Calling the Queer Corners Oshee Eagleheart

Calling the Queer Corners by Oshee Eagleheart

This piece has been germinating for about sixteen years—as long as I’ve been calling myself transgender—maybe even longer. I trace the idea back to a conversation with my friend Zot 1 , the first person I knew who was openly trans. Ze was telling me about a maypole rite (like Beltaine at the Mountain, but led by straight/cis people), at which the queer people present were looking for ways to participate without having to choose between going with the men to cut the pole or with the women to dig the hole. They ended up playing the role of communicators between the two groups, dancing around and exhorting the men to “raise it higher!” and the women to “dig it deeper!”

In another conversation with Zot, years later, ze shared hir experience of a ritual at witch camp in which ze assigned hirself the role of sweeping unwanted energies out through the corners of the space, in between the cardinal directions, and spoke of how natural that felt to hir. That was the key for me: “in between the cardinal directions”! It explained why I’d always loved the cross-quarter-day festivals, the ones that are celebrated at the points midway between the solstices and equinoxes.

Radical Faeries love to gather to celebrate the cross-quarter days, and often use the traditional Celtic names for those four turning points of the wheel of the year: Samhain (aka Halloween, pronounced sah-wen), Imbolc (aka Brigid, Groundhog Day), Beltaine (Mayday), and Lughnasadh (pronounced loo-na-sah, and also called Lammas). These four Fire festivals are celebrated around the beginnings of November, February, May, and August. If you picture the year as a wheel, with Winter Solstice in the North, Spring Equinox in the East, Summer Solstice in the South, and Fall Equinox in the West; then Samhain is in the NorthWest, Imbolc in the NorthEast, Beltaine in the SouthEast, and Lughnasadh in the SouthWest.

In many Earth-centered traditions, each of the four elements is associated with one of the cardinal directions, with some variation depending on tradition and geographic location. For me, Earth is in the North, Air in the East, Fire in the South, and Water in the West. My wonderings about what elements would be associated with the in-between directions led me to these, the ones I now call the Queer Corners: NorthWest is between Water and Earth, which mix together to make Mud; NorthEast is between Earth and Air, which combine as Dust; SouthEast is between Air and Fire, which interact to make Smoke; and SouthWest is between Fire and Water, which together generate Steam. So, the in-between elements are Mud, Dust, Smoke, and Steam, ingredients that are so often essential to working the most powerful magic in fairytales the world over.

What about the other in-betweens, the ones in the Center that don’t correspond to any particular direction? Well, between Air in the East and Water in the West are Mist and Fog; and between Earth in the North and fire in the South are Lava and Magma. And between Heaven and Earth—between Above and Below, between Mist and Magma—is where we humans stand on our two legs. We are in-between beings, channels and conduits of all the forces of Nature, bridges between the worlds.

In addition to the elements and seasons, the wheel of the year—or medicine wheel—represents and embodies every stage and aspect of life. For example, the in-between stages of life, the times of the most intense growth and transformation,

have their places around the wheel: If birth is in the East, childhood in the South, adulthood in the West, and elderhood in the North, then toddlerhood would be in the SouthEast, adolescence in the SouthWest, menopause and midlife crisis in the NorthWest, and second childhood in the NorthEast. Like that the wheel can be applied every aspect of our lives and world.

Discovering myself to be something other than a man or a woman has been like coming home to myself and knowing what I’m here to reclaim, finding out that I have a mission in life after all—after despairing of ever finding one. Connecting with and reclaiming the Queer Corners has given an added dimension to my life’s purpose: to bring awareness of the in-between directions to rituals and ceremonies and to reclaim the special roles of queer people in those ceremonies, one of which is to work with the magic of the Queer Corners.

In 2005 I got the call to a gathering at Faerie Camp Destiny, in Vermont. Its organizers called it a gender “gatherette,” a smaller, more intimate version of a larger gathering. As soon as I read the call I knew I had to be there, and I went with the intention of getting to know other trans and gender-variant Faeries, and of sharing what I’d been discovering about gender and ritual. At that gatherette, our trans intersex shaman friend, Raven Kaldera, gave a presentation about the trans stages of life, stepping into the circle from a different one of the in-between directions for each stage of hir presentation.

The evening after Raven’s talk we hiked up to the labyrinth, and there in the darkness of the Vermont woods, we co-created a genderqueer empowerment ritual. We converged on the center of the labyrinth from the four Queer Corners, spontaneously chanting things like, “Mud and Dust and Smoke and Steam, we come walking in between!” and “Smoke and Steam and Mud and Dust, in genderqueerness we place our trust!” Boldly stepping over the lines defining the pathways of the labyrinth, we gathered in the center to celebrate our fabulously diverse magical queerness.

Ever since that transformational night, whenever I’m leading a ceremony that involves calling in the directions (or greeting or honoring them, depending on the beliefs of the people present), I include the Queer Corners, sometimes speaking to or for them alternating with someone else’s calling of the cardinal directions. That can take time, and it adds up to as many as eleven directions (including Above, Below, and Within), but it’s always time well spent and it invariably brings powerful elements of magic to the ceremony.

At Beltaine at the Mountain five or six years ago, I convened a small of group of genderqueer Faeries to call in one of the queer directions as part of the co-created ritual that sets the stage for the raising of the maypole. We chose SouthEast, since that’s where Beltaine falls, and when our turn came, between the calling-in of East and South, we called in—and exhorted the assembled Faeries to call in—all the in-between spirits and beings and elements we could think of, like Trannymals, dragons, two-spirit ancestors, smoke, and seahorses… One more step in the direction of reclaiming the Queer Corners.

The directions are also often associated with animal spirits, many different ones in the myriad Earth-centered traditions of the world. On Turtle Island, the North American continent, some of the more popular traditional ones are: Eagle in the East, Coyote in the South, Bear in the West, and Buffalo in the North. Which animal spirits live in the Queer Corners, then? I have found Grandmother Turtle in the Mud of the NorthWest; Grandmother Spider in the dusty NorthEast corner; all kinds of magical smoke-loving beings in the SouthEast—like Dragon, Wyvern, and Basilisk; and in the steamy SouthWest, Horse, Scorpion, Rattlesnake, Lizard: intense beings liable to strike without warning. Not to speak of the beings that inhabit the Magma and the Mist.

In all my searching so far, I haven’t found any sign of a tradition of honoring the Queer Corners among the First Nations people of this continent. Perhaps there never was such a tradition, or, as I suspect is more likely, it was eradicated and buried along with the thousands of Native people who were tortured, mutilated, killed, and driven into hiding by the invaders and colonizers, because their identities and roles didn’t fit modern European ideas of binary gender.

In many of the Native American nations, people outside the gender binary traditionally played ceremonial leadership roles. Nowadays such people call themselves two-spirit, and they are reclaiming their traditional roles, as they increasingly gain recognition in their tribes and nations. At one Native American ceremony I participated in, I was invited to lead the serving of the spirit feast, a role traditionally assigned to women. At that feast, the ceremonial leader introduced me to the participants, explaining my presence (as someone who was not a woman) by saying that I was ideally qualified to play that role, since two-spirit people are powerful channels for Spirit. In ways like that,

the walks-between people are being honored in the world once again, and we bring with us the honoring of the in-between directions.

Queer people have a natural ability—and I would say a responsibility—to reclaim those in-between places, to work with our unique magic. It can be a thankless task, out of the spotlight that shines on the cardinal directions. And that can make the work all the more powerful, slipping through the cracks like the in-between elements do, invisible to the enemies of evolution. When I participate in traditional ceremonies, I often unobtrusively honor the spirits that dwell in the in-between directions, making offerings to them in their corners and inviting their participation. Things flow better when we pay attention to the Queer Corners, and I’ve witnessed powerful and miraculous healing taking place in those quadrants of ceremonial circles. Honoring them can be as simple as cleaning up that corner of the space, clearing out cobwebs and clutter, and making a humble offering of mud, dust, smoke, or steam.

Just a few times, so far, I’ve gone so far as to perform ceremonies in which the Queer Corners are honored and the cardinal directions are asked to take a back seat—like that ceremony at the Destiny labyrinth during the gender gatherette. Each time we do that, it feels like breaking a strong taboo, shifting an established tradition, or even like violating an unbreakable law. And each time we’ve taken that risk, powerful, magical healing has resulted.

I have to remind myself, over and over, that what we think of as the established way of doing things is, in the bigger picture, often a relatively recent invention. It’s time to rediscover and reinvent our more ancient traditions, the magic of our queer ancestors, as we reclaim and step into the roles we came here to play. It’s time to play our part in bringing about the shift to a sustainable relationship between our species and our planet, from Whom we were born and Whose blood flows through our veins.

As we reclaim our gender identities and expressions, as we venture out of the binary gender boxes we’ve been stuffed into for so many generations, so many lifetimes, we unlock and release the powerful magic of our unique and desperately needed gifts. I know that reclaiming the Queer Corners is an essential part of our emergence. One step in that direction could be: next time you’re participating in or leading an event or ceremony, see what happens if you connect with and honor the spirits of the Queer Corners. Or at least be open to noticing what happens in those directions, how the energy moves, and how you might interact with the spirits that hang out there.

If you’re one who’s not comfortable in either of the socially sanctioned gender boxes, and have stepped out or are allowing the possibility of stepping out, know that there are millions of us—often invisible in our Queer Corners—here to welcome you and support you in sharing the unique gifts that only you know how to work with. For the good of our world, before it’s too late, won’t you join the dance of the queer magicians? What do we have to lose?

1 Footnote about Zot:

In the process of writing this, I tried to contact Zot, to verify what I wrote about our conversations. I discovered that she had died in September 2016, in a traffic accident while working as an electrician on a solar project in Georgia. Zot Szurgot was a brilliant, multi-talented, truly original thinker and writer, and a person of exceptionally high integrity, whose life challenged every kind of limiting stereotype. Among many other things she was a Reclaiming witch, a war-tax resister, and an environmental and animal rights activist. Her death is a huge loss to the world.