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

St. Jinx Art, 'Ridin’ the Maypole or something'

Ryan James Caruthers, 'Beautiful Boys'

Mathias Chaillot, 'Les garçons regardent le lever de soleil au Point du jour' (2021)

A nineteenth-century painting by the Swiss-French painter Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre depicting a scene from Daphnis and Chloe

Adolphe Thabard, Le Vainqueur

Joseph Caprio, from 'Book Duos & Duels'

John Light as Oberon and Matthew Tennyson as Puck in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Dominic Dromgoole at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. (Photo by robbie jack/Corbis via Getty Images)

Jules-Elie Delaunay, Reapers in the Roman Countryside

AdeY, "Autumn Is Coming"

Aldo Bahamonde, Morpheus 

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest. 

['Abou Ben Adhem', by Leigh Hunt]

Kylix from Capua, c 490 BC (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin)

tito77

Ron Hezekiah