The Past Was Stranger Than We Think (Part II)

In the first installment of this series, I began a discussion of the anomalous individuals found in many paleolithic graves and their relevance to anti-fascist historiography. Whether through physical disability, or some phenotypic or social difference, these people were venerated and perhaps feared. In this installment, I want to expand on this "tolerance of eccentricity" that Dave Graeber and David Wengrow propose is the case in many indigenous cultures. But to do it, we're going to have to get like, really gay. Like, really, really gay.

I have an article coming out next year on this subject in the book Queering Psychedelics, published by The Chacruna Institute, so this post is a bit of a first taste of that publication. My article is a bit polemical, but I try to frame it as coming from a place of love. The argument has three parts. The first is that psychedelic spaces are often not very comfortable for trans and gender diverse people. Second, almost every culture that psychedelic culture and the New Age more broadly appropriates its concepts from has a category for what we would nowadays think of as "trans" people. Finally, I argue that gender transition is a ritual that shares characteristics with psychedelic rituals, and thus people should stop being weird about it and show some solidarity instead.

I don't want to reproduce that argument deeply here, though I will be returning to different elements of it in future essays. However, what I do want to do is talk a little about my experience of writing it. Because it's somewhat common knowledge in LGBT circles, particularly trans ones, that there are different types of "trans people" or "gay people" historically in cultures worldwide. And this is true enough. In my research, I have found almost two hundred cultures that at least used to have a name for one or more forms of gender or sexually diverse people.

The fascinating thing that I found when I began digging deeper into the instances of gender-diverse peoples throughout history is that most of the examples I was finding also had ritual roles in their society. It was thrilling, to be honest, to find the unexpected reality not just of the presence of "transgender" people in previous societies but of their importance as well. I will eventually be writing a separate essay on each of the different examples I found — the relevant ones anyhow — and will link them here when I do.

The following cultures — to which contemporary psychedelic users gesture when providing a historical defense of their spiritual practices — also maintained a class of gender-diverse people. I should note here that they don't necessarily appreciate being compared to modern LGBT people. Opinions are mixed. But one thing is sure that we ought to affirm these unique forms as valid and independent identities in their own rights. Indeed, they often have unique cultural attributes such as caring for the dead, as in North American South East societies. I plan to write a detailed summary of each, which I will link when they're completed, but I'll list my sources for the interim. I'd love to hear if anyone can think of a culture I've missed here. The list is as follows:

The Fang A bele nnem e bango

The Diné (Navajo) Nádleehi

The Lakota Winkte

The Nahua Xōchihuah and Patlacheh

Mayan elite ritual crossdressing

The Andean Quariwarmi

The Buddhist Pandanka

Indian Hijra (or Kinna)

And the Scythian Enaree

It is also a mistake to assume that contemporary indigenous societies are equivalent to pre-historical ones because they must live in an uneasy co-existence with our global society. I think this is somewhat less true before European colonization, but not entirely. Since the Bronze Age, people who held egalitarian principles would have become "societies against the state" by necessity. They would be aware that their neighbors lived in so-called "complex societies" and chose not to do the same.

This argument stems from an anarchist anthropologist in the '60s, Pierre Claustres, who inspired Deleuze and Guattari's attacks on theories of social evolution. Graeber and Wengrow mention the concept in The Dawn of Everything as well. They recontextualize it within the discourse on seasonality from which it emerges. I'll flesh out this discussion in this series's fourth and final installment.

But it also means that we cannot draw a straight line between these peoples and antiquity. However, it does not seem unreasonable to believe that such practices and types of people existed in prehistory. There are certainly some examples from the Bronze Age. But it isn't easy to look much beyond that. Before the end of the Stone Age, gendered forms seem to have been much less strictly enforced, as far as the available evidence suggests.

But if we can speculate for a second, it seems pretty likely that in the Paleolithic that individuals could gender themselves as they pleased. I find the insistence of many indigenous societies on the contextual, spatial, and processual nature of gender to resonate strongly with this less rigid segmentation between bodies. Those who mill the grain are female, and those that hunt and make war are men. How else could it be?

There are dozens of other examples like this from cultures that don't use psychedelics—the Zuni Lhamana, Sumerian Gala, the Greek Galli, etc. And over and over, the ritual thing recurs. Not everywhere, but in a surprising amount of places. This dynamic, to my mind, brings us back to the discussion of anomalous or unusual individuals in The Dawn of Everything.

They describe the queer politicians, the earth priests, and the mad prophets of the Nuer. These prophets would have behaved in very unusual ways, including a variety of "neurodiverse" traits, "unusual sexual practices," or even "eating excrement." But, they were also supposed to have been gifted with "powers of foresight and persuasion." It shows the length which indigenous societies can go to accommodate, integrate, and even honor even the most extreme forms of individual behavior.

A gender-diverse person would have fit comfortably within this retinue. This is true of The Zuni Lhamana We'wha, who performed some of the roles of both genders and was chosen to be part of the Zuni delegation to Washington, during which We'wha met President Grover Cleveland. According to Wikipedia, We'wha also served "as a contact point and educator for many European-American settlers, teachers, soldiers, missionaries, and anthropologists."

All in all, it seems fairly reasonable that we could extend Graeber and Wengrow's framework to cover gender-diverse individuals in prehistory. Taking this perspective may even allow us to understand the concentration of gender-diverse rituals of ancient religions. These include the Gala of Inanna, Galli of Cybele, or the Hijra of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. As ancient god-kings concentrated power around themselves, all of the different types of anomalous individuals we've discussed so far in this series would have made powerful symbols of their royal power. But that's a subject for a future article.

So, in conclusion, to echo J. B. S. Haldane, not only was the past queerer than we suppose, it may have been queerer than we can suppose. I hope it is clear how central the task of queering our image of our history is to a conception of the anti-fascist view of human origins that I introduced in the previous installment of this series. Fascists' supremacist view of the past is predicated on a white supremacist vision of history that erases just these sorts of diverse elements of the human experience. Therefore these traditions of gender diversity that predate colonization — many of which still exist — could be crucial to problematizing fascistic cultural narratives.