Dreams, Art, Creativity and the Two-Spirit
Please Remember
I dream that “my friend Sam and his wife have returned. Sam is in a singing group. His friend is leading the group. They sing a song, “She’s a strong man-woman. He’s a strong woman-man.” I say, “Well, praise God! Androgyny has finally come to the church.”
The twists and turns of listening to my dreams, trusting synchronicities, following my intuition, and interacting with the spirit world through meditation and my paintings led me into the world of shamanism and the discovery of the berdache or two-spirit archetype and a new understanding of my relationship to both the masculine and the feminine. I came to understand that the bull that had chased me up the tree in an earlier dream and that had chased me into a barn in another dream where I discovered a woman hiding behind the mask of a dog was the remnant of an ancient masculine living in the depths of my soul—a masculine that had not lost his connection to nature nor to the Great Goddess and Earth Mother. I would discover my androgenous and two-spirit nature.
Native American and indigenous cultures have a term for this androgenous or two-spirit nature. It is “berdache.” A berdache is a person who identifies with any of a variety of gender identities which are not exclusively those of their biological sex. Berdaches mix together the behavior, dress, and social roles of both women and men. In the 1990s Native American anthropologists replaced the word berdache with the term two-spirit to refer to what was traditionally known as the berdache. I view the berdache as having two spirits, man and woman, combined into one soul.
Archetypes must have a supportive environment in which to develop and find expression. While such a supportive environment existed in many indigenous societies, that environment did not exist in the Europeans and Spanish who settled the Americas. Thus, the berdache or two-spirit archetype was driven into the unconscious where it has laid dormant, rejected or germinating until the recent rise of the LGBTQ communities and the focus on LBGTQ rights. While the current focus seems to be placed on the sexual aspect, perhaps we can open space in our culture to embrace sexual and gender diversity so that the spiritual gifts of the LGBTQ communities can find a place in the greater culture, as they did in the indigenous societies. I am in no way suggesting that we take the berdache traditions from the American Indian and indigenous cultures and try to make them ours or impose them onto modern society. I am suggesting that we make space for the archetype of the berdache, of androgyny and the two-spirit soul to find its expression in our culture as the creative mediator and spiritual healer that it can be. That spiritual healer can take many forms including its artistic expressions in modern and contemporary visual art practices that draw on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer imagery and issues known as Queer Art. In fact, performance art, video art, installation, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and mixed media, among the many forms of artistic expression not only tell the story of the LGBTQ+ communities but provide avenues for acceptance, inclusion, and healing.
We must somehow take the wisdom not only of the American Indians but the wisdom of our own stories and open space in our worldview for the LGBTQ communities and gender diverse people if we are to recover what we have lost by our rejection of these spirits. As members of these communities, we must open space in our own hearts to accept ourselves and live our gifts in ways that heal the split not only in ourselves but the split in the society at large.
You can find the complete story of my discovery of the “two-spirit” in my book, The Other Man in Me, Erotic Longing, Lust and Love: The Soul Calling, at https://www.amazon.com/Other-Man-Me-Longing-Calling/dp/1098334981