INTRODUCTION
In the late 19th century, as the new science of psychology grappled with the notion of same sex love, the new term ‘homosexual’ did not sit well with some gay men, who believed that nature created queer people for much more than sex. Uranian was a term for same-sex lovers and genderfluid people favoured by Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds, even Oscar Wilde. Uranian invoked a connection to the Goddess Aphrodite Urania, the patron of same sex love mentioned in Plato’s Symposium, and maybe also to the recently discovered planet Uranus. In contrast to most people in the later 20th century gay rights movement, these Victorian gay pioneers were well aware of the historical associations of queerness and shamanism, goddess worship and philosophy, and they even believed the presence of both male and female sensibilities in one body put Uranian people at the forefront of evolution.
“This interaction in fact between the masculine and the feminine, this mutual illumination of logic and meditation, may not only raise and increase the power of each of these faculties, but it may give the mind a new quality, and a new power of perception corresponding to the blending of subject and object in consciousness. It may possibly lead to the development of that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness and which may also be termed divination.” Edward Carpenter, Intermediate types among primitive folks, 1913
English advocates of homosexual emancipation such as Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds took to using the term “Uranian” to describe a comradely love that they believed would be a cornerstone of a healthy democracy, a vision that was greatly influenced and inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman in north America, while the term itself was first used in Germany by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who was campaigning for gay rights in the German parliament in the 1860s. Uranian was the English translation of German Urning. Ulrichs took the term from Plato’s Symposium, written in the 4th century BCE when love between men was an accepted, normal, integrated part of society. In the Symposium, Plato distinguishes two forms of the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite: “the elder, having no mother, who is called the heavenly Aphrodite [Urania] — she is the daughter of Uranus; the younger, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione — her we call ‘common’ [Pandemos].” Aphrodite Urania was born from the Ocean when the testicles of Uranus fell into it, having been castrated by his son Saturn. Urania represented a more “celestial” love of body and soul, whereas Aphrodite Pandemos represents more physically focussed lust — and reproductive sex.
Ulrichs expanded the term to give these definitions:
- Urning: A person assigned male at birth with a female psyche, whose main sexual attraction is to men.
- Urningin (or occasionally the variants Uranierin, Urnin, and Urnigin): A person assigned female at birth with a male psyche, whose main sexual attraction is to women.
- Dioning: A heterosexual, masculine man
- Dioningin: A heterosexual, feminine woman
- Uranodioning: A male bisexual
- Uranodioningin: A female bisexual
- Zwitter: Intersex
The underlying spirit of the Uranian movement, in both its philosophical and poetic expressions was the celebration of same sex love, affection, relationships and the creativity that flows from them. It was an attempt to remove the deep rooted prejudices that prevented such love flowing freely, and to celebrate the deep love that comes through comradeship-friendship as a cosmic bonding and elevating force in society.
THE URANIANS
Ulrich’s notion that the the male Uranian was an “anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa” — a female soul enclosed in a male body — was not appreciated by all men who loved men, but his writings made the term Uranian well-known around the world. The Uranian sex drive, according to Ulrichs, was inborn, since it developed early, before a child could decide on his sexual predilections — in his opinion, Uranians formed a third sex and he strongly claimed his right to such a drive: “The Dionian [heterosexual] majority has no right to construct the human society as exclusively Dionian; such construction of it is only scandalous abuse, because we have as much rights as you in the human society.”
In England, philosopher Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), adopted Uranian in his works that sought to revolutionise society’s attitudes towards sexuality in general, and same-sex love in particular. Expanding on the connection to the love goddess, Carpenter proposed that Uranian men were more in touch with ‘their love-feeling’ than other men, because it “flows naturally from the presence of the feminine element in them, and its blending with the rest of their nature…” He continued: “If it be once allowed that the love-nature of the Uranian is of a sincere and essentially humane and kindly type then the importance of the Uranian’s place in Society, and of the social work he may be able to do, must certainly also be acknowledged.” The Intermediate Sex, chap 5 (1908)
In 1895, Carpenter’s pamphlet, Homogenic Love, was the first published in England defending homosexuality. In it he called homosexual a ‘bastard’ word, being a mix of greek and latin etymology, and offered homogenic, which has entirely greek roots. Homos — same, genus — sex:
“… in truth it seems the most natural thing in the world that just as the ordinary sex-love has a special function in the propagation of the race, so the other love should have its special function in social and heroic work, and in the generation — not of bodily children — but of those children of the mind, the philosophical conceptions and ideals which transform our lives and those of society… In each case the main object may be said to be union.”
Carpenter’s studies of the yogic and buddhist philosophies coming from the East convinced him, and many other intellectuals of the time, that the next step in the evolution of human consciousness was approaching — which he understood as union of the individual self with the supreme Self, the World Soul, the cosmic consciousness of the universe. This would bring the end of illusions and confusion spread by religions and liberty for all. But Carpenter could see there was a huge mountain to climb — love would need to replace money as the central focus in life and society’s attitudes towards the body and sexuality would have to completely change, for the divine Self to be able to come into union with the body. He believed Uranians had a big part to play in bringing this change about.
“The Uranian people may be destined to form the advance guard of that great movement which will one day transform the common life by substituting the bond of personal affection and compassion for the monetary, legal and other external ties which now control and confine society”.
In a letter to Richard Bucke (author of Cosmic Consciousness, published 1905), Carpenter says:
“Notwithstanding, then, the prevalence of the foot regime (inductive science) and that the heathen so furiously rage together in their belief in it, let us suggest that there is in man a divine consciousness as well as a foot consciousness. For as we saw that the sense of taste may pass from being a mere local thing on the tip of the tongue to pervading and becoming synonymous with the health of the whole body; or as the blue of the sky may be to one person a mere superficial impression of color, and to another the inspiration of a poem or picture, and to a third, as to the “God-intoxicated” Arab of the desert, a living presence like the ancient Dyaus or Zeus — so may not the whole of human consciousness gradually lift itself from a mere local and temporary consciousness to a divine and universal? There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his quite external body; that we know. Are there not also in every man the making of a universal consciousness.”
Carpenter understood that sex and love are both ways of approaching the universal state:
“Sex is the allegory of Love in the physical world. It is from this fact that it derives its immense power. The aim of Love is non-differentiation — absolute union of being; but absolute union can only be found at the centre of existence. Therefore whoever has truly found another has found not only that other, and with that other himself, but has found also a third — who dwells at the centre and holds the plastic material of the universe in the palm of his hand, and is a creator of sensible forms.”
“Taking all together I think it may fairly be said that the prime object of Sex is union, the physical union as the allegory and expression of the real union, and that generation is a secondary object or result of this union.”
Carpenter’s studies and his cosmic experiences led him to believe:
“…we are arriving at one of the most fruitful and important turning points in the history of the race. the Self is entering into relation with the Body. for, that the individual should conceive and know himself, not a toy and a chance-product of his own bodily heredity, but as identified and continuous with the Eternal Self of which his body is a manifestation, is indeed to begin a new life and to enter a hitherto undreamed world of possibilities….this transformation, whilst the greatest and most wonderful, is also of course the most difficult in Man’s evolution, for him to effect. it may roughly be said that the whole of the civilisation-period in Man’s history is the preparation for it.”
Carpenter recorded his own breakthrough into expanded, cosmic, consciousness is his poetic work Towards Democracy, published in 1883, which echoes the mystical revelations received while enjoying the love of fellow men described by Walt Whitman. Here is a sample:
“Freedom! the deep breath! the word heard centuries and
centuries beforehand; the soul singing low and passionate to itself:
Joy! Joy!“Not as in a dream. The earth remains and daily life remains, and
the scrubbing of doorsteps, and the house and the care of the
house remains; but Joy fills it, fills the house full and swells to
the sky and reaches the stars: all Joy!“0 freed soul! soul that has completed its relation to the body!
0 soaring, happy beyond words, into other realms passing,
salutations to you, freed, redeemed soul!“What is certain, and not this? What is solid ? — the rocks? the
mountains? destiny?“The gates are thrown wide open all through the universe. I go
to and fro — through the heights and depths I go and I return: All
is well.“I conceive the purport of all suffering. The blear-eyed boy,
famished in brain, famished in body, shivering there in his rags by
the angle of the house, is become divine before me; I hold him
long and silently by the hand and pray to him.“I conceive a millennium on earth — a millennium not of riches,
nor of mechanical facilities, nor of intellectual facilities, nor
absolutely of immunity from disease, nor absolutely of immunity
from pain; but a time when men and women all over the earth
shall ascend and enter into relation with their bodies — shall attain
freedom and joy;“And the men and women of that time looking back with something
like envy to the life of to-day, that they too might have
borne a part in its travail and throes of birth.”
Richard Bucke recorded that:
“It was early in 1881, as he tells us, when in his thirty-seventh year, that Carpenter entered into Cosmic Consciousness. …As a direct result of the oncoming of the Cosmic Sense he practically resigned his social rank and became a laborer; that is to say, he procured a few acres of land not many miles from Dronfield, in Derbyshire, built upon it a small house and lived there with the family of a working man as one of themselves. Dressing in the common corduroy of the country side, he took up his spade and worked steadily with the others. It seemed to him that the manners and habits of the rich were less noble than those of the poor; that the soul and life of the rich were less noble.”
Bucke, “unhesitatingly included Edward Carpenter amongst the highly select number of the illumined”. (Antony Copley, A Spiritual Bloomsbury)
Carpenter prophesied that humanity would change:
“The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon which now after a hundred centuries comes back laden with such wondrous associations — all the yearnings and the dreams and the wonderment of the generations of mankind — the worship of Astarte and of Diana, of Isis or the Virgin Mary; once more in sacred groves will he reunite the passion and the delight of human love with his deepest feelings of the sanctity and beauty of Nature; or in the open, standing uncovered to the Sun, will adore the emblem of the everlasting splendour which shines within.” Edward Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (1889)
However, for this to happen, the natural priests of the old religions will have to reclaim their roles! In his work ‘Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folks’ (1911) Carpenter identifies roles that many cultures long reserved for homo- or transsexual people: “the priest, medicine-man or shaman, the prophet and the diviner, the artist and craftsperson and the true scientist, successor to the tribal observer of the stars and seasons, medicine and the herbs”. He was aware of the prominent historical roles of queer folk in spiritual service, and also the reason that the patriarchal religions turned against them:
“The Jewish peoples — perhaps by way of protest and reaction against the excesses of the surrounding Syrian tribes — insisted on a complete divorce between sex and religion; and that alienation of the two has lasted on down the Christian centuries. But in much of the old pagan world it was just the contrary. Sexual rituals were an intimate part of religion; and the wonder and glory of sex were a recognised manifestation of divinity.”
This work gave detailed listing of gender variant and same sex loving people’s roles in history, showing that religion, the arts — and the military — were our principal, specialist areas of activity.
“The instinctive artistic nature of the male of this class, his sensitive spirit, his wavelike emotional temperament, combined with hardihood of intellect and body; and the frank, free nature of the female, her masculine independence and strength wedded to thoroughly feminine grace of form and manner; may be said to give them both, through their double nature, command of life in all its phases, and a certain freemasonry of the secrets of the two sexes which may well favour their function as reconcilers and interpreters. Certainly it is remarkable that some of the world’s greatest leaders and artists have been dowered either wholly or in part with the Uranian temperament — as in the cases of Michel Angelo, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or, among women, Christine of Sweden, Sappho the poetess, and others.”
He wrote about 3rd gender people playing shamanic and priestly roles in non- and pre-christian cultures:
“The fact is well known, of course, that in the temples and cults of antiquity and of primitive races it has been a widespread practice to educate and cultivate certain youths in an effeminate manner, and that these youths in general become the priests or medicine-men of the tribe; but this fact has hardly been taken seriously, as indicating any necessary connection between the two functions, or any relation in general between homosexuality and psychic powers…”
(sic! If it was well known then what happened to that knowledge?)
Same sex love could bring about true democracy because:
“Eros is a great leveller. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society. It is noticeable how often Uranians of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions, customs and political tendencies.” 1908 ‘The Intermediate Sex’
WHAT’S HOLDING THIS REVOLUTION BACK? Same sex love has come a long way since Carpenter was writing — though it was the late 1960s before sex between men was partially decriminalised in the UK, and decades more before equal age of consent, partnership and adoption rights came along. It’s been slow progress, and the story isn’t over. Gay male culture can seem largely absorbed in a great big narcissistic fuck-fest, where drug use leads to many health crises, breakdowns, deaths. Edward would be horrified that in the 21st century that western culture still hasn’t absorbed the — immensely liberating — spiritual wisdom, taught openly by eastern traditions but also existent in the teachings of European mystics, that we are all whole at the core — the self is the Self, all things are part of the Oneness that is existence, and pleasure is a natural way to experience the bliss of creation through oneness with others, but this is best enjoyed from a place of (at least belief in our) inner wholeness:
“In consciously surrendering oneself to the pursuit of things external, the “I” (since it really has everything and needs nothing) deceives itself, goes out from its true home, tears itself asunder, and admits a gap or rent in its own being. This is what is meant by sin — the separation or sundering (German Sünde) of one’s being — and all the pain that goes therewith. It all consists in seeking those external things and pleasures; not (a thousand times be it said) in those external things or pleasures themselves. They are all fair and gracious enough; their place is to stand round the throne and offer their homage — rank behind rank in their multitudes — if so be we will accept it. But for us to go out of ourselves to run after them, to allow ourselves to be divided and rent in twain by their attraction, that is an inversion of the order of heaven; and in so doing does sin and all suffering enter in.”
At the start of the 20th century some believed that humans were ready to evolve their understanding of spirit, drop divisive ideas about god, and experience our cosmic oneness with nature directly. In the early 21st century this can still seem a far off or even unlikely prospect, though the certain fact is — lots more people have directly experienced this themselves than 100 years ago! But the education system has been used, media, business, law, religious conflict all continue to be used, to keep humanity’s millennia long research into spiritual understanding off the agenda. The world seems to have become polarised into believers and atheists, with extremists on both sides, pursuoing a false dichotomy that keeps the simple mystical Oneness experienced by many over the centuries overlooked and underdiscussed.
The Uranians were following in the inspirational footsteps of American poet Walt Whitman when they celebrated their love for other men as in itself a spiritual doorway to understanding, vision and light. Historian Randy P Connor in Blossom of Bone (1993) wrote, “For Whitman, nature was a sanctuary in which to celebrate the love of men for each other.”
We two, how long we were fool’d,
Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,
We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return,
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks,
We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side,
We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any,
We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,
We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings,
We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals,
We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down,
We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar, we are as two comets,
We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey,
We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead,
We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other,
We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious,
We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe,
We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,
We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.
Whitman dreamed of a “new city of Friends,” “invincible to the attacks of the whole rest of the earth,” sustained by “the manly love of comrades” -
“I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
with the life-long love of comrades.”
Whitman famously wrote:
“And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.
I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come for-
ever and ever.
And as to you death, and you bitter hug of mortality . . . . it is idle to try to alarm
me.
To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,
I see the elderhand pressing receiving supporting,
I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors . . . . and mark the outlet, and
mark the relief and escape.
And as to you corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,
I smell the white roses sweetscented and growing,
I reach to the leafy lips . . . . I reach to the polished breasts of melons.
And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.
I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
O suns . . . . O grass of graves . . . . O perpetual transfers and promotions . . . . if
you do not say anything how can I say anything?”
William James major work on mysticism, ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ — said that by 1902 many had come to “regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion”, writing in “the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition” on the same level as Hinduism, Neoplatonism, Sufism and Christian mysticism, paths that can lead us to “both become one with the Absolute and … become aware of our oneness.”
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
Edward Carpenter called Whitman “the inaugurator… of a new world of democratic ideals and literature” build on “intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man.” In his book, Cosmic Consciousness, Richard Bucke described Whitman as “the best, most perfect example the world has so far had of the Cosmic Sense,” which he called an “illumined condition, the state of Brahmic Splendor.”
Bucke described his own awakening to cosmic consciousness thus, writing in the 3rd person: “At the age of thirty he fell in with “Leaves of Grass,” [by Whitman] and at once saw that it contained, in greater measure than any book so far found, what he had so long been looking for. He read the “Leaves” eagerly, even passionately, but for several years derived little from them. At last light broke and there was revealed to him (as far perhaps as such things can be revealed) at least some of the meanings. Then occurred that to which the foregoing is preface. It was in the early spring, at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). His mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city; the next, he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain. He claims that he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted than in previous months or even years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught. The illumination itself continued not more than a few moments, but its effects proved ineffaceable; it was impossible for him ever to forget what he at that time saw and knew; neither did he, or could he, ever doubt the truth of what was then presented to his mind.”
Bucke said that with this consciousness active, “there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination which would place the individual on a new plane of existence — which would make him a member of a new species.”
WHITMAN:
“I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see, multiplied as high as I can cipher, edge but the rim of the farther
systems.
Wider and wider they spread, expanding and always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.
My sun has his sun, and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.
There is no stoppage, and never can be stoppage;
If I and you and the worlds and all beneath or upon their surfaces, and all the
palpable life, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not
avail in the long run,
We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
And as surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.
A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span,
or make it impatient,
They are but parts . . . . any thing is but a part.
See ever so far . . . . there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much . . . . there is limitless time around that.
Our rendezvous is fitly appointed . . . . God will be there and wait till we come.
I know I have the best of time and space — and that I was never measured, and
never will be measured.
I tramp a perpetual journey,
My signs are a rain-proof coat and good shoes and a staff cut from the woods;
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, nor church nor philosophy;
I lead no man to a dinner-table or library or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooks you round the waist,
My right hand points to landscapes of continents, and a plain public road.
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.
It is not far . . . . it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,
Perhaps it is every where on water and on land.”
For Whitman, as for Carpenter, this was an embodied, erotic consciousness that could only emerge once the corrupted ideas imposed on sexuality by religions is expunged:
“I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them.
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.”
JOHN ADDINGTON-SYMONDS 1840–1893 was a poet, literary critic, cultural historian, inspired by and corresponded with Walt Whitman — he wrote works on Renaissance, wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics in 1873 (published in limited edition 10 years later) and in 1891 A Problem in Modern Ethics, which included historical survey of homosexuality and discussion of modern theories about it. Of the many notions circulating in psychology circles only the Uranian ideas of Ulrichs were approved of by Addington-Symonds. For example he attacked Kraft-Ebing’s theory that inverts had inherited morbid predispositions, and named the fact that modern scientists were allowing themselves to be influenced by ancient Christian morality and choosing to remain ignorant of the rich history of same sex love.
“The new school of anthropologists and psychological physicians study sexual inversion partly on the lines of historical evolution, and partly from the point of view of disease. Mixing up atavism and heredity with nervous malady in the individual, they wish to substitute medical treatment for punishment, lifelong sequestration in asylums for terms of imprisonment differing in duration according to the offence. Neither society nor science entertains the notion that those instincts which the laws of France and Italy tolerate, under certain restrictions, can be simply natural in a certain percentage of male persons. Up to the present time the Urning has not been considered as a sport of nature in her attempt to differentiate the sexes. Ulrichs is the only European who has maintained this view in a long series of polemical and imperfectly scientific works. Yet facts brought daily beneath the notice of openeyed observers prove that Ulrichs is justified in his main contention. Society lies under the spell of ancient terrorism and coagulated errors. Science is either wilfully hypocritical or radically misinformed. Walt Whitman, in America, regards what he calls “manly love” as destined to be a leading virtue of democratic nations, and the source of a new chivalry.” (A Problem in Modern Ethics, published 1896)
In an essay titled ‘The Dantesque and Platonic Ideals of Love,’ John concludes: “there were two brief moments, once at Athens and once at Florence, when amorous enthusiasms of an abnormal type presented themselves to natures of the noblest stamp as indispensible conditions of the progress of the soul upon the pathway toward perfection.”
Symonds was a gay man who had an experience of ‘cosmic consciousness’, while under chloroform: “I seemed at first in a state of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light, alternating with blankness and with a keen vision of what was going on in the room round me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was near death, when suddenly my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt Him streaming in like light upon me and heard Him saying in no language, but as hands touch hands and communicate sensations: ‘I led thee; I guided thee; you will never sin and weep and wail in madness any more; for now you have seen Me.’ My whole consciousness seemed brought into one point of absolute conviction; the independence of my mind from my body was proved by the phenomena of this acute sensibility to spiritual facts, this utter deadness of the senses. Life and death seemed mere names… I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt.”
Oscar Wilde was also touched by the mystical, and proud to call himself a Uranian:
“I am conscious.. that behind all this artistic beauty.. there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony… The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature — this is what I am looking for… I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth… We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and the earth is Mother to us all… I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence…”
“It will be a marvellous thing — the true personality of man — when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things….. “‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.”
“To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble — more noble than other forms.”
Uranian became the name of a poetic movement that reached its peak between the late 1880s and mid 1890s. At that time a homosexual subculture was emerging in literary circles (until the Oscar Wilde trial darkened the atmosphere). The Uranian movement has however been regarded as stretching between 1858, when William Johnson Cory’s poetry collection Ionica appeared, and 1930, the year of publication of Samuel Elsworth Cottam’s Cameos of Boyhood and Other Poems and of E. E. Bradford’s last collection, Boyhood.
The chief poets of the Uranian circle were William Johnson Cory, Lord Alfred Douglas, Montague Summers, John Francis Bloxam, Charles Kains Jackson, John Gambril Nicholson, E. E. Bradford, John Addington Symonds, Edmund John, John Moray Stuart-Young, Charles Edward Sayle, Fabian S. Woodley. Historian Neil McKenna has argued that Uranian poetry had a central role in the upper-class homosexual subcultures of the Victorian period, arguing that poetry was the main medium through which writers such as Oscar Wilde, Rennell Rodd, 1st Baron Rennell and George Cecil Ives sought to challenge anti-homosexual ideas.
French novelist Joséphin Péladan’s 1891 novel ‘L’androgyne’ also invoked:
“Eros intangible, Uranian, for the coarse men of moralistic epochs you are only an infamous sin; they call your ‘Sodom’… It is the need of hypocritical centuries to attack Beauty… Protect your monstrous mask from profanity! Praise to you!” (hymne a l’androgyne)
Edward Carpenter presented the same message in Child of Uranus, part of the Towards Democracy collection:
“O child of Uranus, wanderer down all times,
Darkling, from farthest ages of the Earth the same
Strange tender figure, full of grace and pity,
Yet outcast and misunderstood of men-“Thy Woman-soul within a Man’s form dwelling,
[Was Adam perchance like this, ere Eve from his side was
drawn?]
So gentle, gracious, dignified, complete,
With man’s strength to perform, and pride to suffer without sign,
And feminine sensitiveness to t.~e last fibre of being;
Strange twice-born, having entrance to both worlds-
Loved, loved by either sex,
And free of all their lore!“I see thee where down all of Time thou comest;
And women break their alabaster caskets, kiss and anoint thy
feet, and bless the womb that bare thee,
While in thy bosom with thee, lip to lip,
Thy younger comrade lies.“Lord of the love which rules this changing world,
Passing all partial loves, this one complete — the Mother love
and sex emotion blended-
I see thee where for centuries thou hast walked,
Lonely, the world of men
Saving, redeeming, drawing all to thee,
Yet outcast, slandered, pointed of the mob,
Misjudged and crucified.“Dear Son of heaven — long suffering wanderer through the
wilderness of civilisation-
The day draws nigh when from these mists of ages
Thy form in glory clad shall reappear.”
French Uranian Marc Andre Raffalovich lived in Edinburgh with his partner, John Grey, a Catholic priest. His book Uranisme et unisexualité: étude sur différentes manifestations de l’instinct sexuel (1896) offered a different view to the now common notion that a man was a homosexual because he had a female soul in a male body and a woman was lesbian because she had a male soul in a female body. He presented his view of “unisexuality” — defining it as attraction to the same sex, closer to the way we mostly see homosexuality nowadays.
Raffalovich drew a difference with heterosexuality: He regarded a heterosexual’s destiny as marriage and starting a family, whereas a homosexual’s duty, he believed, was to overcome and transcend his desires with artistic pursuits and spiritual and mystical — friendships. Here he was attempting to reconcile his devout Roman Catholic beliefs with his homosexuality, seeing transcendence of desire as the goal, in contrast to Carpenter’s and Whitman’s ecstatic visions which had fully embraced the physical as the vehicle of divinity, bliss and cosmic consciousness.
URANIAN as a word didn’t stick around into the second half of the 20th century, possibly because the term became confused with pederasty, which society confuses with paedophilia. Many of the later Uranian poets celebrated love between older and younger men, in fact continuing a tradition that many poets have been part of throughout the centuries, from ancient Greece to medieval monks to Shakespeare in his sonnets.
Rev Edwin Emmanuel Bradford (1860–1944) was an English clergyman, a Uranian poet and writer of stories, articles and sermons. His prolific verse celebrating the high spiritual status of love between men and boys ‘was remarkably well-received and favourably reviewed in his lifetime.’ (wikipedia)
“Is Boy-Love Greek? Far off across the seas
The warm desire of Southern men may be:
But passion freshened by a Northern breeze
Gains in male vigour and in purity.
Our yearning tenderness for boys like these
Has more in it of Christ than Socrates.”
The underlying spirit of the Uranian movement, in both its philosophical and poetic expressions was the celebration of same sex love. It was an attempt to remove the deep rooted prejudices that prevented love flowing freely between all who wished to share it, and to celebrate the deep love that comes through comradeship -friendship as a more cosmic bonding and elevating society.
Edward Carpenter:
O joy divine of friends!
To hold within the circle of one’s arms
More than the universe holds:
So sweet, so rare, so precious beyond words,
The god so tenderly mortal!Not kisses only or embraces,
Nor the sweet pain and passion of the flesh alone;
But more, far more,
To feel (ah joy!) the creature deep within
Touch on its mate, unite, and lie entranced
There, ages down, and ages long, in light,
Suffused, divine — where all these other pleasures
Fade but to symbols of that perfect union!
THE EVOLUTION
Uranian died away, but men continued of course to experience the spiritual, cosmic, potential in their relationships with each other. The effect of the World Wars and the repressive atmosphere of the 1950s certainly slowed this growth down, but in the 1970s a new strand of gay mysticism emerged in the writings of Arthur Evans, Harry Hay, Will Roscoe, Larry Mitchell, Judy Grahn and manifested physically in the, now global, Radical Faerie community, which builds heart centred cosmic connection through the philosophy of subject:SUBJECT consciousness, which Faerie Founder Harry Hay believed to be the natural consciousness of men who love men. The AIDS pandemic then changed the story again, with many beautiful, evolving, men cut down in their prime, but also brought some of us direct experience of the numinous, of transformation, of the Great Mystery.
Gay male mainstream culture in the 21st century however has little sense of the cosmic about it, especially when it comes to the sex scene, which is dominated by the consumerist agenda engendered by apps like grindr. In this consumer age we may treat each other like commodities sometimes, but friendships are still at the core of our nature, as they were at the core of the Uranian vision, alongside sexual liberation! And maybe this is what is happening for many in the world today — sexual encounters that may lead to friendship and love, that may bring enlightenment and awakening. Or, if they don’t, as William Blake wrote in London in the early 18th century, the road of excess may still lead to the palace of wisdom — maybe found through rehabilitation and recovery programmes. However we get there, the discovery to be had is that life is a spiritual experience, not simply a physical one. Science has taught us a lot about the exterior reality, but it’s within our interior reality that we meet ourselves and where we grow in consciousness, where we become — cosmic.
In his book, Lady Moon Rising, Arthur Evans (who was the author of ’70s masterpiece Witchcraft and the Gay Counter Culture) identifies the lack of purpose in people’s lives as one of the limitations preventing them from realising cosmic consciousness:
“Living a meaningful life adds to the reservoir of moral energy available for making the world a better place. Ironically, though, it cannot provide, by itself, any guarentee of success. Integrity, vision and principled struggle can all end in crushing defeat and often do.
“Nonetheless, rewards remain for people who work with each other to make the world more beautiful, healthy, orderly or just….they connect with each other. That in itself is a great benefit to society that thrives by undermining connectedness. But they also win something else — and expanded and deepened sense of self, one that results from interacting creatively with the larger world.
“Making the Great Reconnect necessarily deepens and expands the lives of the people doing the reconnecting. They become more open to learning from other people’s personal experinces, the cultural richness of humanity, and the wonder of the natural world. If they invest enough of themselves in the world, they will no longer experience it as an alien presence of external, lifeless objects, disconnected from their own inner needs, feelings and identity. Instead, they will come to experience both themselves and the world as mutually engaging parts of a larger, organic whole…
“This understanding — that all things are interconnected in a great, encompassing, living unity — is what is meant by the term ‘cosmic consciousness.’ It’s ‘consciousness’ because it results from reflections on our experiences. It’s ‘cosmic’ because it expands more and more into the larger world as we ourselves become more interconnected. It involves a ‘living unity’ because the universe constantly transforms and perpetuates itself with stunning creativity, like a great living organism, and because the universe is one.
“Cosmic Consciousness stimulates creativity among the individuals who cultivate it. Because of its emphasis on connectedness, it motivates people to integrate the tactile, conceptual, and emotional parts of their lives into an experiential whole…
“Here is where we find the font of the magic of life, for that font is people themselves when self-integrated, flowing with expressive creativity, and connected in body and spirit to each other and the cosmos. Here the boundaries of the self expand, and its windows open outward to the goodness and beauty of the whole, which it takes in with exuberance. From this place onward, life becomes a transformative and magical journey on an ever-opening road.”
CONCLUSION: from Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy:
The sun shines, as of old; the stars look down from heaven; the
moon, crescent, sails in the twilight; on bushy tops in the warm
nights, naked, with mad dance and song, the earth-children address
themselves to love;Civilisation sinks and swims, but the old facts remain — the sun
smiles, knowing well its strength.The little red stars appear once more on the hazel boughs,
shining among the catkins; over waste lands the pewit tumbles
and cries as at the first day; men with horses go out on the land
- they shout and chide and strive — and return again glad at
evening; the old earth breathes deep and rhythmically, night and
day, summer and winter, giving and concealing herself.I arise out of the dewy night and shake my wings.
Tears and lamentations are no more. Life and death lie stretched
below me. I breathe the sweet aether blowing of the breath of God.Deep as the universe is my life — and I know it; nothing can
dislodge the knowledge of it; nothing can destroy, nothing can
harm me.Joy, joy arises — I arise. The sun darts overpowering piercing
rays of joy through me, the night radiates it from me.I take wings through the night and pass through all the wildernesses
of the worlds, and the old dark holds of tears and death -
and return with laughter, laughter, laughter:Sailing through the starlit spaces on outspread wings, we two -
0 laughter! laughter! Laughter!
