One of the great Mysteries of the Craft is that each of us is a perfect, amazing, flamboyant, paradoxical reflection of the Divine. Of course, this Mystery looks cheap on paper. Until its full power is realized through direct experience, it seems obvious, cliché, tawdry. The experience of the Mysteries is what makes them powerful to people who practice Pagan faiths, especially Wicca. But Wicca has a problem in that its focus is on the cisgender, heterosexual pairing of Goddess and God, who each have gender-conforming traits ascribed to them. Of course, the Gods don’t have dangly bits but rather are energy patterns that can manifest in whatever form they damn well choose, so the problem isn’t with them but rather with our culturally influenced understanding of them. Embracing the concept of queerness, even if you yourself are cisgender and heterosexual, can help you expand your understanding of the Gods, the Universe, and yourself.
Queerness as a critical theory involves subverting ideas of genderized roles and labels (for example, why is a dress considered feminine clothing when clothing itself has no gender?) and challenging social norms (for example, why is homosexual behavior considered deviant when it is well-documented in non-human animals as a natural occurence?) Queer theory also embraces the concept that gender is socially constructed and that biological sex is linked to gender only as an ingrained social habit and not because biological sex has anything to do with gender. It also posits that gender is not an static, inborn trait but rather a fluid, evolving relationship with self and society, and that sexuality is an experience to be celebrated.
In the Craft, we have no concept of inherent imperfection. We aren’t born flawed. We are born with certain limitations, some imposed on us by virtue of being incarnate in human form and others imposed on us in order to help us learn and grow. But we aren’t flawed and there’s nothing wrong with us for how we perceive ourselves — cis or trans, het or queer. So there’s rich opportunity for us to explore the wide variety of human experience, knowing that there is nothing about us that is not of the Gods.
Western culture is binary, meaning there are only two options for gender that are accepted. You’re either a boy/man or a girl/woman. These genders are assigned at birth and we are trained from our earliest days to conform to the expectations of the gender role. Even children who are intersex are assigned one of these boxes at birth and often their genitals are altered to match the expectations of a binary gender. This is naturally very limiting, but terms such as bigender, polygender, pangender, androgyne, neutrois, genderfluid, non-binary, gender nonconforming, and genderqueer have arisen to describe other gender concepts evolving out of the western cultural context. At this time, the general culture views these gender concepts as deviant, though there is a thriving community to be shared in at local LGBTQIA+ community centers, online support groups, and trans-positive organizations. At the same time, these gender concepts can also be seen as alluring, and prominent examples can be seen in Ruby Rose and Jonathan Van Ness. But gender is a sense of identity, and androgyny is not required to be genderfluid (such as Miley Cyrus), nonbinary (such as Rose McGowan), or any other gender. Nor do you have to have a certain body type — males, females, and intersex individuals are all free to identify in a way that reflects their inner sense of being. This inner sense of being develops over time, and while most people affirm the gender they were assigned at birth, about 1% of the human population feel that they are some gender other than the one they were assigned at birth. That’s about the same number as the people who are Autistic or who have red hair.
Harnessing Queerness as a Witch
Harnessing the power of queerness in witchcraft involves asking yourself who you really are. How do you know who you are? What’s stopping you from expressing it? What fears do you have about showing your true self to the world? What prejudices do you project onto yourself? Where are shame and guilt originating from? Who benefits from these feelings? These questions are essential, even for people who are comfortably cisgender and heterosexual. They will either affirm your identity or offer you insights into your true identity, giving you the opportunity to explore your own experience as a human being — and that, really, is at the heart of all spiritual practice.
The Temple of Apollo at Delphi had three maxims inscribed on the entrance pillars to the oracle: Know thyself, Nothing to excess, and Surety brings ruin. These three maxims remind us that there is power in knowing who we are, keeping balance through moderation, and maintaining an open mind. As witches, we can harness the power of those maxims in our lives by queering the way we see the world. When we embrace the full diversity of humanity, when we acknowledge all parts of our own identity and sexuality, when we delve deeply into who we really are and why, when we open our eyes to the injustices and prejudices that exist to uphold a system of conformity and domination, then we can unlock the empowerment that comes from standing in a place of pleasure, joy, pride, and defiance. Witchcraft has traditionally been the recourse of the oppressed. By embracing our own queerness or standing as an ally to those who are Queer, we gain access to the strength and wisdom of powerful Queer Ancestors and Deities who can teach us about ourselves and the world.
Queering the Gods
As I said earlier, the Gods don’t have dangly bits. What I mean by that is, the Gods aren’t limited to a certain way of presenting themselves to the world. They have habitual ways, certainly. But they are not limited to those ways, as the shapeshifting myths of many deities illustrate, and they will change their forms to appeal to the needs and understandings of those they present themselves to. For example, I was once granted a vision of the goddess Isis in a form that was perfectly androgynous, bearing both male and female sex characteristics. Now, I do not generally work with Isis, but I have a relationship with her through an initiatory connection, so she is not unknown to me. At the time I experienced the vision, I was struggling with questions of my own place and purpose in the world, both as a priestess and as an individual. It was Isis’s open appearance to me in a form I secretly wished to emulate that gave me permission to accept my uncomfortable feelings about my body and started me on a personal quest into exploring the roots of the gender dysphoria I sometimes felt. In my case, the deeper symbolism of Isis as the possessor of Osiris’s phallus was less relevant than the simple experience of a deity that appeared to me in a way that touched the deepest part of my soul and transformed the way I experienced myself.
Beyond the shapeshifting nature of the Gods, there are deities in both ancient and modern mythology who are explicitly queer. Artemis is often seen as sapphic. Apollo’s mythology is full of same-gender liaisons. Dionysus is shown in the mythology to be gender nonconforming. Loki is both male and female and has both sired and borne children. The Blue God of Faery is a sensual deity free from the shame of conformity who is the reunion of the Divine Twins into a single duality-encompassing being. Similarly, the Sabbatic Goat depicts a variety of unified opposites and is intersex in presentation. Simply acknowledging that these deities exist and have power, and inviting them into your circle as queer deities, can have powerful implications for your magick.
Queering Wicca
Queer deities aren’t typically present in Wiccan worship. Typically, in Wicca, we focus on the Goddess (with her problematic Maiden-Mother-Crone aspects) and her consort, the dying-and-reborn God who is sometimes ascribed triple aspects of Youth-Father-Sage to match the Goddess. One theological argument for this focus is that we can most easily understand the gods as divine parents expressed in a woman-and-man pairing; it’s not that the energy patterns of Goddess and God are fixed as female and male, but our cultural understanding of how parenthood arises is steeped in the idea of a cisgender, heterosexual, fertile couple.
So how do we queer Wicca? Some would suggest doing away with the established form of ritual in its entirety and start over from the beginning, and that is certainly a viable argument, but as a religion, Wicca already has the seeds of its own renewal and expansion within it, and I feel there’s no need to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. My suggestion is to start with the words we use to describe the spiritual energy patterns we’re drawing on. Instead of referring to masculine energy and feminine energy, use the words electric (which radiates outward) and magnetic (which draws inward). This also allows for thinking of energy in other ways, such as static, chaotic, alternating, or null, and expands the concepts of the spiritual energies we’re working with. With a simple change, we’ve opened ourselves up to other qualities of energies that don’t adhere to a binary.
Another way to queer Wicca is to consider the energies that we invoke into the Circle. In my tradition, after we call the Quarters, we invoke the Ancestors. Simply acknowledging that some of these spirits are not cisgender or heterosexual and not expecting them to adhere to those roles in death as they may have in life can change the energy of the circle in amazing ways. The Ancestors have powerful insights and can guide us to be more inclusive because they have a different perspective than we do — that is, they remember life among the living, but they also have the benefit of dwelling in the spirit world, where some of their limitations have been removed. Calling on the spirits of Queer Ancestors can empower the circle in new and exciting ways, and it’s also a rich avenue for personal spirit work. After all, every family has secrets, and a lot of those secrets have to do with who was really Queer. Beyond family, there are powerful Queer voices known to us: Marsha P. Johnson, Anne Lister, James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Langston Hughes, Alan Turing, Sally Ride, and more. You don’t have to be Queer in order to call upon them for aid — we are all human.
Finally, we can queer Wicca by acknowledging that all of the participants in the Circle — in all of their wild, wonderful diversity — are fully-fledged reflections of Deity. In my tradition, after we invoke the God and Goddess as the archetypal energy patterns of Force and Form, we acknowledge their synergetic union as the seldom-discussed Supreme Being of Wicca — sometimes called Dryghtyn or Abracadabra — that we simply refer to as the Cosmos. The Cosmos contains all that is and all that can be within it, and each of us is a spark in its divine Light. We make an acknowledgement of this Great Mystery before we transition from invocations to the work of the circle.
Further Reading
The Pagan movement is blessed to have a number of openly Queer authors and bloggers, who offer their own perspectives on expanding the Craft to include Queer people and ways of thinking. But more than reading about being Queer in the Craft, it’s important to see what Queer people have to say about the Craft itself. As fellow practitioners, their practices and insights are valuable and may otherwise be drowned out. I have included two reading lists here for further exploration of Queerness and the Craft.
Updated Queer Pagan Reading List (2018) by Yvonne Aburrow
My Favorite Queer Witchcraft Books by Mat Auryn