Let us give masculinity back its flowering wand of reciprocal relationship with the natural world.
Let us call Dionysus to the gates of our cities and homes.
A man who can dance with plants and honor beasts, a man who can be a woman and an androgen and an animal, is more than a gender.
He is a celebration.
-Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand
I read Sophie Strand’s Flowering Wand¹ while I was in India recently, and it shook me.
For years I’d being learning how to “do the work,” which I think Strand might refer to as decolonizing my mind. Despite coming out as queer to my friends and family, despite going into recovery and going to therapy and joining men’s work circles and learning non-violent communication, some stubborn parts at the root of me hadn’t budged an inch.
At the core of Strand’s mythological manifesto is the character of Dionysus. In her retelling of the Greek god he takes on a mycelial, emergent quality. He pops up at exactly the right time and shakes a brittle kingdom to its bones, and then he wanders off to wherever the good funk is heading next.
Dionysus has always been androgynous², which may have diminished his place amongst the gods in a world of toxic masculinity, but it appears to be the right time for Dionysus to shake his locks and seduce us back to his endless party.
The soulless hive mind of corpo-consumerism discovered a way to distort Dionysus to serve their own purposes, ie. selling products. Dionysus went all bacchian and sold us jello shots and Jägerbombs and I guess JUUL or whatever. But getting blackout drunk was never the point of the Dionysus party.
Dionysus shows up to change the world.
I dream of a post-religious future, but I understand at the same time the importance of belief systems. Religion is a patriarchal institution, whose entire function is to profit from controlling the pipeline to god. And we allowed those guys to do that for a really long time. I don’t see a compelling reason to continue allowing it to happen.
But belief systems are essential for survival. It’s an individual practice, we all need to make sense of the world in our own way. The gift of Dionysus is to liberate humans from other humans. We are all in this together, and no one is in charge.
In the Flowering Wand, Strand describes her belief system as animist, which feels very close to my own. We’re witnessing the turning of the great wheel, back to what we remember as the beginning. But we have in fact moved forward, and I’m offering techno-animist as a crude approximation of my own belief system.
I believe the universe is alive, and I'm an extension of that life.Technology currently operates as an extension of the life within ourselves, but when I look more deeply, I notice how we are made of the same building blocks. Should we not identify the Earth, who gifted us with her blood, as alive?
Our definition of what is alive expands with our consciousness. Animist is too small of a word if it doesn’t include the elements which bring everything into being. We haven’t discovered extra-terrestrials yet, our technology isn’t conscious yet, and religion is the only obstacle stopping us from believing in either possibility.
What shifted inside me when I read Strand’s book was the hero of my own story. As a self-identifying musician, I always saw Apollo when I visualized my higher self. Apollo is a solar god, and the Flowering Wand is not kind to the solar gods, putting them front and center in the cultural shift toward patriarchy.
But as I allowed myself to soften and take in Strand’s argument, I realized Dionysus was the archetype I’d been looking for all along. My mind had been colonized. Part of my Apollo fantasy was fame and glory, a hallucination of victory. I wanted to be worshiped in my masculine supremacy.
My wand bloomed as I let go of the old gods that didn’t serve the future we need. Androgyny is a gift because no one has to win. My femininity is equally deserving of its day in the sun. The minds we’re beginning to create will find the concept of gender irrelevant.
I forgot my flower crown somewhere, but you can have it if you find it.
¹The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine by Sophie Strand, Sayani Sarkar — https://medium.com/the-omnivore-scientist/the-flowering-wand-rewilding-the-sacred-masculine-by-sophie-strand-1839334ecd68
²Let’s Talk About Dionysus, Genderqueer God of Partying and Pride, Siobhan — https://www.autostraddle.com/lets-talk-about-dionysus-genderqueer-god-of-partying-and-pride-379653/
