Image by Delia Giandeini.

Thousands of years ago, on the sacred rock from which my ancestors fled, this season of the year was celebrated as Samhain, an ancient Celtic festival marking the end of the summer harvest and the beginning of the darker months of the year. This was also a time of sacred upheaval and spiritual transformation, when the veil between the material world and the spirit world was thin, allowing lost spirits to return to earth and the normal roles of society to be inverted. At twilight, the craggy hills of the moors were alive with the glow of massive bonfires set by peasants embracing the darkness in drag.

Eventually, this became what is now known as Halloween and it is really little wonder considering those roots that what became known as Halloween became less commonly known among my people as “Queer Christmas.”

Chaos reigns, the young govern the streets after dark and social transgressions typically demonized are set free to be flaunted flamboyantly by the light of the moon. All of which is beautiful enough in its own right, but this season is so much more than that for a person like me who considers their gender identity to be an integral part of their spiritual journey.

I am a Celtic Christian Pagan who reveres the Virgin Mary as a representative of the Tripple Goddess found throughout ancient matriarchal societies. I also pray to the Morrigana, three sister goddesses of ancient Celtic lore typically associated with battle but also with transformation and necessary change.

While there exists little direct evidence of third genders in ancient Celtic society and little direct evidence of much else of these tribes in general, considering that this was one of many sacred oral traditions wiped out by the tyranny of the churches who used the cross as a weapon for conquest and homogeny, the surviving myths of Celtic heathenry are rife with the same narratives of spiritual gender fluidity that defined many neighboring pagan cultures where the history of revered third genders remains very tangible.

My own embrace of a gender identity that refused to be governed by the limitations of the material world triggered the unlocking of decades of repressed trauma at the hands of the Catholic Church, who replaced the Celtic Druids of my ancestral homeland, along with multiple identities representing the young girls these men failed to silence.

Since becoming a woman divided........

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