Blood Brotherhood

Blood-brotherhoods and similar rites have been employed by men to mark friendships and alliances for thousands of years. Evidence of the practice can be found in the lore, literature and recorded history of most cultures—from Norse and Celtic mythologies to the tribes of Africa, Australian and the South Pacific, to the fiction of Jack London and Mark Twain.

Today, many homosexual men are adopting and adapting marriage rites and relationship ideals that were designed to unite males and females, and which remain steeped in millennia of culture, tradition and imagery inspired by heterosexual unions. Blood-Brotherhood offers an alternative mode of perception: why not remove the feminine element and the trappings of heterosexual romance from the equation altogether and model bonds between androphiles after the bonds that men have made between each other for thousands of years? Why not base these unique unions between men on a tradition that honors male friendship?

Blood-brotherhood is not an attempt to “homosexualize” history or to “homoeroticize” the practice of blood-brotherhood, which has traditionally been practiced between heterosexual male friends. Rather, it is an attempt to inspire homosexual men to think about and solemnize their relationships differently—no matter what legal arrangements they decide to make.

Blood-Brotherhood is a toolbox for the imagination, containing a wealth of research about blood-brotherhood myths and practices from a wide variety of cultures and time periods, including excerpted texts and original translations by Nathan F. Miller. Blood-Brotherhood also documents Jack Donovan’s own bond with his compadre in a unique blood-brotherhood rite, presented as modern adaptation of this ancient ritual.

[Jack Donovan]

@risvidas Pounds of goldenrod, mugwort and mint 💚🌿🌿🌿 #witchcraft #traditionalwitchcraft #herbalism #balkanwitchcraft #malewitch ♬ Siren Voice Sound - 🎧💗

Young Gay Witches?

I, alas, know almost nothing about the modern "neo-pagan" fictional religion known as Wicca. British Traditional Wicca (BTW) was invented in the 1950s by Gerald Gardner. It later went through a sort of reformation thanks to Alex Sanders, whose Alexandrian Wicca would thereafter be distinguished from the original Gardnerian version. Back in the 1960s though, Life magazine ran an article about the phenomenon in England, which still raises an eyebrow to this day.

The beautiful pictures below look like the sort of ceremony that the Alexandrians at any rate would have disapproved of, given that in Sanders's mind initiations should always be inter-sexual - a man being initiated by a priestess and a woman by a priest. Apparently though, these are two young male witches performing just such a ceremony in a cellar in Sussex.

So, are these two lads gay, then? Or are they just mucking about? Or both? And, if the latter, does it matter anyway? (And if it does matter... does it matter that it matters?)

The Morgan-Greer Tarot deck

Sascha Schneider, Hypnosis (1904)

Roman marble sculpture known as "Centaur and Eros" (or "Old Centaur teased by Eros"), Louvre Museum, Paris. (1st–2nd century AD, Roman copy based on a 2nd-century BC Greek original, attributed to Aristeas and Papias of Aphrodisias, discovered at Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, Italy in 1736

stitchguy, 🌸🌸🌸

Lord Leighton, Daedalus and Icarus (1869)

Elihu Vedder, Study for his painting 'The Last Man'

Laurent Jacquot-Defrance, “A Spartan Shows his Sons a Drunken Helot” (1900)

Roman mosaic of Bacchus from Antioch

Frank Kirchbach, born Johann Frank Kirchbach (1859 - 1912), ''The Abduction of Ganymede'' (1892), engraving after a painting seen at the Palazzo Grimani, Venice

Alexandre Haefeli, 'Two boys in the grass'

"Bacchus leaning on a Satyr"(2nd-century Roman copy of a Greek original, Uffizi Gallery) 

Henri-Lucien Doucet, 'Reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus'

Otto Bache, A Centaur Playing with His Son

Wilhelm Bottner, Daedalus Tying the Wings of Icarus

Nikolas Brummer