If you’re new to this series, please visit Genspect on Substack to read the earlier parts in this series about Gnostics, Jungian alchemists, castration cults, rock ‘n’ roll gender outlaws, and the deification of the transgender child.

Like many British people, I live in a crumbly old house which pre-dates electricity supply and indoor plumbing. After chipping away cement to expose original stonework, it was evident that whoever built this dwelling had included a six-foot high rhombus made of flint stones above the front door, in an elevated position visible across the valley. The dark stones had been in-filled with black mortar to make this geometric shape especially prominent, functioning as a territorial marker.

Once I understood the significance of the black rhombus, I began to notice it everywhere; even in the brick wall of a supermarket. What some may take to be a decorative feature is the signature of a male power network. It represents the black tile in the floor of a Masonic lodge, supposedly modelled after King Solomon’s Temple. In some accounts, the black and white floor tiles represent spirit and matter, while in other stories they represent good and evil.

Rather than a monolithic patriarchy, I believe that male networks, which may be highly selective in their membership, intersect to empower and serve specific interests. The Freemasons attracted notoriety among the descendants of the medieval craft guilds by developing their own quasi-religious rites, referencing a Great Architect who created their world. Like the bissu of South Sulawesi, the initiation ritual for a Freemason involves a sharp dagger and a supposedly secret, esoteric text.

The Freemasons I’ve met have been mostly concerned with business deals and charitable works in the local community, but long-held suspicions about the power of their network linger. Not all of their brethren have been so benign. In Spain from 1931, Freemasons deployed lawfare as part of the anti-clerical movement. Their allies in ‘antifa’ groups murdered over 10,000 Christians before and during the Spanish Civil War.

While there have been small, breakaway women’s and mixed-sex lodges across Europe since the mid-nineteenth century, the United Grand Lodge of England, which claims a lineage going back over three hundred years, is strictly male-only. The wives of Freemasons are expected to support the organisation, but may not participate, and certainly cannot challenge its doctrines. Freemasonry’s wackier clones include the Order of the Oriental Templars, which Aleister Crowley, whom we met earlier in this series, seized control of long ago.

If you are ever in the financial district of the City of London, built upon the original Roman colony of Londinium, I highly recommend a visit to the Temple of Mithras. Its stone foundations were relocated and rebuilt in their original position during the construction of Michael Bloomberg’s headquarters in the city. After obtaining a ticket in advance, you can enter a side door of the Bloomberg building and descend below modern street level to see the temple’s remains, and a small exhibition.

It was here that I learned that the all-male cult of Mithraism, popular among Roman colonisers before Constantine’s endorsement of Christianity, had an initiation ritual referred to as the ‘male bride’. The hazing ceremony in this windowless, underground temple, known as a mithraeum, seems to have involved a lot of alcohol and the young male initiate being dressed in women’s clothing, in a forerunner of today’s S&M dungeon. It has been speculated that the male bride ritual was derived from the feminine representation of Babylonian bad-boy Baal.

This cult practice has been preserved in the form of a headless statue now held in Madrid by the National Archaeological Museum of Spain, which could be taken as evidence that transgender people have existed for thousands of years. Or, that when sex-starved military men are hundreds of miles from home, the prettiest boy in the unit has to dress up and take one for the team.

It seems this cult was widespread across classical-era Europe and beyond, with examples of Mithraic statues and allegorical stonemasonry found in north Africa and Syria. Somewhat like ‘Monkey’ in the Japanese TV show I enjoyed each week, Mithras was supposed to have been born from a rock. One such statue from the era of the Emperor Commodus (177-192 AD) was found at the Castra Peregrina imperial barracks in central Rome, indicating that this was no fringe religion.

Furry cosplay may also have been involved, as evidenced by a statue dated to 389 AD, found in a mithraeum in the country now called Lebanon, and kept today in the Louvre in Paris. This sculpture features a man with a lion’s mask, a snake around his torso, and his genitals on display. Some historians of these fruity basement-dwellers believe that ‘Leo’ was one of the senior levels in the Mithraic cult.

With the Roman Empire so vast by ancient standards, the followers of Mithras weren’t its only cross-dressing cultists. In his podcast episode ‘A critical history of gender theory’,

Forrest Smith detailed how the Galli, self-castrating transfeminine priests from Anatolia who worshipped the goddess Cybele, have been appropriated for modern times by the abuse of historical process. As UK government quango-turned-charity English Heritage puts it, the Galli “occupied an ambiguous space in Roman notions of gender that many modern transgender and nonbinary people have identified with.” This amounts to official celebration of deliberate, masochistic and dangerous self-harm.

In 1897, English poet George Cecil Ives founded secret society ‘The Order of Chaeronea’, also known as the ‘Army of Lovers’. This quasi-military cult was inspired by the Sacred Band of Thebes, a unit of three hundred homosexual warriors who had been defeated at the Battle of Chaeronea in Ancient Greece during 338 BC. A reference to the Army of Lovers re-surfaced in the 1990 pamphlet ‘Queers Read This’, which James Lindsay has reviewed recently. The anarchist ‘Bash Back’ movement of militant-deviant activism appears to have inspired today’s ‘trantifa’.

Andy Ngo reported that a group calling itself ‘Bash Back’ carried out a vandalism attack on the Equality and Human Rights Commission building in London during November 2025. This was in retaliation for the Commission recognising the authority of the UK Supreme Court ruling on the definition of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010.

The ritual of the ‘male bride’ does not appear to have ceased over the centuries, with the evidence in Martin Dammann’s photographic book “Soldier Studies: Cross-Dressing in the Wehrmacht” suggesting those men who accuse feminists of being ‘Nazis’ may be doing what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called ‘projection’: attributing problematic thoughts and desires to others.

The National Socialist Workers Party of Germany was of course a formidable male power network, going from a rag-tag of revolutionaries, Berlin night-clubbers and rough-trade street brawlers to dominate the country within little over a decade. The party’s mantras about domestic roles for females elided the fact that as early as 1933, the Third Reich had opened a concentration camp at Moringen for women who wouldn’t wheesht.

In today’s cancel culture, we see evidence of a male power network in operation. Feminists asking awkward questions about gender ideology, and women simply objecting to the presence of a naked man in their changing room or prison cell, have been subject to censure out of all proportion to the offence supposedly caused. Queer theory appears to have escaped the academic seminar to engender a male power network, which certain women appear to support, perhaps in the hope of obtaining power by becoming non-women.

Male power networks with esoteric beliefs are routinely accused of corruption precisely because history has proved them extremely effective at manipulating whole societies and nations. The bond of brothers under pain of death, sworn to make all others secondary, is a supremely powerful organising force, because loyalty is of vital importance to functioning clans. These powerful associations do not sit well with liberal notions of equality.

To what extent is the online community of socially isolated basement-dwellers a male power network used for sadistic hazing? Members of the so-called ‘764’ cult have been convicted in both the USA and UK of encouraging self-harm and suicide by young women.

What if the harmful medical interventions and bizarre surgeries carried out on young, terminally online people with gender identity crises are the result of trolling by devious manipulators and wannabe Satanic edgelords? Is anyone checking the motivation of transgender forum members who encourage vulnerable teenagers to seek the interventions of gender clinics? And are the anonymous posters who encourage institutionalised self-harm in the guise of ‘life-saving healthcare’ even transgender themselves?

In this respect, transgender people could be considered victims of organised psychological manipulation by social network. The gender industry of doctors, clinic staff, plastic surgeons, drug companies and pharmacists has been only too happy to oblige this new legion of self-harmers, only at war with their own bodies.

If we are to challenge the harms being actively pursued for gender non-conforming people by an ideological-industrial complex, I believe we need to recognise the influence of networks of power attached to magical belief systems, and in particular male power with dark intent.

The gender non-conforming Bissu of Indonesia were believed by the Bugis people to have descended from the heavens via rainbow with the ‘white-bloods’, aristocratic rulers of the region. Their esoteric status is therefore tied into power politics. Until the 1940’s, the Bissu priests led the ritual which crowned new kings and queens for their people. As historian Leonard Y. Andaya put it, the origin story of the Bissu “is not simply an entertaining legend but a form of oral magic which reactivates the beginning of time in order to endow the favored ruler with powers of that primeval period.”

The followers of Mithras in Britain may have been drunken, horny soldier-colonisers who liked playing dress-up with the boys in darkened basements, but they also founded one of the most powerful cities the world has ever known. The square mile around Londinium’s Temple of Mithras remains a key centre of international financial empire almost two thousand years later. Those of us who have been inspired by Margaret Mead’s famous quote on small groups of people changing the world might note that it also applies to ruthless bands of ambitious and highly motivated fetishists who organise in cults.

Being surrounded by hostile natives who do not share your novel beliefs and rituals appears to cement the bond between men, making them a powerful adversary, like the British soldiers who killed hundreds of Zulu warriors after facing an overwhelming siege at Rourke’s Drift, Natal in 1879. Due to its technological advantages, the male power network of the colonial British army ultimately won that war. It would take another 115 years before majority rule emerged in South Africa.

In our time, a very small number of cross-dressing men appear to have dominated nations of millions of women. And so, the very act of colonising territory can reify countercultural belief systems into policies to be imposed on a reluctant local population; siege mentality begets an authoritarian form of governance if the coloniser can achieve and maintain power. How many years will it take for majority rule to be restored in the case of gender?

The network’s belief system must contain a categorical imperative for the seizure and maintenance of power in order for that network to endure. For the coloniser, this could be based on the vulnerability inherent in numerical disadvantage; for the usurper or crusader, divine right. Sometimes both imperatives combine, forming a Molotov cocktail of murderous, insurrectional zealotry.

Late American sociologist Alvin Gouldner attacked the tendency of critical theories to espouse ‘underdog metaphysics’, noting the irony that progressive academics were drawn from the wealthier classes. Today, ‘allies’ support the right of violent sex offenders, invariably male, to be housed in prisons for women while simultaneously arguing for prison abolition. Deviant underdogs are supposed to form the new proletariat, with maximal revolutionary potential. That the contemporary spree of sex crimes harms the actual proletariat most is of no consequence to the postmodern theorist.

The contemporary transgender rights movement in the West appears to operate as a quasi-Masonic male power network; queermasonry, if you will. Instead of the dagger of the bissu, the sharp initiation implement is a syringe of cross-sex hormones, and the sacred, esoteric text is Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Trouble’, or ‘Julia’ Serano’s ‘Whipping Girl’. And so, the male power network takes on a quasi-religious quality, as its fundamentals, essential to power-seeking, become codified into initiation rituals, creeds and mantras, like the slogan, heard so many times, “Repeat after me: Trans women are women!”

From the Yogyakarta Principles of 2006 to the notorious ‘Denton’s Document’ of 2019, it is more than obvious that the trans brigade is on a mission to change the world. How else might we explain the rapid adoption of policies directly contrary to established medical, scientific and ethical principles, except via a powerful network acting in the interests of a self-selected affinity group? The arrest of comedian Graham Linehan by armed police on arrival in Britain, treatment usually reserved for international criminals and terrorists, was evidence of queermasonry in the justice system.

Women may outnumber men with transgender ideation by the ratio of Zulus to British soldier-colonisers, but there is no ‘trans genocide’ underway in the West. If your identity depends on the mental and physical submission of the majority, it was always unstable and precarious, with a tenuous connection to reality. The existential need for the power-seeking imperative of the ‘trans rights movement’ simply does not exist, suggesting that queermasonry will not endure in the long term as a network of male power.

Like in Freemasonry, women do not lead the genderist movement, but some play an important supporting role in sustaining it. As Queen Jezebel found out in around 843 BC, proselytising for Baal may result in being defenestrated by eunuchs and then being eaten by wild underdogs.

It seems allyship is seldom rewarded.

Image: Altar and mosaic floor at the Moonta Masonic Temple, South Australia. Photo by Denisbn, CC BY-ND 2.0

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

The post Is Genderism an Esoteric Male Power Network? appeared first on Genspect.

If you’re new to this series, please visit Genspect on Substack to read my previous articles about Gnostics, Jungian alchemists, castration cults, and the rock ‘n roll gender outlaws.

Everything I know about the proselytization of Buddhism, I learned from watching ‘Monkey’ on TV. This Japanese series, produced from 1978 to 1980, based on Wu Cheng’en’s 16th-century novel, was shown on British television with dubbed dialogue while I was in primary school. Other than the titular magical simian in somewhat human form, his water-monster sidekick Sandy, the ever-hungry, lecherous Pigsy, and their talking horse, the central character was boy-priest Tripitaka. Just like Moses, this young mystic had been found as a baby floating in a stream, and had been given the special mission of receiving, guarding and spreading the divine word.

On an epic journey to India with the imperative of retrieving the three sacred texts he was named after, Tripitaka was given anthropomorphic animal companions by the Buddha to defend him from cannibals. Because he was considered the reincarnation of a holy being, a belief had spread that consuming the flesh of this boy-priest would confer eternal life on whoever ate him. My favourite character was Sandy, who wrestled with the moral dilemma of having to defend Tripitaka despite his fondness for snacking on humans, as demonstrated by his skull necklace. You can take the water-monster out of the swamp, but can you take the swamp out of the water-monster?

Even as a child, I noticed that the holy charge of the spirit animals was not at all masculine. In fact, Tripitaka was played by actress Masako Natsume in the 1970s version of ‘Monkey’, the boy-priest being rather girly as a consequence. This was not the only reference to gender ambiguity in the series. In one memorable episode, a defiant Monkey attempted to fly beyond the end of the world on his pink cloud, only to discover that he remained within the Buddha’s hand. Giant columns, which our staff-wielding, kung-fu fighting hero imagined were pillars marking the end of the heavens, were in fact manicured fingers attached to the divine palm. The Buddha had confused Monkey that day by appearing in his/her female form.

Bissu Gender

I remembered this early education in Eastern mysticism while learning about the Bissu gender of indigenous priests who live among the Bugis people in South Sulawesi, part of modern Indonesia.

The Bissu have their own written ‘language of the heavens’, studied from a young age and supposedly unintelligible to other Bugis, in which the same characters can be transcribed as matelo (to die) or mattelo (to make love). This literary ambiguity emphasises the cycle of life leading to new life, which Sabina Spielrein made the core of her theory of primary masochism, or ‘Thanatos’, as the death drive.

Young Bissu must undergo a potentially dangerous initiation ritual, involving an elder member of the sect holding a dagger against their throat while readings are made from sacred, esoteric texts.

The success of Islam in the region has marginalised the indigenous religion to the point where this gender non-conforming priest caste might disappear altogether. The ‘trans genocide’ wasn’t caused by Western feminists or Baroness Cass. Under the long dictatorship of Suharto, a military general from Yogyakarta, which lasted from 1967 to 1998, Bissu were forced to renounce the religion of the Bugis. Some Bissu were tortured or murdered in the preceding Islamic rebellion led by Abdul Kahar Muzakkar.

It was, of course, a 2006 meeting of academics and human rights professionals at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta that devised a framework that codified gender identity beliefs into international law. Of the 29 signatories to the original Yogyakarta Principles, only one represented Indonesia, while the majority were Westerners.

Attempts to claim the supposedly celibate Bissu and other indigenous gender identities for the Western LGBT movement may not be helping to save them from radical Islamist oppression. Recently, Bissu had found a unique niche in a syncretic blend of traditional religion and Islam, blessing events such as Hajj pilgrimages, but they remain under threat from a new generation of anti-LGBT Muslims.

There is now academic interest in the Bugis people and their traditions because of their five traditional gender identities: oroani, makkunrai, calalai, calabai and bissu, roughly corresponding to masculine, feminine, transmasculine, transfeminine and either ‘intersex’ or ‘non-binary’ respectively. Other than the Bissu priests, transfeminine Bugis work as makeup artists, wedding planners and caterers, while some transmasculine members of their society provide physical labour.

As Leonard Andaya, former professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Hawaiʻi, relates, the Bissu have a higher status in Bugis society than cross-dressers who perform opposite-sex roles, because it is believed they have the unique ability to understand both heaven, which is coded as male, and earth, which is coded as female. The Bissu are considered divine because of their ability to manifest both masculine and feminine genders, like the Buddha who entrapped a foolish Monkey in her manicured fingertips.

Other than blessings, Bissu carry out religious duties for their communities including rituals, and in the past, the crowning of kings, but their identity does not map exactly onto Western understandings of gender or differences of sex development. While some Bissu are believed to have been marked by the gods with unusual bodies, like the sacred, feminine bayasa of central Sulawesi reported to have very small penises, other Bissu, known as mau jangkka, are feminine men who have wives and children. To complicate matters, calalai and calabai sometimes have to step in to perform Bissu rituals because the latter group is now so small in number.

Much like the Western priest class in their frocks, who at once provide their congregations with masculine discipline and a sympathetic, listening ear coded as feminine, the Bissu have a formal social role which accommodates, rather than pathologises, their distinct appearance and gendered behaviours.

The tragedy of Western transgenderism is that the modern, secular world has no reserved place for cross-dressing eccentrics with esoteric ideas and beliefs about the universe and their place in it, except in light entertainment, academia, software engineering, Olympic sports or political lobbying. And so, we medicalise and surgically alter these benighted individuals, in a misguided attempt to help them fit our godless times. A man being made ‘Woman of the Year’ neatly encapsulates this exaltation without purpose.

The idea that the transgender or gender non-conforming individual has unique access to the divine is by no means limited to Indonesia, and appears common to several societies in Asia. This makes transgenderism ultra-conservative, rather than progressive. The anti-scientific notion that the way a person has sex or dresses makes them neither male nor female, or somehow the opposite sex, appears in pre-Abrahamic traditional religions which have a very different understanding of the human body.

Andaya reports that among the Iban people of Borneo, the manangbali healer wears female clothing “in obedience to sacred commands conveyed through dreams. However, it was necessary for him to be ‘sexually disabled’ before doing so”, in a manner similar to that of the boy singer with the voice of an angel given the snip to become a castrato. The hijra, despite living on the margins of society across the Indian subcontinent, often with no other work available than prostitution, have been considered magical for centuries.

Eastern Imports

In addition to the influence of Germanic pseudoscientific ‘sexology’ on notions of gender, Westerners have witnessed the wholesale importation of Eastern religion by the counterculture from the 1960s onward, by pop stars and phony gurus alike. It is cultural appropriation to imagine ourselves part of a multi-gendered, pre-modern society like the Bugis or the Iban. And there was no facial feminisation surgery, for which the appropriate abbreviation is ‘FFS’, in Tripitaka’s time.

As Matt Osborne wrote in 2023, and I have covered in part one of this series, the more radical factions of contemporary Protestantism are waving the Progress Pride flag, their belief predicated on the Gnostic heresy of the gendered soul. This belief may have been reincarnated in our times from Buddhist missionary influence on the early Christians.

Inverting the principle of ‘lived experience’, the holy child knows more than we adults do precisely because they have a direct line to the divine. The search for a new Dalai Lama among children of the Tibetan villages, the lost boy Jesus found in the Jerusalem temple dispensing wisdom to his elders, or the ‘transgender child’ who knows their sex better than any biologist: all embody the idea of a precocious supernatural authority. “They know who they are!” shout the devouring mothers who transport their children to the gender clinic for chemical castration, and the surgical table for removal of sexed body parts.

J.R.R. Tolkien used the term ‘mythopoeia’ to describe the process of legend creation, which he had dedicated himself to by writing the epic Lord of the Rings cycle over seventeen years. Psychoanalytic alchemist Carl Gustav Jung, whom we met earlier in this series, fully leaned into the value of myth-making to humans. Robert Bly and others would later draw on the Jungian method to create the ‘mythopoetic’ men’s movement in the 1980s.

The Harry Potter universe, the Narnia stories of C.S. Lewis, or even the Star Wars franchise could be considered mythopoeic; they are not mere allegories for the eventual triumph of good over evil, but complete subcultures which attract obsessive fandoms. The young Potter himself is a magical messiah, the divine child who arrives at our time of need to save the world from evil. He receives the grimoire, a mystical text, but he is found in the cupboard under the stairs rather than in a floating basket.

Art and Life

As life imitates art, Greta Thunberg, who arrived telling the adults they are wrong and wicked, never grows up, cursed to remain all-knowing while trapped in the body of a child. Like Oskar, the protagonist of Die Blechtrommel by Günter Grass, her piercing scream is heard from afar. To ‘beat the tin drum’ is a German idiom meaning ‘to gain attention for a cause’.

Perhaps the reason why self-identified ‘transgender rights activists’ hate J.K. Rowling so thoroughly is that having created their magical world, with the story of a hidden child inheriting supernatural powers from heavenly parents, she is their Gnostic demiurge: the jealous god of Moses’ second commandment. Helen Joyce defined gender identity as “a thing that the individual in question can utter into being by stating it”.

Alchemy uses magical words in an attempt to control the material world, and so gender woo is not merely an abstract, inconsequential performance; it is semantic witchcraft. Someone who grew up believing in ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ might imagine that words of self-declaration spoken out loud could turn a man into a woman, as he grasps his wand tightly.

The extreme privation of the spiritual ascetic is no longer Harry Potter’s cupboard, or being walled into a convent cell like 15th-century syphilitic anchoress Lady Isabel German, it is being imprisoned in the family basement by depression and an addiction to Reddit, or worse still, being the subject of a reality TV show on ‘the transgender child’.

In Exulansic’s re-telling of the ‘Melody’ Dawson case, a teenage boy suffering the delusion that he is female managed to shoot out both of his eyes and part of his brain with a single bullet. This is not only a tragedy which Sigmund Freud might have considered validating of his Oedipus Rex fixation, but an act of religious extremism comparable to the eyeballs on a dish of third-century Christian martyr Saint Lucy. ‘Melody’s’ survival of this alleged self-harm could be considered miraculous, on the path to sainthood.

The deification of the transgender child is only possible within the belief system of a child abuse cult like the Skoptsy, because this holy status comes with costs attached. In Western culture, with our history of using psychiatry to control difference, cross-sex identity is not merely symbolic. Veneration requires sacrifice. As Abraham discovered in the Book of Genesis, being willing to destroy your own child is the ultimate test of faith. Nor is transgender ideation merely a performance à la Judith Butler. Instead of on the altar for burnt offerings, the knife is now wielded above the surgeon’s table, somewhere in Thailand where ladyboy transitions are routine.

The transgender child is venerated because he/she/they has achieved gnosis at a prodigious age, and is therefore the most special child of all. What takes some autogynephilic men until middle age to realise, they discover in school. Just as the young Jesus was found conversing knowledgeably with the elders in the temple, inspired by the divine power of the Gnostic goddess Wisdom, so the child is allowed to lead the adults because they are the shepherd and we are the sheep.

So-called ‘gender-affirming care’, which involves castrating and mutilating young people in a secular context of ‘informed consent’, is not progressive. It merely replicates ancient religious traditions of ritual and sacrifice. It is a regression to myth-making, which is why evidence-based medicine was always incompatible with the gender industry. Now, after multiple systematic reviews, ritual body modification has retreated to the consumer principle that the customer is always right, even if mental and physical health outcomes are not improved by these drastic interventions.

We need a new honesty that transgender medical and surgical procedures have nothing to do with ‘healthcare’ and everything to do with a reversion to pre-modern superstition, in which gender non-conforming people pay a high price for being different. On this basis, the special exceptions in legislation which allow physical harm to transgender people, forbidden for anyone else, need to be repealed immediately.

Female genital mutilation law also needs updating to address the phenomenon of male children being flown across borders for devastating surgeries, which would be illegal in their own territories. This urgently-needed political intervention would confirm that neither boys nor girls should be enabled to suffer life-limiting procedures which they cannot possibly consent to. And as those children grow into adults, they need the support to understand that self-harm is never a rational choice.

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

The post The Deification of the Transgender Child appeared first on Genspect.

In the first part of this series, I wrote about the Gnostics, and their influence on contemporary Protestantism. In the second part, I covered Carl Gustav Jung’s weaving of Gnosticism and alchemy into psychotherapy. In this part, I’ll tell the story of how cults with esoteric beliefs about sex made themselves notorious. The so-called ‘transgender rights’ movement is merely the latest expression of irrational sadomasochism.

Since ancient times there have been numerous examples of castration cults and orgiastic ceremonies. While euphemisms such as ‘sex reassignment surgery’ and ‘gender-affirming care’ are modern, the surgical modification of sexual characteristics has been carried out for thousands of years, gelding horses as well as human slaves.

The usual reasoning is that eunuchs were safer around high-status women, were prized for their singing voices, or were punished to prevent them having offspring, but that doesn’t explain why some people actively seek out this body modification. I believe we need to understand why some people reject or abuse their natal sexed bodies; in particular, the role that supernatural beliefs play in body integrity disorders and queered rituals.

In Skirt Go Spinny’s documentary ‘WrongBodies’ Genevieve Gluck relates the story of the Skoptsy, members of a Russian castration cult based on extremist Christianity that lasted for hundreds of years. Skoptsy leader Kondraty Selivanov told his followers that he was both Jesus and the Russian emperor, Peter Fyodorovich, which must have meant a packed schedule.

Eunuchs Not Unique

While male cultists could opt to have either just their testicles or full genitals removed, female members of the Skoptsy had mastectomies, and genital mutilations which sewed up the vulva. These cult practices were therefore a direct antecedent of the smorgasbord of options available in the contemporary gender clinic.

The procedure known as metoidioplasty, now funded by Britain’s National Health Service for transmasculine women, optionally sews together the vulva to create a pseudo-scrotum, after re-routing the urinary tract with a catheter surgically inserted through the patient’s clitoris. So, before being too judgemental about crazy Russian peasants, let’s reflect on the fact that if the Skoptsy were here among us now, they would recognise the significance of what our society does to young lesbians. The injection of testosterone into a young woman is a ritual practice designed to manifest a ‘true’ self.

Writing in the journal ‘Transgender Studies Quarterly’, Jennifer Wilson noted that the Skoptsy believed that before the Fall, genitals did not exist, and therefore getting rid of these sexed body parts would make believers holy. 

Wilson argues that the Skoptsy provided “queer temporality, in that they offer a counterpoint to arguments that the future is the realm of the normative reproducing subject”. This sounds like the transhumanist dogma predicting ordinary breeding humans are rapidly on their way to irrelevance.

As the Skoptsy also believed in the end of the world being nigh, it’s hard to imagine a more doom-laden proposition. That this mad Russian cult is of interest to queer theory as a belief system worth amplifying tells us plenty about the decline of Western academia.

From Spiritualism to ‘Sex Magick’

With the advent of mass literacy in the 19th century, a market arose in esoteric religious books which claimed to unlock the secrets of the universe. Russian aristocrat Helena Blavatsky claimed to have travelled to Tibet, receiving ancient wisdom which inspired her creation of ‘Theosophy’ in 1875, an occult practice supposedly based on ancient Egyptian and Greek religion and philosophy.

Spiritualism was all the rage when Blavatsky travelled to the USA, England and India to spread her doctrine, with many people believing that they could communicate with the dead in séances, or see ‘real’ fairies in the garden. Blavatsky was exposed as a fraud by disgruntled followers in India, after recruiting them to con credulous people with basic conjuring tricks.

1875 turned out to be an inauspicious year for the generation of woo, as it marked the birth of both Carl Gustav Jung in Switzerland, and Edward Alexander Crowley in England. The latter renamed himself ‘Aleister’, but his mother called him ‘The Beast’, which goes to show that sometimes Mummy really does know best. Crowley’s family were originally Quakers. Following the influence of American mystic Rufus Jones (1863-1948), many Quakers believe they have an ‘inner light’ of God within them, and therefore do not need to follow man-made laws.

Aleister Crowley’s father had converted to an extreme sect within the Plymouth Brethren, which had in turn broken away from the Anglican church. While attending the University of Cambridge from 1895, Aleister joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an upper-class mystic sect, but was frowned upon for being too libertine even for them.

Like Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Crowley considered a Gnostic saint, Aleister reacted against a strict Christian upbringing to fully embrace the dark side, being fond of masturbation and using prostituted women. Another thing Friedrich had in common with Aleister was syphilis, which probably drove both of them very, very mad. 

Crowley claimed to be in communication with a messenger of the Egyptian god Horus. He believed that his personal ‘guardian angel’ was actually an expression of the ‘inner light’ of the self, its ‘eternal essence’. Crowley had been encouraged in this belief of supernatural visitation by his first wife Rose, who was committed to an institution in 1911, following the death of their child five years earlier. Crowley would advance the theory that the ‘Body of Light’ could be separated from the physical body and travel around the astral plane.

Drawing from Nietzsche, Blavatsky and other mystical frauds, Crowley created his own religion ‘Thelema’, the best known maxim of which is “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”. Its ‘sex magick’ doctrine attempted to achieve transcendence via exhaustion from excessive copulation, among other techniques, which in a forerunner of the ‘free love’ cults of succeeding generations required followers to relinquish any reservations they might have about the ritualised, orgiastic use of their bodies. Disassociation was the name of the game, then and now.

Mixing anarchism and libertinism, and insisting that his doctrine was scientific, Crowley put theory into practice by establishing a commune on the island of Sicily in 1920. This pansexual sadist fathered many children with his female followers; one of these children and a male visitor died at the commune. This ‘abbey’ was shut down by the Italian authorities in 1923, forcing cult members to disperse, inadvertently spreading their magical sex woo.

By 1924, Crowley had assumed full control of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a quasi-Masonic mystic sect, previously led by Theodor Reuss, who had attempted to revive the 18th century genital worship cult of Phallism. You can probably guess what the pseudo-eucharistic ritual performed by Phallists involves imbibing.

Gnosticism Meets Psychotherapy

From 1935 to 1948, the Agape Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis operated around Los Angeles, California, first in Hollywood, then moving to Pasadena. Hugh B. Urban, professor of religious studies at Ohio State University, has writtenabout how Lafayette Ronald Hubbard joined this lodge in 1945 and participated in sexual rituals intended to reincarnate the Whore of Babylon as a ‘moonchild’ messiah.

In Crowley’s belief system of Thelema, ‘Babalon’ is an earth-mother goddess. Because L. Ron Hubbard’s followers are highly litigious, I will state for the record that Lafayette was working as an agent of the US government to infiltrate the Agape Lodge and put an end to its black magic.

Hubbard had written that Crowley was a great friend of his, but the Beast was less complimentary in return. After the Agape Lodge closed, Hubbard launched ‘Dianetics’ in 1950, a blend of self-analytical psychotherapy, Eastern mysticism and science fiction. Hubbard sold his followers a gadget he called the ‘e-meter’ which could supposedly detect and remove problematic ‘engrams’ from the unconscious mind, enabling its users to enter the ‘clear’ state.

Following a less than welcoming response from mainstream psychiatry for his method, Hubbard incorporated Dianetics into his new Church of Scientology venture. This church encouraged followers to be “three feet back of your head”, separating the spirit from the body. In a 1976 study of early Scientology members by Roy Wallis, over half of the believers studied had converted from marginal religions including Theosophy, or Jungian analysis.

The 1950’s also saw the marketing of Marxist psychoanalyst and sexual revolutionary Wilhelm Reich’s ‘orgone accumulator’, a metal-lined wardrobe that believers could be shut inside to supposedly heal them from a multitude of ailments. Reich’s original ‘orgasm theory’ had proved too extreme even for Sigmund Freud’s circle, and his sex woo was too perverse for his comrades on the hard left, so he had been a double outcast for decades.

Reich was convicted of consumer fraud in 1956, and imprisoned for contempt of court after claiming that orgone energy could cure cancer. Reich died in prison and his written works were shredded by the authorities. Reportedly, over three hundred orgone accumulators had been sold to his followers in the USA.

Charles Manson studied Scientology while in prison for pimping and other crimes during the early 1960’s, claiming to have reached ‘theta clear’ status. He managed to persuade his followers in ‘the Family’ cult that he was Jesus, and that they were the early Christians reincarnated, with the help of psychological manipulation and a lot of psychedelic drugs.

Manson’s followers carried out at least nine murders during 1969, in a paranoid attempt to start a race war. Several of his devotees were sentenced to death, but escaped that fate due to humanitarian reforms in California. After his conviction, when asked if he missed sex, Manson replied that he could get all the sex he wanted in prison. If Manson were still alive today, he could request a transfer to one of California’s correctional facilities for women.

Wilhelm Reich’s beliefs re-emerged in the counterculture, with military veteran Otto Mühl founding the authoritarian socialist Friedrichshof of Commune near Vienna, Austria in 1972. Around 600 communards were required to have sex five times a day, with no time allowed for foreplay, and never twice in the same week with the same person lest attachments be formed.

Sexual performances at Friedrichshof were video-taped for ‘artistic’ reasons, in an offline precursor to OnlyFans. Children were separated from their parents at the commune and raised by other cult members in an attempt to destroy the bourgeois family. Sexual initiation rituals were required for girls from the age of 14 at the commune, with Mühl taking the lead. Somehow he managed to dodge prison until 1991.

One of Aleister Crowley’s surviving children, Randall Gair Doherty, also known as Count Charles Edward D’Arquires, considered himself the true ruler of Great Britain. In 1976, wearing full dress uniform and driven in a limousine to London, Randall attempted to meet with the Prime Minister, but the actual leader of the country was busy that day. This would-be aristocrat was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and ended up living on a park bench.

Of Vegan Trans Cults and School Curricula

In February 2025, the transgender vegan ‘Zizian’ cult came to the world’s attention with an investigation into at least six deaths, including four murders and two cult members killed in shoot-outs. According to Zizian belief, each hemisphere of the human brain has a gender, and sometimes they are different genders. All meat eaters will be put on trial after the Singularity. Naturally, media including the BBC reported on the mad male Zizians using she/her pronouns.

Just as crime can be organised with psychopathic intent, so too can mental illness. A cult leader with a god complex is a danger to anyone they come in contact with. The criminality documented by Reduxx, Andy Ngo and others is a feature, not a bug, of messianic delusion which validates the transgression of societal boundaries.

It’s unfortunate for harmless gender non-conforming people that they have been grouped into a socially constructed ‘transgender community’ with zealous individuals who seek to break every man-made law. Perhaps some psychopaths adopt opposite-sex clothing, hormones and surgeries precisely because it is transgressive, not because they really believe in a mystical ‘gender essence’.

The Ordo Templi Orientis remains active, and according to Manon Hedenborg White, associate professor of History of Religions at Malmö University, non-binary and genderqueer folx have the option of performing the Gnostic mass in the role corresponding to their birth-assigned gender. The priestess is always naked while the priest and congregation are clothed, according to instructions left by Aleister Crowley. It would appear that the Beast is still in charge.

According to recent coverage of the US Supreme Court case Mahmoud v. Taylor, American parents may yet gain the right to opt-out of gender ideology being required reading for their children.

Arizona attorney Ryan Heath is aiming to go further, by having gender ideology formally classified as a religion. Schools forcing these beliefs on pupils would then be in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States constitution which prohibits the government from establishing a religion or favoring one religion over another. 

In the meantime, and for those of us who live in countries which don’t have separation of church and state, we will have to remain vigilant about the post-Enlightenment comeback of Gnostic sex and death cults. As the world becomes ever-more complicated and uncertain, I urge all of us not to lose our heads. Or any other body parts.

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

The post Sex and Death Cults, Old and New – Gender as religion, part three appeared first on Genspect.

In my last article for Genspect, I wrote about the Nag Hammadi discovery of early Christian heretical texts in 1945, and the reinvigorated belief in a feminine or androgynous, self-impregnating God during the era of second-wave feminism in the West. How might these beliefs have shaped the treatment of people with gender identity crises within the contemporary mental health system? While therapists and gender clinicians might have any religious beliefs or none, how did Gnostic ideas in particular have a bearing on modern therapy culture?

If mental health has long been the Cinderella service within healthcare, gender identity was a tiny niche within mental health until very recently, when this obscure clinical practice was embraced by commercial providers looking for growth markets. Young people with gender problems were previously considered by both psychiatry and psychoanalysis as probable psychopaths in the making, not helped by Anthony Perkins portrayal of cross-dressing, mother-fixated Norman Bates on screen in 1960. There was not a great deal of public interest in what the few specialist gender clinics were up to, nor much sympathy for their patients.

Sigmund Freud’s followers who set up the Tavistock Clinic provided a refuge in Hampstead for the final years of their guru’s life, and also hosted lectures by Carl Gustav Jung in the 1930’s, even though the two patriarchs of psychoanalysis had fallen out decades before. Being a generation younger, and Swiss rather than Austrian, Jung survived the Second World War by another sixteen years, just long enough to see Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ in the cinema, and the emergence of anti-psychiatry texts by Thomas Szasz and others.

Since David Cronenberg’s 2011 movie ‘A Dangerous Method’, Jung is better known for an inappropriate relationship with his mad and muddy patient Sabrina Spielrein than for being the originator of a separate strand in psychoanalysis. Whereas Freud’s method was concerned with addressing hysteria (literally, womb-madness) in his female patients, and castration anxiety in the males who visited his couch, Jung had other ideas which caused the two of them to part company, professionally and intellectually, by 1913. Jung’s method was not just about curing neurosis; it was about self-directed spiritual development, with the therapist as a confessor and psychoanalytic priest.

Later in his career, Jung left behind his work in the asylums and cultivated a network in which wealthy clients would refer their friends and associates for his unique brand of psychotherapy. Having been steeped in the Jungian method, they would be endorsed as entry-level therapists who recruited and analysed new patients, passing them up the pyramid to the Swiss master. This form of therapy required a considerable personal and financial investment by the patient; just as the devout must eventually make a pilgrimage, all Jungian subjects aimed one day to achieve analysis by the man himself. That usually involved a trip to the Swiss city which Jung had made his home since being hired by the Burgholzli Psychiatric Hospital in the year 1900.

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Cited in the paper “From Neurosis to a New Cure of Souls: C.G. Jungʼs Remaking of the Psychotherapeutic Patient” by Sonu Shamdasani (2020) one of Jung’s patients expressed their desire to recruit new followers for the master in explicitly religious terms:

“go, my brethren, go to the Mecca, I mean to Zürich, and drink from the fountain of life, all ye who are dead in your souls, go and seek new life.”

Jung developed this method using his favourite subject: himself, writing and illustrating a dream journal he called the ‘Red Book’. His clients were encouraged to keep their own journals, and follow those dreams wherever they led, as the path to self-enlightenment. These books supposedly manifested a more perfect soul from intensive self-analysis of the patient’s writing and artwork, shared with the therapist who would be paid to listen and throw in a question every now and again, as the patient rambled on. Jung sometimes took his patients on long walks in the country, perhaps because he was getting numb from sitting in the psychiatrist’s chair.

Unlike Sigmund Freud’s businesslike fifty-minute therapy hours, which allowed ten minutes for the psychotherapist to record notes on the patient before the next client walked in, the Jungian method is open-ended and has no time limits or conclusion. It is a spiritual practice which borrows heavily from Eastern religion, esoteric ‘knowledge’ and alchemy, not a quasi-medical cure for psychosexual hang-ups about Mom and Dad.

Just as base metal supposedly contains a mystical essence which can be turned into gold by the alchemist, the ‘spark’ of the gendered soul is meant to transform into a divine manifestation not limited by material reality, if only the magician has made the correct incantation. As such, today’s transgender forums on Reddit and elsewhere could be considered places of Jungian confession; a multitude of Red Books in the form of digital fantasies. J.K. Rowling now takes the place of the demiurge, the jealous and mean lesser god who created their magical world.

Like his former mentor, Jung yearned for sources in antiquity which would validate his method. For Sigmund Freud, it was of course the classical myths of Oedipus and Electra which proved he had discovered the root of his patients’ psychosexual neuroses. We can imagine Jung’s excitement at the Nag Hammadi discovery, which believers thought provided evidence of a masculine-feminine supergod or multiple gods and goddesses, just like his ‘anima and animus’ theory of an opposite-gender spirit hidden inside everyone, published decades before.

Borrowing Plato’s concept of ‘forms’ or ‘essence’, Jung had noted in his 1935 essay ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’ that the second-century AD Greek bishop Irenaeus had written: “The creator of the world did not fashion these things directly from himself but copied them from archetypes outside himself.” That implies the archetypes of gender would be older than humanity, and therefore spiritual and primordial rather than social constructs of modernity. Quoting St. Augustine, Jung wrote of the ‘ideae principales’, “which are themselves not formed… but are contained in the divine understanding.” So much for ‘material girls’.

Jung further wrote that in the modern world “The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim.”

In his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’, published posthumously in English in 1963, Jung’s words were translated as:

“Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious; an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or “archetype” of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman – in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation. Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man.”

So, you heard this right from the master: ‘woman’ literally is a feeling in a man’s head, and vice versa.

The Gnostics had apparently devised a spiritual, proto-psychoanalytic method based on certain special people unleashing their hidden divinity through self-analysis, just like the scheme Jung created for his followers in Switzerland. Each of the Nag Hammadi texts dug up in Egypt were a Red Book; someone writing their own Gospel and achieving their very own brand of immortality, however unreasonable that sounded to Roman establishment religion at the time. And by finding validation in the ancient Gnostic texts, Jung had made himself a psychopomp, an ancient deity like a Valkyrie or Shinigami which releases the gendered soul from its earthly, Platonic prison.

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After the discovery of the Gnostic library in 1945 and the Dead Sea Scrolls turning up in a cave in Qumran on the West Bank the following year, there was intense interest among modern mystics in acquiring these ancient religious texts. Jung’s associates were among those Europeans who scrambled to buy original Nag Hammadi documents before the Egyptian government could track them all down, and obtain their return. The 1950’s saw the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, who as a prominent Arab nationalist was probably not at all keen on the region’s heritage being looted by Western collectors and sex magicians.

Carl Alfred Meier, prominent Jungian analyst and director of the Jung Institute, sought to publish a ‘Jung Codex’ of Nag Hammadi material, but had to promise the Egyptian government that he would return the manuscript.

In a letter from would-be codex editor Walter C. Till to Meier in 1958, Till shared one of his castration anxiety dreams, like any good psychoanalytic subject:

“An acquaintance of mine (a fully undefined male person) asks me whether I have already seen the large snake that they have in hell; one could also see it at the cinema. I say I have not yet seen it. He thinks he will investigate whether it can now be seen. He goes through the entrance door to hell. I go after him…

Immediately thereafter a young devil comes out of the door. He has on a formless sack-like white garment reaching from his neck to the floor, with an indiscriminate olive green print. He is holding some kind of longish object (branch with leaves?). In this way he is dancing around as if he were a violin player…

Then one of the devils touches me lightly with his “violin bow”-branch on my sexual organ. I immediately have the thought that I could thus lose my masculinity and become feminine. But the thought of this possibility produces in me such discomfort that I (also in reality) give out an unarticulated sound of discomfort and wake up.”

Clearly, self-analysing dreams using Jung’s method reveals deep, Gnostic insights about the unseen spiritual world. Or perhaps not. In the 1923 English translation of his book “Psychological Types or The Psychology of Individuation”, Jung offered a warning from history about embracing the god-self:

“Gnosticism was also divided into two schools: one school striving after a spirituality that exceeded all bounds, the other losing itself in an ethical anarchism, an absolute libertinism that shrank from no lechery however atrocious and perverse.”

The early Christian scholar Origen of Alexandria didn’t get off so lightly, according to Jung, who: “in the mutilation of himself, sacrificed the sensual hold upon the world. For him, evidently, the intellect was not so much a specific danger as feeling and sensation with their enchainment to the object. Through castration he freed himself from the sensuality that was coupled with Gnosticism; he could then yield himself unafraid to the riches of Gnostic thought…”

Before removing any more testicles, let’s recap that in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fifth edition revised text (DSM-5-TR), the insight of a psychiatric patient who is alienated from their own body is ‘on a spectrum’:

“With good or fair insight: The individual recognises that the body dysmorphic disorder beliefs are definitely or probably not true or that they may or may not be true.

With poor insight: The individual thinks that the body dysmorphic disorder beliefs are probably true.

With absent insight/delusional beliefs: The individual is completely convinced that the body dysmorphic disorder beliefs are true.”

The Jungian method may have value for people who aren’t sure of their goals in life, or wish to develop their imagination to counter existential ennui. Based on the manifestation of gender woo over the last decade or more, we might conclude that this method is indeed dangerous for those patients who experience powerful delusions, such as believing they were born in the ‘wrong’ body.

Combined with the Gnostic heresy in which true believers become the central character in their self-authored Gospel, it’s now possible to live full-time in psycho-spiritual derangement, and be affirmed in it. Famously, one online influencer discovered by Libs of TikTok declared that thine pronouns be god/godself.

Following the closure of traditional lunatic asylums across the Western world, in answer to the critique of anti-psychiatry (or, more cynically, a lack of care and consideration for the mentally ill during periods of state austerity), Gender Jesus is free to walk the streets once again. Putting the trans into transcendental, insanity has escaped the psychiatric setting that would have been familiar to Jung from his early work.

Instead, Jung chose to work with an affluent patient group that came to him of their own free will, usually by personal recommendation: relatively sane but curious people who sought the master’s teaching on how to become introspective and self-affirming. These days, the youth train each other in the art of navel-gazing and love-bombing, without parental oversight.

Jung’s mysticism has hardly abated in the era of the Internet. In ‘The Seven Planets of Alchemy: Hormonal Alchemy and Spiritual Transformation’, Samael Aun Weor wrote “Endocrinology, studied through Alchemy, enters into the field of Psychology and Astrology. When the endocrine glands are super-stimulated, they naturally produce a greater number of hormones that animate the metallic (hormonal) planets of Alchemy within us.” It turns out that men really are from Mars, and women from Venus, which presumably means non-binary people are from Mercury.

Psychoanalytic talking therapies may have utility, but they also have significant psychosexual, alchemical and Gnostic baggage that they need to discard if they are to help, rather than hinder, patients with gender distress.

Unfortunately, Jung’s legacy as a mystic isn’t the only woo separating the gender industry from evidence-based medicine. There has been an unholy alliance between radical politics, German idealism and psychoanalysis at least since Herbert Marcuse wrote ‘Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud’, published in 1955. Judith Butler’s PhD thesis was on Hegel, another German-speaking alchemist and purveyor of magic.

Unlike the early Gnostics dodging Roman martyrdom in the public arena, today’s gender identity movement isn’t secret, or an unfathomable mystery; it is loud, proud and demands our acquiescence. But we cannot yield to superstition, whether dressed in the garb of science or the newest human rights issue. As journalist Róisín Michaux put it, in an article illustrated with the mock-crucifixion of LGBT Jesus https://peaked.substack.com/p/the-ground-zero-of-trans-propaganda?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web

“The problem isn’t really that we don’t understand it. It’s that we understand it all too well, but that we won’t politely shut up about it.”

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

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The parallels between gender ideology and ancient Gnostic beliefs

In 1945, when a humble Egyptian peasant was digging the soil in Nag Hammadi, just around the bend in the Nile from Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, he chanced upon an ancient pot. Like better-known Egyptologists, he smashed this historic find open, in the hope of finding treasure, but was disappointed to find the pot only contained some old writings. Taking them home anyway, his mother put most of the documents to use as firelighters.

It was only when an associate tried selling the remaining artefacts to a local dealer in antiquities when it was realised that this discovery was of early Christian texts that had not made it into the official Bible. At least one of these texts was known from other sources, but the majority of the hoard was thought to have lain hidden for more than a thousand years. A bidding war ensued, and so various documents from Nag Hammadi made their way into museum collections and private hands.

For the first two or three centuries AD, the subject of what was, and what was not, Christian belief was highly contested. There were many factions among the early Christians, some of which may have been inspired by Buddhist missionaries who arrived in the Mediterranean region from India. The Gnostic sects claimed special knowledge, not as in “I happen to know a really good place for lunch”, but in the sense of the Greek word gnosis, meaning insight. Gnosis was not meant to be shared with non-believers; it was for sect members only. There was no point debating gnosis with people who didn’t have it, and how to get it was a secret.

A Gnostic text called ‘Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth’ refers to the upper levels of insight which can be achieved by believers who have already completed the first seven levels. If that sounds like Scientology, it may not be a coincidence. Whoever achieved gnosis supposedly became not just a Christian, but a Christ themselves. Why not write your own gospel, in that case?

Another discovered text, the ‘Allogenes’, explains how introspection leads the Gnostic to identify as holy: “…[I was] very disturbed, and [I] turned to myself… [Having] seen the light that [surrounded] me and the good that was within me, I became divine.” Literally being Jesus is of course one of the more common delusions found in the psychiatric ward.

The Gnostic is a ‘disciple of their own mind’. Some early Gnostics thought this special insight might only be achieved by one in a thousand people, or less, whereas what became known as the Orthodox and Catholic churches were open to all-comers. The theologian and initiator of Latin scripture, Tertullian, who lived in what is now Tunisia in the second century AD, mocked the Gnostic sect of the poet Valentinius, stating that its members:

“first beset all access to their group with tormenting conditions; and they require a long initiation before they enroll their members, even instruction for five years for their adept students, so that they may educate their opinions by this suspension of full knowledge, and, apparently raise the value of their mysteries in proportion to the longing for them which they have created. Then follows the duty of silence…”

The long controversy between heretics and mainstream Christianity led to the Roman emperor Constantine setting up the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. This gathering of church leaders nailed down Christian belief as being in one male creator God responsible for everything that existed, one and only son of God born of a virgin offering salvation through resurrection, and a holy spirit to round out the Trinity. For those of us who have heard the Nicene Creed repeated many times, it may come as a surprise to find out that in the early Christian era, all of these basic beliefs were disputed, which is why the Creed had to be agreed on by bishops from the dominant regional factions within the Roman Church.

For Gnostics, the God of the standard Bible is a minor deity sometimes called the demiurge, a jealous male who merely pretended that there were no other gods. Polytheism had been standard practice in the Roman empire, of course. Being secretive and mysterious, Gnostics mostly managed to avoid being ravaged by lions in the arena; a spectacle which had taken over from gladiatorial combat as top-billed entertainment because putting Christians to death was much cheaper for the Roman authorities. The Gnostics were reportedly uninterested in provoking martyrdom because they didn’t consider bodies and their fate as being all that important. Their inner essence was everything.

The Council of Nicaea also carried out the editorial task of deciding which documents would be considered canonical in the Bible, throwing out the Gnostic and other texts which were contesting and confusing the Christian narrative. It is possible that the pot found at Nag Hammadi was an early example of a data backup strategy, with Gnostic sect members hiding texts underground which became definitively heretical once the bishops published their decisions from Nicaea. 

Elaine Pagels, who obtained her doctorate from Harvard and was appointed chair of the religion department at Barnard College, Columbia University in the mid 1970’s, published a popular account of the Nag Hammadi texts in 1979. Her book ‘The Gnostic Gospels’ appeared at a time when second-wave feminism was still a thing. It made the case that the Gnostic sects had been in favour of sex equality, with women priests recorded in the early Church. This was not merely a case of equality in the workplace for religious employees, but a radical reshaping of what Christianity had meant since the time of Constantine.

In the third chapter of her book, Pagels pointed out that the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are relatively unusual in declaring that God is exclusively masculine. The Gnostics disagreed with mainstream Christians and each other on the subject of gender, as they did on many topics, with the Gospel of Thomas stating “…every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven”. Other Gnostics prayed to a dualistic Divine Father and Mother, while some insisted that the Holy Spirit must be feminine. The Gnostic text known as the ‘Secret Book’ stated “She became the Mother of everything, for she existed before them all, the mother-father”.

In the Gnostic ‘Apocalypse of Adam’, a parthenogenic goddess is the source of all human life: “She came to a high mountain and spent time seated there, so that she desired herself alone in order to become androgynous. She fulfilled her desire, and became pregnant by her desire…” Valentinius opined that this goddess called Wisdom, being a single parent, raised her demiurge offspring to manage the mess she previously made by bringing forth all living creatures in this one-sided manner. According to one Gnostic source, it was Wisdom that saved Noah and his family from the great flood caused by her bad-tempered son. In those days, the symbol of the rainbow had something to do with God, rather than Pride.

The ‘Trimorphic Protennoia’ discovered at Nag Hammadi contained words spoken by a divine feminine voice: “Now I have come a second time in the likeness of a female… I have revealed myself in the Thought in the likeness of my masculinity” and “I am androgynous. [I am both Mother and] Father, since [I copulate] with myself… [and with those who love] me…” A Gnostic poem called ‘Thunder, Perfect Mind’ contains another divine revelation in a feminine voice: “I am the whore, and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin.” This Gnostic goddess is sex-positive.

According to Pagels, notions of the divine feminine were driven out of official Christianity by the year 200 AD. With that shift in theology, women were also prevented from being priests in the official Roman church, possibly as a result of Greek Jews converting to the religion and bringing their orthodox traditions with them. Tertullian flamed an African Gnostic priestess he called “that viper”, stating: “It is not permitted for a woman to speak in the church, nor is it permitted for her to teach, nor to baptize, nor to offer [the eucharist], nor to claim for herself a share in any masculine function – not to mention any priestly office.”

Exactly 1700 years after the Council of Nicaea, a high priestess scorned a newly inaugurated President Trump from the pulpit of the gothic Washington National Cathedral. The Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde spake thus: “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families. Some who fear for their lives.”

Let’s note that Budde said ‘our God’ rather than the more usual ‘God’, implying that there are diverse other gods. Just as in Gnostic times, it is possible to create new gospels and parables of our own devising, in this case featuring an evil King who gave the executive order that all transgender children be cast unto the wilderness. A Herod for the age of intersectionality.

When I visited Coventry Cathedral in central England during 2023, a giant Progress Pride flag hung from the ceiling. A special exhibition of LGBTQIA+ artwork featured transgender celebrities including Munroe Bergdorf and Elliot Page, and a depiction of British Olympic diving champion Tom Daley as Saint Sebastian, shot through with arrows. As the cathedral’s website explained this scene of sadistic torture, which appears to have mixed up Saint Sebastian, Jesus and the Weimar Republic’s downfall, “The crown of thorns made from pink triangles references the persecution of homosexual people during the Nazi regime.” 

Referencing the late Derek Jarman’s film on Saint Sebastian in the cathedral was a bold move, given Jarman’s known views on the age of consent, and the failure of the Church of England to deal with the abuse of children by its members.

In 2024, the church’s most senior cleric, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, quitthe top job after failing to do anything about psychopathic sadist John Smyth when he had the chance to, between 2013 when Welby was appointed and 2018 when Smyth died. Smyth’s victims included at least 30 boys in the UK and another 85 in Africa, although the total number of children he tortured and abused may never be known. Smyth carried out his crimes in the 1970’s and 1980’s when the British advocacy group ‘Paedophile Information Exchange’ or ‘PIE’ was supported by radical progressives.

Despite the Right Reverend Budde’s dire warnings to President Trump, the greatest risk to children of all kinds is not official scepticism about gender identity; it is the erosion of safeguarding and the insistence that mere consent can substitute for moral boundaries. Socially assimilated gay and lesbian youth are of no use in the revolutionary vanguard, and so the goal of queer theory is to Make Homosexuality Dangerous Again.

James Lindsay has documented the Gnostic influence on progressive politics today. Just as Catholicism experienced an insurgency from liberation theology in the 1960’s, it appears that Protestant churches have undergone a Gnostic incursion since Pagels published her book on alternatives to traditional Christianity in the late 1970’s. As I wrote in my review of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928) official Catholic doctrine remains that there is no such thing as a gendered soul, but the neo-Gnostics have taken that idea and run with it. And Exulansic has noted how factions within the transgender community resemble church denominations.

Some believers have taken the Gnostic idea of a self-made salvation to its logical conclusion. Jo Clifford’s one-transwoman play “The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven” has been performed in Calvinist Scotland, sexological ground zero Germany and liberation theology’s territory of Brazil since its debut in 2009. The play has been welcomed in actual cathedrals and churches in the USA, not just edgy arts venues. The show’s website promises that we may “Join Queen Jesus for a revolutionary queer ritual in which bread is shared, wine is drunk and familiar stories are reimagined by a transgender Jesus.”

Since long before the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, which featured a set-piece reportedly inspired by Jan van Bijlert’s painting “The Feast of the Gods”, the queer Last Supper has been rendered so many times that it’s practically a genre. In 2012, artist Bronwyn Lundberg produced an all-lesbian Last Supper with Ellen DeGeneres in the central seat, wrapped in a dead swan.

While the transgender phenomenon has many facets – political, medical, social – talk of gendered souls imprisoned in human bodies is classic Gnostic heresy, and needs to be recognised as a supernatural claim. It’s hard enough being Jesus without being subject to the attentions of the gender clinic as well. Who knows how many of the advocates for invasive medical and surgical procedures on gender non-conforming people are motivated by self-affirmed religious belief? 

Part 2 of Daniel Howard James’ series on gender ideology and Gnosticism appear Saturday, May 24th

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