsters, there are themes throughout mythology that flow into one another. 

We intend to look at and discuss the intersectional nature of mythology across the entire world. We explore what may have caused these similarities and their implications on societies past and present. 

What can we learn from these ancient stories?