My Queer Reflections on the Twisted Path: Birth, Death, and Transition

During a hard birth, I named my youngest after the dance of the seven veils, rooted in Inanna’s journey through the seven gates. My journey into the giving to light was a descent into death realms, losing the emerging child again and again to darkness, until they had to be cut from my very flesh to be born to the brightness of day.

This child—now grown—has chosen their own rebirth again and again, a new name, a body molded to their own desire. We share this motivation, this path. We share this language of transformation.

What greater gift than to birth ourselves continually to our own essential truths? To choose to journey, again and again, the realms between? What greater gift than to birth ourselves from incarnation to incarnation, living many lives in this one?

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Birth and death, linked eternally as two sides of a coin; the liminal, the indistinct, the soft-edged focus of waxing and waning light. We are shapeshifters, edgewalkers, journeyers; those of us who choose to endure the knife-edge of transition, of transformation.

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While the most omnipresent tale of descent in the collective consciousness is an unwilling one–the myth of the abduction of Persephone–there are also many stories of descent by choice:

Iannana in search of Damuzi, or in honor of Death Itself, or in search of Her own power. And even at that, the journey down stripped Her of all She held dear; left Her naked and hallowed out of every element of identity.

Dionysos in search of His smote mother, Semele, or His departed lover, Zagreus, or His missing tragic playwright, Euripides. Or in His exaltation, and as is his Rite, wandering the ways as a chthonic God.

Odysseus, to meet Tiresias, the powerful soothsayer/prophet of multiple genders, to learn his way home–and so much more.

Orpheus, for love.

The Christos, for the salvation of lost souls.

(Every one of them was changed, marked somehow, by the journey. We surrender who we are, in order to become.)

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Sometimes we choose the underworld. Not just the initial descent, but sometimes we choose to stay there, in part or fully. Like Persephone, we find a way to make a home in the rich darkness under the surface. Many of us, though, wander the path between, threading the way from light to dark and back again.

I have lived a lifetime of descent and reemergence. Katabasis, the process of going below, has gifted me treasures more precious than jewels. Through descent, we learn choice. Through reemergence, resilience.

Through my own processes of death and resurrection, I have learned a truth; our choices define us more than our experiences do. Every moment is a chance to choose again. And, perhaps choice is most acute in moments of spiriting away.

Rarely is an undertaking so simple a binary as a distinct line between agency and reactivity. We fall and rise, again and again, by some miracle of personal myth and fortitude. Perhaps the most one can hope for is the emergence of some balanced pattern between light and dark; six months below ground, and an equal term above.

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In other mythologies, I see the body of us transformation artists as the Chimera, fire-breathing and feared, hauling our patched-together, Monster-cred, glorious carcass along for the ride. Equal parts magick and monstrosity, we walk the amalgamated edge, live in the cast-aside periphery–until all unbidden, we let loose a flurry of fire and frighten the town-dwellers.

This mythology is a story of mismatched elements made one. I see us in it. I see it in us; all lion-maned head, goat-footed hooves, wings of a swan. (The wings call to mind both Lucifer and Icarus–at once condemned for a love too great, and cast down to the Earth for hubris.)

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In a more modern mythology, I call to the page Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster. Here I bring to recollection and attention the reminders of the out-sized power of prejudice, the tender hope of love, and the terrifying impacts of isolation and denigration.

We nurse our monster-wounds, and seek out solitude in fear of ridicule. If we are lucky and skillful we find ways to turn our anger and vengeance upon the systems of oppression, and not on our own noble, humble hearts.

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We are Monster, hear us roar! You will find us on the ways you fear to tread, the roads less travelled. We stand at the edges, glorious skin dappled in the dance of firelight and shadow, waiting for a brighter dawn.