A Lokian Family: Queer and Pagan Agency in Montreal. The Pomegranate, 15.1-2, 2013.

[The Pomegranate 15.1-2 (2013) 1-23] ISSN 1528-0268 (print)doi: 10.1558/pome.v15i1-2.1 ISSN 1743-1735 (online)

A Lokian Family: Queer and Pagan Agency in Montreal

Martin Lepage1

Université du Québec à Montreal

Pavillon Thérèse-‐‑Casgrain

455 est, Boul. René-‐‑Lévesque

3e étage – local W-‐‑3020

Montreal, Québec

H2L 4Y2

[email protected]

AbstractContemporary Paganism portrays gender in an array of different ways and, as such, is very inclusive of sexual diversity. But how do queer people take part in the Pagan community? More precisely, what kind of efforts or changes do queer and transgender people have to make in order to relate to the pagan community? To answer these questions, this article examines how queer and transgender people proceed to differ-ent kinds of negotiations, especially regarding the concept of gender, that allow them to either participate actively in the Pagan community

community in Montreal and its take on gender, it will demonstrate, with the help of certain concepts from queer studies and performance stud-ies, how a few queer individuals perform gender in ritual context and how gender and queerness impact their relationship with Pagan reli-gious beliefs, practices and communities.

Keywords: Contemporary Paganism;; Gender;; Identity;; Performance;; Queer.

Introduction

Over the last twenty years, many studies have been produced about contemporary religious phenomena some scholars have called “spir-itualties of life” or “lived religion.”2 A lot of that research has shown

1. Martin Lepage is a PhD. candidate in the Département de sciences des reli-gions, Université du Québec à Montreal.

2. Paul Heelas, Spiritualities of Life: “New Age” Romanticism and Consumptive

Martin

Martin

This is a previous version of the article publishedin The Pomegranate, 15.1-2 (2013)

2 The Pomegranate 15.1-2 (2013)

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2014

how, today, gender is a major factor in the way people go about their spirituality. Studies have demonstrated how lesbian, gay and bisex-ual people negotiate the meaning of gender representations within religious traditions, especially in contemporary Paganism and God-dess spirituality, in order to heal themselves from rejection, abuse and domination.3 In that sense, the link between gender and power

not conform to binary gender norms still want to be part of a reli-gious community in which institutions are against them.4

But how do queer people take part in the Pagan community? More precisely, what kind of efforts or changes do queer and trans-gendered people have to make in order to relate to the Pagan com-munity? To answer these questions, this article will examine how queer and transgendered people proceed to different kinds of nego-tiations, especially regarding the concept of gender, that allow them to either participate actively in the Pagan community or distance themselves from it.

I have studied contemporary Paganism in the city of Montreal and the Pagan community that surrounds this location, extending to

Capitalism (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008);; Meredith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

3. Lucie Dufresne, “The Goddess Incarnate: A Discourse on the Body within One Community of Contemporary North American Goddess Worshippers” (PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2004);; Jay Hasbrouck, “Utopian Imaginaries and Faerie Practice. Mapping Routes of Relational Agency,” in Gay Religion, ed. Scott Thumma and Edward R. Gray (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2004), 239–58;; Sarah M. Pike, “Forging Magical Selves: Gendered Bodies and Ritual Fires at Neo-Pagan Fes-tivals,” in Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft, ed. James R. Lewis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 121–40;; Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves. Contem-porary Pagans and the Search for Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);; New Age and NeoPagan Religions in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004);; Susan Harper, “‘All Cool Women Should Be Bisexual’: Female Bisexu-ality Identity in an American NeoPagan Community,” Journal of Bisexuality 10, no.

Daughters of the Goddess. Studies in Healing, Iden-tity, and Empowerment (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 1999);; Rosemary Rob-erts, “‘Healing my Body, Healing the Land’: Healing as Sociopolitical Activism in Reclaiming Witchcraft,” Ethnologies 33, no. 1 (2011): 239–56.

4. Pierre Hurteau, Homosexualités masculines et religions du monde (Paris: L’Har-mattan, 2010);; Gary D. Comstock and Susan E. Henking, Que(e)rying Religion: A Crit-ical Anthology (New York: Continuum, 1997);; Ursula King, ed., Religion and Gender (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995);; Anna Fedele and Kim E. Knibbe, eds., Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches (New York: Routledge, 2013).

Lepage A Lokian Family: Queer and Pagan Agency in Montreal 3


the larger province of Quebec and a few festival locations in Ontario. In fact, I will try to give a sense of the way in which these people

having to partake in what we call “queer negotiations.”

Wicca and Reclaiming Witchcraft, two traditions that are present in Montreal and that develop opposite views on gender. In order to gain a better perspective on this phenomenon, I discuss the lives and personal narratives of people that are either transgendered, transi-tioning or identifying as queer. I will also explain certain concepts from queer studies and performance studies that can help under-stand how queer individuals perform gender in ritual context. Then, with the help of three case studies, I will demonstrate how gender and queerness impact the relationship Pagans have with their reli-gious beliefs, practices, and communities.

Contemporary Paganism and Gender in Montreal

Québec and in the city of Montreal, but it is certainly not the only one.5 What I have witnessed in Montreal, however, is a far less struc-tured form of Wicca than what can be seen in the United States or in other parts of Canada such as, for example, the Wiccan Church of Canada in Toronto.6

to observe the activities of one private (and quite secretive) Mon-treal coven, called The Silver Wheel. Most of the Wiccan groups I know would mostly be considered by any member of a “real” Wiccan coven as mere circles. These circles are mostly composed of young people of Western European background who started prac-ticing Paganism and Wicca on their own in their teenage years (as most Canadian Pagans did between the 1980s and the 1990s). Some

5. Mireille Gagnon, “La mouvance wiccanne au Québec: un portrait de la sor-cellerie contemporaine” (MA. diss., Université Laval, Québec, 2003);; Marisol Char-bonneau, “A Distinct Paganism: The Contemporary Pagan Revival in Montreal at the Turn of the Millennium” (MA. diss., University of Ottawa, 2008);; Rosemary Rob-erts, “‘It’s All a Giant Web’: Syncretism, Agency and (Re)connection in a Contempo-rary Pagan Community” (MA. diss., University of Montreal, 2009).

6. Kevin Marron, Witches, Pagans and Magic in the New Age (Toronto: Seal Books, 1989).



of them practice only with their group, others are solitary practitio-ners who will sometimes join in a group they know from a friend or a family member.

People who call themselves Wiccans (or witches, sometimes inter-changeably) often do so in order to claim the practice of witchcraft as a spiritual or religious alternative to their Christian, mostly Cath-olic, upbringings, or to recognize the sacred feminine and masculine aspects of the immanent divinity that is Nature, our planet, or our entire universe.7

Many Montreal Pagans never join a group nor take part in pub-lic rituals, and since they rarely come under the public light, their number is hard to estimate. Nevertheless, a large number of Pagan people who attend public rituals and form private groups amongst themselves can also take part in Pagan traditions other then Wicca such as Goddess spirituality, Reclaiming Witchcraft, Druidism, Hea-

one point or another the life trajectories of the majority of my infor-mants. Even if there are some discrepancies between different prac-tices and ideologies, the Pagan community of Montreal is fairly harmonious and the mixing of different traditions often results in very inclusive rituals.

A lot of the public rituals taking place during the eight sab-bats of the year are organized by the Montreal Pagan Resource Center (MPRC) and also by any member of the community who wishes to participate, no matter their tradition. Very few public rituals are organized for the esbats, or the monthly full moons, by the MPRC. A small group from the Reclaiming tradition used to hold a New Moon song and drums circle, but the main organizer recently moved to California. Also, the MPRC often led their rit-uals in the back area of the occult shop The Magical Blend8 that has, since June 2013, no more physical location. Now the rituals

7. Sarah M. Pike, New Age and NeoPagan Religions in America;; Barbara Jane Davy, Introduction to Pagan Studies (Lanham, Md.: Altamira Press, 2007);; Graham Harvey, Listening People, Speaking Earth (New York: New York University Press, 1997).

8. The Magical Blend (or Le Mélange Magique) also used to be home of the Crescent Moon School of Magic and Paganism, a quite popular place for beginners to learn the basics of Paganism in a non-initiatory manner. Another shop called Charme et Sortilège can be considered a second gravitational center for French-speaking Pagans, but since none of the informants mentioned here are connected with it, I do not discuss it here.



organized by members of the MPRC mostly happen outside in the more secluded parks of Montreal or in venues rented with the aid of ticket sales. Events such as the Yule Fair and the Beltane Fair used to help raise enough money to cover these costs, but now the MPRC organizers rely on the gracious collaboration and generosity of the owners of the Café Chimera Games to hold indoors public events.

These rituals mostly happen in English, sometimes in English and in French, at Samhain, for example, when the number of people is a lot higher. A large part of the rituals I have observed were led by members of the Wiccan coven the Silver Wheel, members of the

These eight sabbats9 and thirteen esbats portray natural sea-sonal cycles as the interaction of the feminine and masculine and are celebrated by the majority in the Pagan community of Mon-treal, sometimes under different names according to the group or

Even if not every member of the Pagan community of Montreal practices a strict structured form of Wicca, many still observe the distinction between feminine and masculine as the basis of their spirituality. For Wiccans, closer to the original Wicca promoted

-cal ritual is, for the most part, the result of the symbolic union of male and female polarities understood under the traits of the God-dess (Mother-Goddess, Great Goddess, Mother Nature) and the God (Horned God), who get different names according to the mythologi-

a tendency to naturalize sexual duality associating female to women and male to men (which equates gender with biological sex). This distinction is realized during ritual performance, as men and women adopt certain gestures and movements symbolizing the reproduc-tive potential of their biological sex. Wiccan covens are especially fond of this principle as they are the only ones I have seen who prac-tice the Great Rite, maybe the most binary ritual I have witnessed. With this rite, Wiccans invite the Goddess and the God to join them in a fertility rite. The high priest, representative of the God, dipping

9. For more details about the sabbats and the Pagan ritual calendar, see Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).



the ceremonial dagger called the athame into the cup held by the high priestess, is meant to symbolize the (pro)creative union of both deities. Invoking the generative power of the sacred masculine and feminine, Wiccans who perform this ritual believe that the union of the two sexes can generate the energy and the power that “magic” or the ritual tries to produce and channel.

Pagans who, for multiple reasons, tend to critique the gender

the feminine/masculine duality in a different way which is often expressed in their beliefs and ritual practice. Their critique of hetero-

rituals, as they tend to leave behind the normative Wiccan duality. What was thought as complementarity between male and female is instead thought to be, in traditions such as Reclaiming Witchcraft and the Radical Faeries, mostly, a metaphor for the masculine and feminine parts in each of us. This focuses less on the creative comple-mentarity of the sexes and more on the awareness and consciousness of these polarities within the psyche, on their acceptation and actual-ization in order to gain balance and wholeness.

However, in reality, these two interpretations of the gender bin-ary, portrayed respectively and differently in Wicca and Reclaim-ing Witchcraft, can be found within the same individual or coven

the context.Much research in Pagan studies has shown how Pagans (LGBTQI

or not) express their identity through bodily means such as danc-

or sexual orientation.10 A lot of it shows the challenges that oppose gender essentialism to LGBTQI Pagans who still have to deal with ste-reotypes regarding their identity.11 Research has also demonstrated

-arate people of different genders before putting them together, like

10. Harper, “‘All Cool Women Should Be Bisexual’”;; Hasbrouck, “Utopian Imaginaries and Faerie Practice. Mapping Routes of Relational Agency”;; Mary Jo Neitz, “Queering the Dragonfest. Changing Sexualities in a Post-Patriarchal Reli-gion,” in Gay Religion, ed. Scott Thumma and Edward R. Gray (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2004), 259–80;; Sarah M. Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves.

11. Regina Smith Oboler, “Negotiating Gender Essentialism in Contempo-rary Paganism,” The Pomegranate 12, no. 2 (2010) 159–84;; Christine Hoff Kraemer, “Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Paganism,” Religion Compass 6, no. 8 (2012): 390–401;; Harper, “‘All Cool Women Should Be Bisexual.’”



during chants, or allow diversity on both sides, men with women and women with men.12 I have myself witnessed these phenomena at different Canadian festivals like Wic-Can Fest or Kaleidoscope Gathering. I will give an example of such rituals, done from a queer perspective, in the next portion of this article.

Furthermore, some groups and traditions, as well as people within them, tend to distance themselves from each other often because they cannot agree on their conception of genders.13 Dianic witches, whose participants are mainly women and Goddess-focused participants would probably disagree on a number of things regarding gender with Pagan men from the Radical Faeries movement, for example, which see male homosexuality as an expression of the Goddess or the divine within them.

As we have seen, an alternative to Wicca like Reclaiming Witch-craft, with its critique of patriarchy and heteronormativity, would be ideal for LGBTQI Pagans, who need to equate their spirituality with their gender or sexual identity, to invest time and energy in. But, in reality, things are much more complex, and to take part in a tradition or another has to do with a lot more than gender or sexual orienta-

-

they encounter, and to the slings and arrows they experience, creat-ing differentiated trajectories.

But how do Pagans who identify as LGBTQI reconcile their reli-giosity with their identity? It is reasonable to think that the perfor-mance of rituals such as the Great Rite especially, and ritual practice in general, demands for every LGBTQI person an active work of negotiation in order to attune their religiosity with their gender or

12. Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers and Other Pagans in America Today (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986 [1979]);; Davy, Intro-duction to Pagan Studies;; Harvey, Listening People;; Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves, New Age and NeoPagan Religions;; Jesse Daniel Sloan, “The Gendered Altar: Wiccan Concept of Gender and Ritual Objects” (MA diss., University of Florida, Orlando, 2008);; Marisol Charbonneau, “Mother Earth, Father Sky? The Sexual Politics of Con-temporary Wicca and Paganism,” in Stories from Montreal 2: Ethnographic Accounts of Life in North America’s Francophone Metropolis, ed. Tammy Saxton, Crystal Léger, and Karoline Truchon (Montreal: Armchair Academic Publications/Concordia, 2002), 1–19.

13. Adler, Drawing Down the Moon;; Marcella Althaus-Reid, “From the Goddess to Queer Theology: The State We Are in Now,” Feminist Theology 13, no. 2 (2005):

Daughters of the Goddess;; Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves, New Age and NeoPagan Religions.



sexual identity.14 Covens do encourage their high priestesses and high priests to be able to embody the Goddess as well as the God, and solitary practitioners have the freedom they need to give dif-ferent meanings to highly sexual symbolic objects like the athame or the cup. There is every reason to believe that the designation and the meaning of feminine and masculine become at some point a very personal matter, in the name of a critique of normativity and insti-tuted authority (the Catholic Church and its authoritative regime being the exact opposite Pagans want to distance themselves from). I will explore this question in depth during my doctoral thesis, begin-ning with a few answers in the next pages.

Gender Performativity and Ritual Performance among LGBTQI Pagans

In her 1949 book The Second Sex, French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”15 Since then, feminist studies have not slowed down in showing the social construction of gendered identities and sexes.

-tion is the American philosopher Judith Butler. She is very well know for her 1990 Gender Trouble,16 which she commented and expanded in 1993 with her Bodies that Matter. With her research, she became, next to the feminist theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the main voice for queer theory.17 This constructivist theory questions the norma-tive association between gender and sexual orientation within some-one’s identity. In this perspective, it is society that forces people to take on gender roles that tie them to certain types of regulatory behaviors. These theories go against the ones under the essentialist denomination that claim the existence of a static, unchanging, bio-logical and natural essence to the sexes.

For Butler, this association between gender and the category of -

less array of repetitions and categorizations, forcing heterosexuality

14. Charbonneau, “Mother Earth, Father Sky?”;; Harper, “‘All Cool Women Should Be Bisexual’”;; Sloan, “The Gendered Altar.”

15. From the French, “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient”. Simone de Beau-voir, Le Deuxième Sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 285.

16. Judith Butler, Trouble dans le genre: Le feminisme et la subversion de l’identité (Paris: La Découverte, 1990);; Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

17. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).



as the norm. More precisely, Butler’s theories demonstrate how gen-der is performative, in the sense that is has the potential to perform an identity. This notion, borrowed from Austin’s linguistics,18 sup-poses that every utterance in discourse, which compel people to iden-tity with one gender or the other (“It’s a boy!” “Women are crazy!”

-mative ritual where the body becomes the instrument—already gendered—through which the gender binary will manifest itself.

that it essentially is a social act that we always have to perform. Everything going against this equation will eventually be forced to

these norms through multiple acquired stylizations (with clothing, in the way the body moves and occupies space, linguistic codes) that often go unnoticed to the person’s awareness.

Nevertheless, gender, being performative and repetitive, is always -

vert it. This is what scholars in queer theory have come to know as agency, someone’s power to act upon their own lives. This concept refers to the idea that a subject is inevitably at the heart of power rela-tions that are constructed or transformed even though they are fought against. Jacques Guilhaumou describes the agency of feminine power in these terms: “a particular method in relations to structures of dom-ination, a relative autonomy in the choice of means to control one’s

general level, an action (historical agency) conducive to change.”19 This

relations and resistance tactics. In fact, people who do not conform to the gender binary for a reason of identity often react quite strongly against these norms that are still promulgated within the majority of Pagan rituals.

Third-Gender Ritual and Agency at Kaleidoscope Gathering

To better understand the queer negotiations that LGBTQI Pagans must undertake in order to adjust their religious practices to their

18. John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

19. Jacques Guilhaumou, “Autour du concept d’agentivité,” Rives méditeranée-nnes 41 (2013): 28.



gender or sexual identity, I have proceeded to several interviews that allowed me to circumscribe the “meaning itineraries” of my informants.20 Meaning itineraries refer to a project of construction of the self aiming to make the person whole and to put into a coherent narrative different contradictions of existence and singular events. These itineraries show the ways in which Pagan people deal with discrepancies between ritual symbolic and their gender or sexual identity.

In this respect, performance theories developed by British anthro-pologist Victor Turner, inspired by French ethnologist Arnold Van Gennep, suggest that every ritual act works to perform an identity validated by the community after it has been internalized through the force of experience.21

For example, here is a description of the third-gender ritual I attended at the Pagan festival Kaleidoscope Gathering (KG), during which participants could experience gender in a non-binary fashion. This ritual occurred in August of 2012 at Raven’s Knoll, on Pagan-owned land in southern Ontario, where a thousand people attend multiple festivals every year, from May to September. Also, because of its proximity to Montreal (about three and a half hours), a consid-erable portion of the people who attend KG are from the urban part of the greater Montreal area.

This festival, from what I have seen, is probably the most open-minded and inclusive in terms of gender identity and sexual orien-tation, having a LGBTQIA ritual and a parade known as Rainbow Pride parade, women’s and men’s rituals that include members of both genders, and a third-gender ritual that ritualizes queer iden-tity. Eleven people took part in this ritual and most of them, except

designed for people of the “third gender.”

20. In French “itinéraires de sens.” Raymond Lemieux, “Bricolage et itinéraires de sens,” Religiologiques 26 (2003): 11–34.

21. Victor W. Turner, Le phénomène rituel: Structure et contre-structure (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969);; The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986);; Arnold Van Gennep, Les rites de passage: étude systématique des rites de la porte et du seuil, de l’hospitalité, de l’adoption, de la grossesse et de l’accouchement, de la naissance, de l’enfance, de la puberté, de l’initiation, de l’ordination, du couronnement,

(Paris, 1909);; Michel House-man, Le rouge est le noir: Essais sur le rituel (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2012);; Richard Schechner, “What is Performance Studies?” Rupkatha Journal 5, no. 2 (2013): 2.



The eleven people gather in the birch grove, a small area con-tained by a circular settlement of tall birch trees that provide shade and privacy from onlookers. Manon,22 the priestess, explains the ritual people are about to go through. She starts by placing in the middle of the circle a square of white fabric decorated with woven rainbows, on which she then placed four masks. These masks are differently shaped and painted by hand by Manon herself.

For the occasion, Manon is dressed like her interpretation of Loki, the shape- shifting trickster god of Norse mythology. In fact she is dressed in her Harley Queen costume, a female DC Comics charac-ter who dresses to resemble the commedia dell’arte character Harle-quin, famous for his ability to change form and his status as a buffoon and a trickster. This shows her own interpretation of the gender of the god Loki who, like herself as a transgendered person, knows a little bit about what having to adapt one’s body to one’s spirit is like.

moon. It is painted in black with a silver moon crescent across the whole thing, making Katherine’s face look a bit like the moon as a whole. Katherine places the mask on her face and starts walking around the circle, just as the moon orbits around the Earth. As an all-encompassing feminine principle, the moon, embodied by Kather-ine, will circle the ritual area until the end of the ritual.

Manon then puts on a second mask, representing the feminine. This mask is painted in silver and green, decorated with green holly leaves and its red fruits. This mask is usually dedicated to the Norse goddess Gerda, as the holly plant is also associated with the femi-nine, according to Manon.23 After a moment of introspective silence, she starts talking in a softer and higher-pitched voice than usual,

-inine she knows, in the way she thinks women should behave in life, with strength and determination. After Manon, Fay puts on the mask of the androgynous. This mask is associated with Loki and is painted with black (feminine color) and red (masculine color) free

22. Manon will be the subject of one of our case studies. She is the leader of Lok-abrenna Kindred, which I will later present as the primary focus of study for this arti-cle. Members of this kindred are the ones who organized and led this third-gender ritual.

23. The association of the masks with the gods and goddesses of Norse mythol-ogy was not explained during the ritual. Manon later told me that they were what she and her friends had in hand to organize their third-gender ritual at the time and did not feel the need to explain their symbolic meaning to the other participants.



cannot choose one side of the binary standard or the other in a per-manent manner. Being intersex herself, Fay offers a parody of the feminine and the masculine by showing how they can be expressed alternatively by changing at will one’s movements and attitudes. Finally, Simon, a transgendered man, puts on the fourth mask, asso-ciated with the Norse god Freyr and painted in green with golden oak leaves. As such, he starts acting in a very masculine manner, looking strong but proud, protective but also nurturing and a bit ashamed.

Following them, every participant is invited to speak as well, mask in hand, in order to personify their interpretation of the femi-nine, the androgynous and the masculine. They express thusly what they believe genders represent for the outside world and what they imply in everyday society.

Once this step of the ritual is over, Manon guides the other nine people into another type of discussion. First, the masculine mask passes on from hand to hand as each person expresses what it rep-resents to them personally. This portion of the ritual is particularly

strong emotional reactions. This part of the ritual ends with the

more comfortable with these two last masks and speaks more posi-tively about them.

A last turn of circle allows participants to express how each gen-der has helped them in their lives and to recall the blessings they have brought them.

each gender. This ritual allows, secondly, a subversion of gender

present as they expose the different negative and positive aspects of the three genders they talked about. This creates a new understand-ing, both personal and collective, of the non-binary or queer identity of the participants. Every symbol called upon during the ritual, may it be the circle, the celestial bodies or the masks, participate actively

-ering offers in this way a unique occasion for LGBTQI Pagan (or not so Pagan) individuals to negotiate their identity in regards to both gender norms of dominant patriarchal culture and those that are present in contemporary Paganism inspired mostly by Wicca.



As we will see later on, the majority of the interviews I conducted -

ferent degrees.

Lokabrenna Kindred : Queer Adepts of Loki

Lokabrenna Kindred is a very rare occurrence in the Pagan commu-nity located in the city of Montreal. It is the only group of Pagan and Pagan-minded people I have met that includes only persons of queer sensibility. Also, it is one of the few that claims to work around a

not all member of the group call themselves Heathens.24 Some of them have a strong background in Wicca and Druidism, some are more acquainted with different types of spiritual practices like med-itation, aromatherapy, Reiki, drumming or even Native American spirituality.

Lokabrenna Kindred is not a coven either, as it does not include

does have a leader at its head. In fact, the leader of the group is Manon, the one who instigated the creation of the group about four years ago. This group of six or seven is a kindred in the sense that it reunites people who consider themselves more as family members than members of a religious or spiritual group. As such, Manon is the leader, because she is the one who prepares, invites people over, and lead the ritual parts of their meetings. She never would give any orders or apply any kind of authority that is not consensual, and she would never make any decision without consulting the concerned members of the group.

Some type of roles have indeed been attributed to a few mem-bers of the group, but these roles are not supposed to place anyone in a position of authority higher than the rest of them, maybe in-stead for Manon who leads the ritual and, in this manner, has some kind of control over what is happening during the ritual. Simon,

24. It is interesting to note that Heathens and Asatruar, in some parts of the world, may be the only ones who actually have spoken against the equality of rights for LGBTQI people. It is to say how much Lokabrenna’s ideologies are far removed from this aspect of Norse traditions of contemporary Paganism. For details about homophobia and transphobia in Asatru and Heathenism, see Stéphane François, Le néo-paganisme: une vision du monde en plein essor (Valence d’Albigeois: Éditions de La Hutte, 2007);; Harvey, Listening People;; Davy, Introduction to Pagan Studies.



a member of the kindred speaks about the role of each member in the group:

So Manon is the chieftain…we call it a benevolent dictatorship. She says “Okay, we’re gonna do this!” We say ”Alright, let’s do this!” As long as she is still open to suggestions or comments, that’s accept-able. As we continued to work together, we each got more concretely

Manon’s position is very much just a person with her hands on the

at running events, preside over rituals. I’m the bearer of the unholy spoon! It means like a priest, but there’s a story behind it.25

When Manon felt that the different communities in which she was involved were not proactive enough in terms of practice, she decided that she wanted to start something of her own and invite whoever wanted to come and join her in her celebration of the deities of Norse mythology. Although this is a common thing to happen in the Pagan community, most of the groups eventually drift off to create more groups or to leave people in solitude without a group to join, rare are the groups that get created, in Montreal, especially, by someone like Manon with such a deep and eclectic experience of Pagan reli-gions. In fact, Manon is also very involved in the Pagan community of Montreal at large, as she often joins the organization and the cel-ebration of public rituals for Samhain, especially, when the darker matters of life are brought to light.

community around Manon’s worship of Loki and the twelve Hand-maidens of Freiga. To describe these deities, Manon speaks in these terms:

thirty-three goddesses. About the gods, there are two books, about the goddesses, only two pages… I spend time meditating, talking to them, I make offerings to them each month, I write my impressions. I have a certain amount of stories I collected because there is nothing else. I will publish them! These are stories that have not much to do with the other Norse gods. They are mostly goddesses stories, the ones we can imagine women having back then. It’s inconceivable that these people

25. The story being that he proposed himself as the designated driver while he was cooking, using a spoon without holes, and the joke being that they had to give him that title while organizing a sex magic ritual. For Simon, this shows the Lokian quality of the kindred for which humor and laughter are an important aspect of sociability and religiosity.



did not have stories about their goddesses. We lost a lot of it because of oral tradition. Assuming these goddesses still exist, we can talk to them. This is my devotional work, to write stories about and for these goddesses.

In accordance with Manon’s devotional work, the main activity of Lokabrenna Kindred is their monthly dumb suppers. Manon invites

Norse pantheon. Usually, these suppers happen on the full moon, a time of introspection when the feminine energy of the goddess is supposedly at its peak. The members of the kindred generally arrived at Manon’s and prepare food to eat together. These moments are a time of celebration, to be silly, to have fun in order to contrast with the following supper, which is much more solemn than the rest of the meeting. Indeed, when they start supper, a special place is prepared for a goddess to join them at the table. The chair, a special

occasions, remains empty during the supper until members decide to sit in it in order to channel the words of the goddess, or simply to eat in their place to honor them.

They also celebrate the eight sabbats of the Pagan calendar while adapting some of the basic concepts and practices having to do with gender. For example, at Beltane, when Pagans take part in fertility rites and raise May Poles in honor of the union of the Goddess and the God, the members of Lokabrenna Kindred wear the masks of two Norse gods, Gerda and Freyr. Then they throw a party where people wearing those masks embody the gendered qualities of the

act of sexual reproduction, this Beltane ritual enacts the feeling of the chase, the humor and pleasure behind seduction and the mys-teries of beauty.

Following Manon, the other members are encouraged to nurture and practice within this group their own abilities and help Manon in her journey towards her knowledge of her Goddesses.

In the last part of this article, I will take a closer look at the way three members of the kindred, starting with Manon, understand gender in relation to their spirituality. We will then be able to see

and a personal view of gender.Manon is a transgendered lesbian woman who works as a hyp-

notherapist specialized in gender and sexual identity problems. She is forty-two and has been part of the general Pagan community of



to spiritual matters, as her father was involved in a Presbyterian

youngest male member of the Rosicrucians in Quebec at the time. Around the age of eighteen, she left the traditional Martinist order

something that was less intellectual and that implicated the body in a more active way. Her elders led her to Paganism. She explains:

The reason I was attracted to Paganism was because of the theatrics, of the drama, you dress up, you have a wand, you burn incense, you do invocations, you do something, you move, you have a sense of magic. It’s beautiful and inspiring, it involves your body, your heart, not just your head. This is what I was looking for, magic.

fact, she was rejected from the coven because she attended a wed-ding ceremony of people from another coven. She then joined that second coven but her need for knowledge was too great for what it could offer. So she joined the Druidic fellowship Ár nDraíocht Féin (ADF) and created a group called “La Clairière du Renard Argenté,” which died in 1999. She says,

One of the reasons I gave up Wicca was because of the fact that it’s a binary model of the God and the Goddess, and it’s very heterosexual. What I liked about ADF, about druids, was that it was a ternary model:

of nature, the worlds that are above, in the middle and below. It was always by three, which suited me very well, you didn’t have this dual-ity and this dependence on heterosexuality.

Manon’s decision to transition from a man to a woman happened while she was practicing Wicca with the second coven she met. It was easier for her to leave this coven and join another Pagan group where people did not have to learn her new name or accept her new identity. When she joined the ADF, she had already transitioned and, for her, it wasn’t a problem anymore: “There was no coming out to do anymore.” Also, the ADF suited Manon because of the fact she was attracted to women, but also because she was transgen-

option.She talks about the connections between her spirituality and her

gender identity in these terms: “The fact that Loki is able to change gender and all that, it has a lot to do with my appreciation of him and the alternatives he represents. This is also true for my goddesses



with whom I found a lot of diversity.” For this reason, Norse mythol-ogy and its pantheon is very important to Manon.

She is still a member of the ADF but her practice now revolves around her Norse tradition group, Lokabrenna Kindred. As men-tioned before, this group helps her in her devotional works as she is assisted in the revival of worship of Norse goddesses. She also takes par, from time to time in Reclaiming Witchcraft New Moon song

upon her goddesses.Manon is a very decisive person and the core of her spiritual

practice is to take decision and go into action. As a very intellectual person, she admits needing the balance between this spiritual aspect of her life and the one that wants to act upon this spiritual aspect. This principle is manifested in the way she described her transition,

you are inside. It can also be seen in the way she navigates and nego-tiates her identity within the Pagan community. She joined and left a few groups, was rejected from one and from rituals given by others, but she still leads public rituals and private groups today. In fact, she does so in a way that she feels in necessary for them as much as it is for her.

I was trying to do what people wanted to do. But people don’t know what they want to do. So I did the eight rituals of the calendar year and I waited for people to decide themselves. But with maturity, a year or two before starting the kindred, I said “Well people don’t know what they want, but I do, so I will do it.” So I started practicing on my own, a lot more seriously. Then I said “Here is what I do and if people want to join while I’m doing it, they are welcome.”

Manon talks about magic in a very compartmentalized and analyzed

asked her, to synthesize, if magic exists where there is contact, she said to me:

Yes, just as love is in contact. If it’s not reciprocal, there is no magic.

the people, yes, and by their spirit, but it is not based on a heterosexual model. When two chemical agents react with each other, it can happen from multiple combinations, not just guy and girl.

In the same manner, Manon navigates through the Pagan commu-nity in a way that allows contact without rejection. In fact, the con-sensual authority deployed in Lokabrenna Kindred shows how



much this magic brought up by reciprocal contact, is needed in her community. People only do only what they feel comfortable doing, what they want to do or to be good at. They can leave the group if they want, not come for certain celebrations, since Manon has done her spiritual work by providing them, and herself at the same time, a non-normative, or at least less binary, way to explore spirituality and divinity.

This is especially the case for Maria, Manon’s girlfriend, who is also part of the kindred. Maria is a forty-year-old divorced woman who works as an administrative assistant after quitting, six years ago, a promising job in information technology. Following this change in her life, she felt the need to regain contact with her spiri-tual life. Her Catholic education had never quite reached her heart,

identity. In fact, she is bisexual and in a polyamorous relationship with two transgender persons.

When Maria found Paganism, she did not feel very attracted to Wicca or to other gendered spiritualities. However, she rapidly was inspired by practices of ancestor worship and by the symbolic

herself as a spiritualist or a Pagan pantheist. She says, “God is in everybody. I expand that to not just people, but plants, animals…everything that is embodied has spirit… This is what I try to do in my life, things I do are manifestations of love.” In fact, telling her

religiosities.Although she takes part in Lokabrenna Kindred activities, Maria

as a guest. In fact, her solitary religious practices include a learning journey toward mediumship, which she does in order to communi-cate with the spirits of the dead and to gain sensibility over the living and the elements. Furthermore, Maria frequently uses the aroma-therapy technique called Bach Flower Remedies to yield the energies within the spirits of plants. Through these practices, Maria experi-ences a spirituality that focuses less on gender and sex and more on the immaterial and the invisible.

On the other hand, Maria’s relationship with her other transgen-dered boyfriend allows her to put forward her interest for social



activism. With her boyfriend, she practices commemoration rites for the ancestors, inspired by his direct knowledge of Native spiritual-ities. She explains, “I try to honor the land I currently live on, that was colonized by our ancestors, and to respect it. If there’s things I could do in a native American tradition, that, I would do it, in respect for where I am, where I live.” In addition, both are members of a drag king group with which they personify and parody the gender binary. Maria is also one of the organizers of the third-gender ritual given at KG in 2012, during which they tend to sufferings caused by homophobia and transphobia.

Maria’s spiritual practices, even though she perceives them to be solitary, have an effect on her community and the people who take part in it. She says,

I've gotten so much within the past years on the type of spirituality that is important to me: talking to spirits, being able to be open, to speak messages whether they are for me or someone else, being able to be open enough to speak messages. It's a way of living… Spirituality is intertwined with art, with sex and sexuality, in a tantric way but also just in the sharing of intimate space.

Maria’s contribution to Lokabrenna Kindred is much more than a mere valorization of energies or the spirit of things, instead of a focus on the gendered materiality of the body. In the same way, the

-tity;; it also reveals the nature of her view of the world, of her actions on the world, and of her relationships with her dear ones. In fact, the love and respect she values so much within her spirituality also go and in hand with her social activism toward cultural appropriation and with her lifestyle. She feels the need to respect Native people by trying to understand them and pay homage to their ancestors, and she tries to evacuate from her practice any reference to the gender binary. This certainly demonstrates how important individual and consensual authority is to her. For Maria, this autonomy can ensure

of her actions in every sphere of her life.This matter is especially important to Sam, another member of

Lokabrenna Kindred, friend of Manon and Maria. Sam, thirty-two years old, is an interpreter, translator and graduate student sex-ology. He is single and lives with a roommate. He comes from a middle-class family who were also members of the United Church of Canada (a very liberal Protestant church). As of today, he describes



himself as a cissexual gender queer man.26 When he was a child, as he told me, his “religious organs” never got very stimulated by the

for his family, a bigger shock than his homosexuality. In his turn, he describes his need to reconcile religiosity and sexual identity:

Me, I wanted a spirituality that accepted me, but that also centered me, that centered my sexual and gender experiences as I was living

the Goddess, where it’s written “All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals.” …I had always experienced my sexuality like something that was spiritual or spiritually powerful.

The Spiral Dance, which he read in his teenage years, he found it funda-mental that his religious practice did not contradict his conception of gender and his sexual identity. For this reason, Sam was rap-idly attracted to the rituals and events organized by the Reclaim-

Radical Faeries. His testimony shows indubitably how things related to the body and sexuality are intertwined with spirituality and his inner quest: “[Magic] will act on a level more like a prayer or a ritual that I will do to invoke the help of a divinity, libations [to Aphrodite Urania] when I make it with a guy, or it will take a more psychologi-cal form that operates on my subconscious.”

Sam started off by practicing a more traditional type of Wicca that includes the separation of feminine and masculine. He also told me that he tries to follow the teachings of his own experience in order to evolve towards the invocation of a love divinity that wouldn’t

binary makes it in Wicca for people who do not conform to it:

-ticing, was enough, but the fact that it was centered on a male/female gender polarity was disturbing me. It wasn’t a question of how LGBT sexualities or identities were against nature or damaging,

not imposed, but it wasn’t questioned either, not obligatory, just not analyzed.

Today Sam practices energy raising and ecstatic techniques, along with healing rituals, with the group in which he partakes, focusing

26. Sam describes himself in such terms because he doesn’t think it necessary to



less and less on the gender binary. He feels these practices are better suited to his sexual identity and allow him to conceive simultane-ously the masculine and the feminine within him. Along the lines

his religious implication in the sense of emancipation from gender norms.

Conclusion

This article tried to demonstrate some of the queer negotiations that LGBTQI Pagans, especially transgendered and queer people, have to do in order to take part in the Pagan community. With rituals like the third-gender ritual at Kaleidoscope Gathering, Pagans who have different views on gender but who still ally in their non-binary con-ception of it, can agree that it is primarily a social construct. They also agree in their critique of gender and on how they should be per-ceived on a more equal level. In this manner, they perform gender in a less normative way than what usually occurs in Wiccan or main-stream Paganism or in Western culture in general.

The way our informants give meaning to different conceptions of gender also show how their construction of gender come into play with a community who also has some forms of gendered reli-giosities. Manon, Maria, and Sam have somewhat divergent views on gender but they can agree, even though they identify with dif-ferent genders or sexual identities, that they are basically highly

to them most is the power or the magic they get when they can identify freely to a non-binary gender or sexual identity and when they can share it with people like them. The different queer nego-tiations they have to perform don’t seem like much of a chore any-more, but more like an occasion to gain agency in the way they tend to their spirituality.

Having a space such as Lokabrenna Kindred, where they can learn about themselves and share with their friends, allows the members to take part in the larger Montreal Pagan community celebrations without feeling like the somewhat binary Wiccan way of expressing gender is the only one available. They feel less excluded from the community that is Paganism in general as their identity can be rep-resented too, joining forces with a growing number of heterosexual Pagans who continue to be invaluable allies.



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