Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

SIBERIA/ARCTIC: Reversal and Renewal, Traversal and Transmutation

A similar constellation of phenomena concerning animal homosexuality and transgender is found among the numerous indigenous cultures scattered across Siberia and the Arctic (including the Inuit and Yup’ik [Eskimos] of arctic North America).³⁶ Aboriginal Siberian shamans often harness the power of cross-gender animal spirit guides or assume characteristics of the opposite sex under the direction of spirit animals. The most powerful male shamans among the Sakha (Yakut) people, for example, are believed to undergo a three-year initiation during which they experience aspects of female reproduction, including giving birth to a series of spirit animals (such as a Raven, loon, pike, Bear, or Wolf). Some female shamans also claim to manifest their power by transforming themselves into a male Horse. Gender reversals and recombinations are most prominently expressed in the phenomenon known as the transformed shaman, a sacred man or woman who takes on aspects of an opposite-sex identity. Transformation ranges along a continuum from a simple name-change, to partial or full transvestism during shamanic rituals, to living permanently as a transgendered person (including marrying a husband in the case of a transformed male or marrying a wife for a transformed female). Among the Chukchi, transformed shamans are sometimes associated with animal powers through spirit-name adoptions and animal transmutations. One such male shaman was named She-Walrus, for instance, while another believed s/he had the ability to change into a Bear when curing patients. Animal gender transformations that parallel those of shamans are also encoded in sacred stories. Among the Koryak, for example, a mythological figure named White-Whale- Woman turns herself into a man and marries another woman. In another story s/he marries a male Raven who has turned himself into a woman (and whose son later gives birth to a boy).³⁷

The ornate and beautiful costumes worn by shamans in many Siberian cultures often combine animal impersonation with cross-dressing. The robes, headdresses, and footgear of male shamans among the Yukaghir, Evenk, and Koryak people, for example, are usually women’s garments adorned with animal imagery. This may include an “antlered cap” bearing a symbolic representation of Reindeer antlers, or two iron circles representing breasts sewn to the front of the cloak. These sacred vestments—often made from an entire animal skin—are believed to allow the shaman to incarnate an animal or undertake supernatural bird-flight during trance, and s/he often performs dances that closely imitate the movements of a particular species that serves as his/her tutelary spirit. Shamanic ceremonies in a number of Siberian tribes also sometimes involve all-male dances imitating the mating activities of various animals, aimed at promoting sexual activity and a “renewal of life.” The word for shaman in the Samoyed language actually has the same root as the words to rut (of a stag) or to mate (of game birds). Chukchi transformed shamans do not generally wear special garments or impersonate animals; however, female-to-male shamans sometimes wear a dildo made from a Reindeer’s calf muscle, attached to a leather belt. In addition, Chukchi women and girls who are not shamans often perform all-female dances imitating various species, including white-fronted geese, long-tailed ducks, swans, Walruses, and seals. Some of these dances actually represent the courtship displays of male Ruffs or rutting Reindeer, and dances may also conclude with two girls lying on the ground and simulating sexual intercourse with each other.³⁸

Reindeer (known as Caribou in North America) are regarded in the shamanic contexts of some Arctic cultures as powerful transgendered creatures belonging to the supernatural. The Iglulik Inuit (Eskimo), for example, believe in mythical Caribou known as Silaat (in their male form) or Pukit (in their female form; singular Pukiq). These enormous animals are swifter and stronger than ordinary Caribou, can create dangerous weather conditions, and are thought to hatch from giant eggs on the tundra (sometimes identified with actual wild-goose eggs). The males wear female adornments on their robes (such as white pendants) and can transform themselves into females (some Silaat also assume the form of bearded seals or Polar Bears). The Silaat/Pukit also serve as spirit guides to shamans: one shamanic initiate named Qingailisaq tells of encountering a herd of such creatures, one of whom metamorphosed into a woman. The other Silaat then instructed him to make a shaman’s cloak that resembled her garment. The robe Qingailisaq created combines both male and female elements: in pattern and overall style it resembles a man’s coat, but in its ornaments and decoration it is similar to women’s clothes. The cloak’s white pendants evoke the garments of the transgendered Caribou, and an embroidered image of a transformed white Caribou or Pukiq adorns each shoulder. These Caribou are thought to be the original male descendants of Sila, a powerful deity and life force associated with gender variability. The Iglulik Inuit culture is based on a ternary gender system that recognizes a “third sex” or gender category. This encompasses a number of different cross-gendering phenomena such as “transsexuals” (people believed to have physically changed sex at birth), transvestites (people who adopt or are assigned the clothes, name, and other markers of the opposite sex), and shamans (who may be fully transgendered, or combine various male and female elements, or undergo mythic transformations between sexes and species). Sila occupies a central position in the Inuit cosmology as an intermediary between gender poles, and Sila’s descendants—the transgendered Caribou—are a further manifestation of this bridging and synthesis of “opposites” (male and female, animal and human).³⁹

Some Inuit peoples share with Native American tribes the belief that Bears—in this case, Polar Bears— manifest qualities of gender mixing and left-handedness.⁴⁰ In Siberian cultures, however, the association of Bears with sexual and gender variability is most notable in the activities generally known as Bear ceremonialism. A pan-Siberian religious complex, Bear ceremonialism involves the ritual killing of a Bear, whose skin and head are then placed on a sacred platform and feted for many days. Among the Ob-Ugrian peoples, these carnivalesque ceremonies involve feasting, dancing, the singing of sacred epics, and the performing of satirical plays. The latter typically include bawdy displays of transvestism: all female roles are played by men, who often simulate sex acts with one another. In ecstatic ritual dances men may also remove each other’s clothes. During Nivkh (Gilyak) Bear festivals, male hunters wearing articles of female clothing (and men’s clothing backwards) try to grab a Bear from behind or kiss it. This highlights a fundamental aspect of Siberian Bear ceremonialism: transgressions of gender and sexual boundaries are simply one of many ritual “reversals” that occur during the festivities (others include saying the opposite of what one means, and the breaching of various other social prohibitions). Bear ceremonies thereby serve, in the words of one anthropologist, as a “liminal (mediating) period of ritual excess,” believed by these Siberian peoples to be essential for both human and animal fecundity and prosperity.⁴¹

A cloak belonging to the Inuit shaman Qingailisaq. Just below each shoulder is the image of a Pukiq, a mythical transgendered Caribou that combines and transforms elements of male and female, animal and human.

Dramatic performances of gender reversals and sexual ambiguity are also an integral component of the elaborate animal renewal and fertility ceremonies of the Yup‘ik (Alaskan Eskimo) people. Such festivals feature “male mothers,” hermaphrodite and androgynous spirits, ritual transvestism, and cross-gender impersonation of animals, among other elements.⁴² One of the most important ceremonies is Nakaciuq or the Bladder Festival, a ten-day winter-solstice feast in which seals and other sea mammals are honored and invited to return for the next year (so named because the animals’ souls are believed to reside in their bladders, which are inflated and displayed during the ceremony). Another important ceremony is Kelek or the Masquerade, part of a larger festal cycle in which shamans and others interact with and appease the spirits of game animals. Images of male motherhood, pregnancy, and birth abound during these ceremonies. At the beginning of the Bladder Festival, for example, two men (often shamans) are designated “mothers” and pretend to be married to each other, with a third man playing the part of their “child.” In the Masquerade, male participants occasionally enact the part of a nursing woman, wearing a female mask and two wooden breasts carved with nipples. Male shamans dressed in women’s clothing also undertake trance journeys to visit animal spirits, symbolically give birth to spirit beings, and observe rituals associated with menstruation and childbirth following their spirit encounters. At the climax of this festival, a young boy dressed in women’s clothes acts as a ceremonial staff-carrier. Transvestism occurs in other Yup’ik festivities as well, involving