Priests and Shaman: In Between Heaven and Earth, Male and Female

I lived for a couple of years in a village on an isolated island in what today is the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu.  I was at one time the only American on this island until a Catholic priest arrived from the U.S.  He had been assigned to a mission station about three miles walk away from me, down along a rocky coastline.   This was Père Bob.  (Up until then, all priests serving the Catholic mission had been French-speaking pères.)  Père Bob was hospitable and engaging; he was also vigilantly taken care of by a gaggle of Italian nuns, and he had laid in a fine supply of wine and whiskey. 

Père Bob was interested in island culture and language and he often joined local men and boys who gathered at dark village clearings each evening to prepare and drink kava, the Pacific's traditional drug substance.  Kava ordinarily has light depressant, mood-leveling effects, something like valium.  It wasn't long before teen-aged boys were whispering to me that Père Bob, everyone zoned out on kava, would sometimes feel them up.  The boys weren't upset about this; they just giggled at the père's sexual eccentricity.  It came to me then that the connections between religion and sexuality are long and twisted in human history. 

Whatever one believes about the supernatural, the problem in all religions is one of access and communication.  Who controls the flow of messages back and forth between humans and the gods?   Specialist mediators operate in most religions as supernatural guides, as did Père Bob, in his own way, on my island.  Many cultures presume gays and lesbians to bridge fundamental gender categories.  Religious systems have often built, metaphorically, on this positional intermediacy of gays and lesbians.  Homosexuals (however culturally conceived), who themselves are in between gender categories are effective religious mediators linking humans and the gods.  Mohave Indian cross-dressers, for example, traditionally, often were powerful shaman; they cured sickness by contacting the world of the spirits.  Cross-dressers in India, the hijras, similarly possess powerful abilities to bless and to curse based on their close links to the Mother Goddess.  (Anyone interested in hijras, a few of whom are hermaphrodites and some of whom ritually emasculate themselves, might have a look at my friend Serena Nanda's book Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India (1990).)

Anthropologist Weston La Barre once suggested that original human religion everywhere was shamanistic and therefore relatively egalitarian.  Although people might turn to part-time specialist shamans to diagnose and cure disease and for other sorts of assistance with the supernatural, everyone had the capacity and the right to contact his or her own ancestors or other family spirits.  With the development of agriculture, though, religion and social life in general became much more hierarchical.  When the great religions--the religions of the book--appeared in human history, they quickly acquired an official monopoly on spiritual mediation.  Priesthoods, notably, emerged and gained control of tallking to the gods.

Organized priesthoods may have secured the function of mediating with spirits but they have not escaped issues of sexuality and religious function.  The Roman Catholic Church, for example, particularly since the 12th century has symbolically remarked the powers of its priestly mediators through an elaboration of celibacy.  But some of the same sorts of people whose intermediate sexuality once would have led them to take up the spiritual quests of the shaman nowadays become clergy within religion organizations that are hostile to homosexuality.  Nonetheless, some of the best priests and pastors, at least in my experience, are lesbian or gay.  In this, they maintain a wide-spread, cross-cultural tradition of great antiquity.

My friend William now studies in a seminary in the east.  He is a monk on his way to the priesthood.  He loves men and, I should also tell you, he is super cute.  I worry about William.  Sometimes I suspect he has thrown himself into a celibate church as a means to control a personal sexuality that discomforts and vexes him.  Marriage to the church means never having to go on a date.  "This is dangerous overkill," I plead with him:  "Can't you become a priest after you are old and ugly?"  But part of me knows he is realizing a primal human cultural pattern.  Those who find themselves in between male and female also move easily between earth and heaven.  William's retreat to the monastery might be a loss to the gay bars--that mundane world of the flesh--but it is a gain for the realm of the spirit.  I am glad that the messenger who helps carry my prayers up to the gods is so beautiful.