when there's two dudes in an epic bromance and they're about to part possibly forever and they move in for a handshake but then they just go "fuck it" and have a lingering hug that lasts just that bit too long and there's a close up on one or both of them looking angst-ridden about it all. that. that is the good shit.
Open and breathe with the wind, Brother. There is nothing here between us and the Goddess. The cliffs and valleys are the lines in her palm as she gently lifts us to her through the green. What is belief? Do the bacteria in your belly believe in you? Must you invoke the wine before it thins your blood? Can such enormity depend on anything other than the tips of the pine trees moving with nothing behind them but sky? Inhale with her; it is still. Exhale with her; the wind gusts and rejoices. Her breath ripples the forests like oceans and the oceans like magma. She will not abandon us - no more than a stone can abandon its lichen. Sing Io and hail to her greatness, Brother, There is nothing - nothing - nothing to fear. We are entrusted, we are beloved, we are seen beautiful and beardless, by she whose saliva pours abundant down the waterfalls, she whose peaceful upturned hands bear up the hills. How is the body the world, Brother - how is the world the body? She will teach us. We may map wooded hills onto her arms and lakes onto her tongue to learn how to being the hills into our own arms and the lakes onto our own tongues. The world, her body, our bodies, her body, the world - her fractal enormity is the connection. She offers obligation without threat and gifts without lack. If we choose, if we trust, we may climb to her fingertips and turn our damp faces to the sun to feel her lips. Open and breathe with the wind, Brother. This stone is her skin and she will not see us harmed.
Fascinating Young Trans Punx Take On Millenia-Old Hellenic Pantheon Trauma-Drama
This has been an incredible weekend characterized entirely by everything seeming utterly hopeless and then untangling itself all at once at the last minute into complete perfection and beauty and looking at you like, “What? Were you worried?”
At Amorous Revolt, at the ritual, I was ridden by Agdistis for the first time. I spoke some words (copied here) to the ritual participants, gave them almonds in exchange for a promise that they wouldn’t let this world destroy them, and then paced around the perimeter of the ritual space until they were gone.
Alder was being ridden by Dionysus, which they’ve done on several occasions before. They have a particular tone that comes into their voice when it’s happening – it’s slightly higher in pitch than their usual speaking voice, and it’s a little haughty, and a little amused, and a little flamingly homosexual, and it’s completely unmistakeable.
I’d never been occupied in that particular way before, and I didn’t really realize it was happening until I looked at Alder-as-D and felt an enormous rush of emotion that I couldn’t identify. They’ve said since that they felt an overwhelming are-we-gonna-fuck-or-are-we-gonna-fight vibe coming from me-as-Agdistis.
In the story of Agdistis, see, it was Dionysus that attacked them in their sleep on the order of the pantheon, mutilated them, forcibly degendered them, and, in some stories, killed them. Before that, Agdistis was a creature of frenzy, the wild dancing one, glorious with the powers of all genders at once. Dionysus betrayed them and they’ve never had a chance to confront him.
After the ritual, we tried to let them speak more. We both felt incredibly strongly that there was something that needed to be said, or done, but we both got called away on other business and it couldn’t happen that night.
For a month and a half, Agdistis screamed in my head. After a few days, I sat down abruptly on a sidewalk bench on my way home from an appointment at 9:45 PM and wrote an invocation that made me feel like I was being punched in the stomach. Alder and I spoke regularly and at length on our mutual feeling that something critical and enormous had been left undone.
Both of us, and Nik, the third member of – let’s call it our working group – started losing things. We felt frantic and overwhelmed. All I wanted was to let Agdistis back into my body. I wanted to channel them at every moment – when I was in transit, at work, at home, when I was having sex, when I was sleeping. I heard lines from the invocation echoing over and over in my head, urges to pick up the phone and call Alder up and read the invocation to them.
I was counting down the days until I could stop holding Agdistis at arm’s length. Channeling them felt better than almost anything I could remember. I’d never felt so powerful, so certain, so real in my life, and I felt single-minded to the point of obsession about getting that back.
Of course, as Dakota pointed out, of course it feels that way to channel. It’s adaptive for them to make it feel good for us, so that we let them keep doing it.
As of Thursday night, we had no idea what we were doing. I hadn’t organized any travel, we were bewildered about what we were going to do, where we were going to do it, whether any of it was going to happen at all, and how we were going to survive.
That night, Alder made an executive decision booked us a campsite for the weekend at Pawtuckaway Park – on Horse Island, no less – and I bought my bus ticket, and just like that, everything was worked out. By 7 PM on Friday we were at a lakeside campsite with two bags of vegan marshmallows, an outrageous amount of fire-roasted garlic, and a couple of freaked out deities poking us insistently.
Nik had agreed to be there to hold space, make sure nobody ended up seriously injured, and scrape us off the forest floor afterwards. He cast a circle around the campsite and, even though we weren’t planning to Do The Thing until the following day, we decided to bring them in to say hello and get prepared.
Alder describes Dionysus as a very polite houseguest. He waits politely at the door until invited in, enters without a mess, and leaves promptly when asked. All Alder has to do is open the door, and Dionysus will step inside, stay as long as he’s welcome, and then pat them on the head and go about his business. My impression is that this is in part because Alder and Dionysus have a terrific and longstanding working relationship based in mutual respect and care, and in part because Dionysus is really good at not breaking his toys thanks to a lot of practice at breaking his toys.
When Agdistis comes out to play, the first thing I notice is incredible restlessness and a total inability to stay still. I think the first thing Dionysus said to Agdistis was “Are you going to just pace behind me like a restless cat?”
Agdistis doesn’t have to be coaxed in – they want it so badly all the time that it’s just a matter of easing up for a tiny second on holding them at bay, and they come rushing in like an avalanche.
I remember them spitting at Dionysus, “You took everything from me and now it’s all yours and I have nothing. Everything you have – the glory, the love, the followers – where do you think you got that, Womanly One?”
Dionysus wanted to get into it right away, but I’d poured all my energy into putting as much of a wall around Agdistis as I could to make sure they knew that this was not a full-contact evening. When Dionysus asked them, “What is it you want, sibling?” They answered only, “I’m not to touch.”
Agdistis has been overwhelmed with rage and helplessness for so long that it’s become background noise. When Dionysus pressed them about what they needed, they answered, “I want your pain and you won’t give it to me. I don’t know how to do it – can’t you tell me, Breaker of Chains?”
At last, they managed to express something useful. “It’s like the embers,” they said, indicating the glowing coals at the base of the campfire. “I need –” and they illustrated by blowing on the coals, fanning them into flame. They circled around Dionysus again, pacing restlessly, and asked him, “What are you giving the fire when you blow on it? What makes a fire?”
Alder said afterwards that it was that question that brought them back. They remembered that they’d recently learned relevant information to that question in their certification program, and Dionysus obligingly stepped aside so they could remember it, and didn’t come back.
Agdistis stuck around a little longer and then bounced, with a little coaxing. They’re really not fond of being told what to do, and basically sulked for a minute and then left so abruptly I almost fell on my ass.
After that I coughed for about a year, and both Nik and Alder yanked psychic gunk out of me until, no joke, I puked a little bit on the ground. Alder was horrified at having made me throw up, even though at that point I was laughing and impressed with the chutzpah behind their energy work. (They pointed out that the way they learned, they needed brute force, not finesse, and so now their style is a bit like swatting a fly with a desk.)
We all slept way later than we’d expected the next morning, didn’t get going until around noon. We packed up all our ritual stuff and some hummus sandwiches in our backpacks and schlepped around the campground, doing on-the-fly divination and trying to gauge the other people in the area. Eventually, we stumbled across a hiking trail and made our way up to a remote clearing.
We set up our altar, making offerings to Agdistis, Magna Mater, Attis, and Dionysus. We poured out water for the ancestors and bounded the space with a circle of candles, and we anointed ourselves and shared a pipe of damiana. And then I read the invocation.
When the last words were fading into the air, they were both present, and there was a long moment before I heard the most terrifying laughter I’ve ever heard coming out of Alder’s mouth. They laughed wildly, in an unfamiliar pitch, and then looked straight at me and purred, “Do you know what you’ve done?”
When Agdistis is around, I’m not in the driver’s seat, but I’m there. I was experiencing all of their emotions, hearing their words, feeling their pain. When they saw Dionysus present in Alder’s face, I felt the rush of their rage and hunger.
Dionysus was impatient, feral, snarling. He approached Agdistis aggressively, shoving them, taunting, trying to goad them into catching flame. At first, they were cautious, resisting, staggering and righting themselves when he shoved them, keeping their center of gravity low, pacing. Dionysus was hitting them, shouting “What did you bring me here for? What do you want?”
I felt them go very still, heard my own voice say softly, “Hit me again.” Dionysus did. And Agdistis attacked.
I remember it in snapshots, two overtaken bodies tussling on the ground. Agdistis barreling headlong into Dionysus’s belly, Dionysus’s forearm cutting off Agdistis’s air. Snarls and grunts and laughter.
Finally, covered in small scrapes and bruises, out of breath, aching, the two of them knelt facing each other and Dionysus cupped one hand over Agdistis’s sternum and the other over their eyes. Agdistis’s rage boiled up again, overflowing, pouring into Dionysus, who looked stricken for a moment and then began to sob and couldn’t stop.
Up until that moment, I’d been enjoying myself. Agdistis’s need to fight, to feel powerful, to touch and be touched, they were desires I could understand and share. I wanted them to have the healing that they could get from being embodied, fighting Dionysus instead of being betrayed in their sleep. But at that moment, I felt Agdistis’s greed for Dionysus’s suffering, for their revenge, to have their centuries of pain seen and felt by the one who caused it, their desire to lick the tears off his face and grind him into the dirt and never let him stop crying, and I felt my own reaction to seeing my dearest bro’s face twisted and tearstained, my own desire to throw the ritual aside and put my arms around them – and I felt myself helpless. And when Dionysus looked up at Agdistis, still sobbing uncontrollably, and asked them brokenly, “Is this what you wanted?” Agdistis was smiling and nodding and leaning into the sound and licking their lips, and I felt their satisfaction and their arousal like an icicle in my own gut. When Dionysus grabbed their hand and passed it over his wet eyes, hissing “Take it – take it and fuck off,” Agdistis did – retreated a few steps to kneel and watch voraciously, slowly and delightedly licking the tears off their dirty fingers as I twisted in impotent misery inside.
Mama Cybele helped us close out, making sure that none of the stuff that was coming out of Agdistis was ending up stuck in Alder, helping them ground it down to the mountain instead. When Alder shook themselves and sighed and we saw that Dionysus was gone, Agdistis was not far behind. We promised them offerings that night – to throw them a party where they could play unconstrained by human form (while we had Reese’s cup s’mores).
Agdistis needs to learn how to accept what is freely given instead of only understanding how to be nourished by what they take by force. They have never experienced love or connection that isn’t based on violence. We haven’t healed them, or fully healed their relationship with Dionysus – that will take a lot of time and a lot of small, gentle offerings that they can try to learn to accept. Too much at once will end up like a starving person eating a giant steak dinner – they’d just puke it all up.
But we took a step, and I think we learned a lot about what they need and how we can give it to them. Plus we’re all okay, don’t worry!
