A common recurring element found in world cultures, past and present, is the existence of some “third gender” role, often similar to modern conceptions of transfeminity, which fills some sort of shamanic or priestly position. In discussing many of these social roles, I will admit to resorting to the shorthand “transfeminine,” a concept which is inevitably bound up with modern conceptions of gender. Some roles discussed here were associated with femininity and some kind of transition, or initiation while other roles touched on here are seen as completely distinct from the spheres of masculinity and femininity. The only real uniting factor across these various “third genders” is the significance of the connection between gender liminality and the ability to interact with the world of spirits, gods, or the occult. However, this throughline makes clear that there is a near universal connection between gender variance and the ability to occupy liminal spaces between the human and otherworldly.
In the Sumerian city-states of Ancient Mesopotamia, temples dedicated to the Goddess Inanna were staffed by the gala, at least as far back as the third millennium BCE. These priestly figures occupied a liminal space in gender: universally they adopted feminine dress and mannerism, and predominantly they were what we might call “assigned male at birth,” an attribute suggested by the fact that the cuneiforms for gala are the signs of “penis” and “anus” combined, but gala who were “assigned female at birth” were recorded as well. The feminine nature of the gala was conceived of in most cases as a transformation brought about by Inanna herself, a gift that created a link with the divine and the ability to commune with the gods, both in order to soothe them and request their boons. The gala had a reputation for sexual relations with men, but at the same time some gala married women and had children. While the social status of the gala varied between individuals, the chief among them in each city was considered one of the state’s most prestigious officials. The role of the gala was maintained long after the fall of the original Sumerian civilization, with their roles in appeasing and calling upon the gods was retained in the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian civilizations as the kurgarru and the assinnu, servants of Inanna’s equivalent Ishtar.
Outside of the Mesopotamians, similar institutions to the gala existed in a number of societies in antiquity even after the end of the Bronze Age. In the region of the Levant, the transfeminine priestesses of the Canaanite equivalent of Inanna, Astarte as well as the mother goddess Asherah were known as qedeshim and fulfilled a similar role to their Mesopotamian counterparts. The qedeshim, including their ritualistic role as passive sexual partners, were a major part of the cultural practices of the Hebrew kingdoms until the institution of King Josiah’s reforms at the end of the 7th century BC. Despite this, a similar class of castrated, transfeminine priestesses serving the Canaanite goddess Atargatis would manage to survive all the way into the time of Roman hegemony. To the northeast, ranging from the Pontic Steppe to grasslands of Central Asia, the nomadic Scythians had a transfeminine shamanic class known as the enarei who had received the ability to soothsay from the goddess Artimpasa. Similar to the gala’s relation to songs invoking the gods, the enarei were associated with ecstatic states created through the use of cannabis. Considering the practices of steppe peoples to drink horse urine, some scholars have even theorized that enarei feminization was partially achieved through the use of pregnant mare urine as an early form of hormone replacement therapy, a possibility bolstered by the familiarity of the ancients with the fact that vitus amantis equate could be used by witches to emasculate men. These practices are why many writers in antiquity associated the Scythians with the mythical Amazons.
The connection between the divine and the transfeminine continued well into the Classical period. During the Greek Dark Ages in the Anatolian city-state of Ephesus, the famous Temple of Artemis was administered by the megabyzoi, eunuch priests who had ritually castrated themselves in the service of their goddess. Ancient historians such as Herodotus interpreted the Temple as having been established by the Amazons, similar to how the transfeminine shamans of the Scythians lead to their association. The location of the Temple of Artemis in the Anatolian peninsula also makes it likely that these megabyzoi were related to the cult of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, and that the Ephesian Artemis was a Greek interpretation of Cybele. Playing the role of a Mother Goddess, a central component of the cult of Cybele was the myth of her consort, Attis. Attis was a vegetation deity associated with a variety of similar myths that are ultimately united by the story of his self-castration and death, and his role as the founder of Cybele’s castrated priesthood, the galli, who were referred to with feminine pronouns by authors in antiquity. One version of the Attis story includes a deity connected to Cybele and sometimes considered one and the same, the androgynous Agdistis who possessed both male and female genitalia. The hermaphroditic power of Agdistis apparently threatened the other gods, prompting them to drug and castrate the deity, the fertile blood of which would plant an almond tree that would impregnate a mortal woman with the god Attis. As Attis grew into a beautiful youth, the now female Agdistis would pursue her son. When she was foiled in her attempts, she would instead inflict Attis with madness, prompting his self-castration and death. In mourning, Agdistis would preserve his body so that his beauty could remain eternal. The myth of Agdistis and Attis, as well as the less bloody variation involving the more conventional Cybele, have a number of parallels to the Greek myth of Adonis and Aphrodite, which in turn was derived from the ancient myth of Inanna and Dumuzid, providing a connection between the various transfeminine goddess cults in Western Asia and the Mediterranean.
The cult of Cybele would continue to remain predominant among the Phrygians, and quickly spread among the Greeks during the Hellenic period. When faced during the Second Punic Wars and faced with a number of ill omens, the Roman Republic would import the cult of Cybele and the practices of the galli after consulting the Sibylline Books, a collection of oracular prophecies relied on for advice in times of trouble. The priesthood of the galli effectively became an organ of the Roman state, and authors referred to the priests of Cybele as a “third sex.” The practices of castration initially clashed with Roman prohibitions of the practice, resulting in a legally uncertain citizenship status for a priesthood that was a part of the state religious apparatus. Nonetheless, the cult of Cybele would become an enduring part of Roman life and eventually the Emperor Claudius would outright lift the religious prohibition on castration for Roman citizens altogether. It would not be until the predominance of Christianity in the Empire that the practices of the galli would eventually be suppressed.
To shift our attention eastwards, we find that Indian texts such as the puranas and the Kama Sutra make frequent reference to the existence of a tritiya-prakriti or “third nature/gender.” The number of cultures encompassed within the Indian subcontinent mean that understandings of tritiya-prakriti can vary significantly between areas, but for the purposes of this discussion, our focus is on one of the most prominent “third gender” roles found there with the hijras. When we discuss the hijras, we must keep in mind that we are not dealing with some lost cultural practice of antiquity, but a population of at least over half a million people who understand their gender identity in a variety of different ways and have to contend with contemporary political institutions and social forces. Nonetheless, in discussions of transfeminity and third genders in relation to spiritual affairs, it would be remiss not to mention the long traditions of hijra communities led by gurus that transmit religious practices from generation to generation. Many of these hijra communities honor either the goddess Bahuchara Mata or the androgynous deity Ardhanarishvara, the combined form of the god Shiva and the goddess Parvati, and traditionally hijras were considered to be a source of blessings, often being invited to attend births and weddings in order to encourage good fortune. These communities and traditions are part of what distinguish hijra from other transgender and genderqueer persons in modern India: some form of ritual initiation is necessary in order to be considered, where they are instructed in a secret language, and their identity are ultimately tied to the leadership of a guru and spiritual practices. These intentional communities also serve as a bulwark against the poverty and discrimination that many hijras face, partially as a holdover from a century of criminalization under British imperial rule.
Other still extant culture specific “third genders” found in disparate parts of the world similarly have strong historical associations with religious and mystic functions. The broad umbrella term “Two Spirit” was developed in order to attempt to encompass the numerous instances of third gender roles in Indigenous American nations, complicated by the extensive variations between the distinct social roles associated with each “third gender” encompassed by the term. One of the indigenous “third genders” most overtly connected to the liminal sphere of the mystic is the Lakota winkte, a transfeminine gender role who traditionally realized their status in divinely inspired dreams, often becoming soothsayers who assigned secret names to newborn children and had access to secret knowledge of particular medicines. Across the Pacific in Indonesia, the Bugis people have five traditional gender roles, including the non-binary role of bissu which is considered to encompass both masculinity and femininity and traditionally filled a priestly role. Similar to other “third gender” roles, being bissu is tied to initiation into a community and like hijra are privy to a secret language used in their songs and chants. Meanwhile, the Asog of the Visayan people and bayok of the Luzon people in the Philippines were traditional gender roles associated in contemporary times with the bakla, a feminine gender role distinct from being a trans woman. Prior to colonization, in the Philippines the role of a shaman, known as a babaylan, was considered inherently feminine, and as such the majority of babylans were women. Babaylans had the ability to communicate with the spirit world and access to knowledge of methods of healing, sacred songs and chants, oral histories, and rituals to invoke spirits and cast spells. While asogs and bayoks were not universally babaylans, they did not need to be chosen in order to undertake the role and bypassed the need for initiation rites. Of course these various, diverse gender roles should not be conflated on the basis of some similarities, and we should take care not to exoticize the identities of numerous living persons, but the histories of these disparate cultures do suggest a strong connection between gender roles outside the male-female binary and the ability to access liminal spaces associated with the spiritual or magical.
Let us return to the Temple of Artemis to tie this into the western tradition of occult practices. On the coins issued by the temple, the Artemis of Ephesus was depicted wielding a particular symbol that resonates throughout the history of western occultism - two serpents coiled around a staff, the famous “caduceus.” The caduceus is best known as the symbol of the god Hermes, a deity not only strongly tied to the practice of magic and associated with liminal spaces, moving between the worlds of the living and the dead, but also tied heavily to gender variance, being the father of the androgynous deity Hermaphroditus. A wider connection can be drawn to say that Hermes is also the god of transitions and transitory states generally, in his role as messenger, trickster, and magician. Furthermore as “Hermes Trismegistus,” the legendary founder of the occult tradition of Hermetism, there is an emphasis of the “unity of opposites” suggested by the intertwined serpents of the caduceus that resonates with the androgyny and liminal “third genders” of figures like the megabyzoi that served the Ephesian Artemis.
The associations between the caduceus and the gender liminality are made effectively explicit by the myth of Tiresias, a blind prophet who appears in multiple stories in Greek mythology. The most important myth related to Tiresias is where he discovers a pair of serpents intertwined and copulating and strikes them with a rod. In response, they are transformed by the goddess Hera into a woman for seven years until she discovers a pair of intertwined serpents once more and is transformed back into a man. Here the caduceus is directly associated with “transitory” states of gender, and both are connected to a figure with magical abilities. Tiresias, like Hermes, is a liminal figure, living as both a man and a woman, and being unable to see the present but capable of seeing the future. The use of the symbol by the goddess of the megabyzoi and its associations with the gender-bending soothsayer suggest that the caduceus was directly connected to the androgynous and transitory gendered states, and by extension through the liminal god Hermes, the caduceus suggested a connection between magical practices and gender liminality. It is even likely that the male Caduceus deity is historically connected to the service of a goddess figure : consider how the Minoan civilization of ancient Crete which preceded the Mycenaeans worshiped a mother goddess which depicted wielding a pair of serpents for example, or perhaps more pointedly the original Mesopotamian god of the caduceus, Ningishzida, was depicted as subservient to the goddess Ishtar and a partner of the god Tammuz, the Babylonian equivalent of Inanna’s lover Dumuzid. In fact, some depictions of Ishtar, the goddess of the kurgarru is even depicted wielding the caduceus herself.
So, the caduceus and his liminal role connects Hermes, the ideal embodiment of wisdom in the western occult tradition, to gender variance, and it is well established that the practice of magic is tied up with “third gender” roles in the civilizations of antiquity which this tradition draws upon. This background perhaps clarifies why western esotericists have long depicted the desired state of perfection or enlightenment as a divine “androgyne,” neither male nor female but both simultaneously. Reasoning that the unity of opposites was the path to transcendence, the early modern Hermeticist tradition drew on the texts of the old Hermetists to conclude that bringing together male and female principles into a single being was a transcendental act. Meanwhile in the western alchemical tradition, the end product of achieving the magnum opus, the mission of all such alchemists, is symbolized by Rebis, the “divine hermaphrodite” which balances the masculine solar and feminine lunar principles in a single body and represents the perfection embodied in the philosopher’s stone and its capacity to transform any substance. The mystical doctrines of the Rosicrucians, an early modern Christian mystic movement which would shape the development of modern esoteric traditions, teach that humanity originated from a pre-fall state of androgyny, the primordial Adam Kadmon, and that the eventual universal enlightenment of humanity would come about with a sort of restoration of this pre-fall state with the emergence of universal androgyny.
The explicit relation of gender transition to the occult is most obvious in the works of Aleister Crowley, particularly when we investigate The Book of Lies. In his chapter “The Oyster,” Crowley poetically characterizes the initiation into the Order of the Silver Star, the highest order of his magical organization, the A.’.A.’. as a type of gender transition. “The Brothers of A.'.A.'. are Women: the Aspirants to A.'.A.'. are Men,” Crowley describes in relation to the title of Magister Templi, obtained once the practitioner has crossed the Abyss associated with the “false sephirot” of Da’at, experienced the destruction of their ego at the hands of the demon Choronzon, and emerged reborn in the City of Pyramids, associated with the feminine sephirot of Binah. This is a prominent milestone in the Thelemic process known as the Great Work, in which the practitioner undertakes a course of study and practice to come to understand their True Will. At this stage in the process, the practitioner becomes one with the goddess Babalon and is reborn as a Babe of the Abyss and master of occult arts. Obviously, this framework does not necessarily involve a literal gender transition. However the nature of magickal practice, in which the goal is to achieve one’s True Self and understand one’s True Will, and involves a dissolution of one’s old self and identity by the embrace of a rebirth through identification with the feminine, makes the parallels almost overt. This is likely part of the reason that Aleister Crowley adopted the persona of “Alys Cusack,” which was not only a name under which they published poetry but also a personality which they would adopt from time to time at the Abbey of Thelema in the Sicilian town of Cefalù, moving between Aleister and Alys from day to day.
Taking this long history of the connection between communication with the divine and gender variance, especially transfeminity and androgyny, from the Sumerian gala serving and invoking Inanna to crossing the abyss to become a “woman” and one with Babalon in Thelema, it can be extrapolated that the roles of occultist and magician are ones tied to defiance of the conventional boundaries of gender. The mercurial spirit of experimentation and discovery inherent in the occult practices requires a willingness to divorce oneself from the old categories and embrace the “opposite” elements that exist within you. An occultist can be any gender identity, but at the same time they must be willing to transcend binaries and accept the possibility of shedding numerous elements of their old self to become something new. The practice of magick, as Crowley defined it, is “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will.” In this sense gender transition is the most overt act of magick that we know of, an arduous journey undertaken to realize the true self, to “become who you are,” utilizing both the fruits of the scientific method and aesthetic transformation to facilitate this Tiresian metamorphosis. No wonder there is such an affinity between occult practices and gender non-conformity when every act of transition is knowingly or unknowingly an act of magick.