Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

Extraordinary as it may seem, rites like this may be far more ancient and widespread than previously imagined. Among the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux in France, for example, imagery combining anal penetration of bison bulls, shamanic and sexual ecstasy, hunting motifs, and hermaphroditic animal figures can be found—a striking echo of certain elements in the Okipa ceremony and other Native American belief systems. One picture, regarded as among the most important in the entire Lascaux complex, is of a shaman lying in rapture, with erect penis, in front of a bison bull. Penetrating the bull from behind is a spear that, according to Joseph Campbell, has “transfixed its anus and emerged through its sexual organ.” The phallic imagery of the bison is also combined with vulvar symbolism in the shape of the spilled entrails or wound of the beast. Elsewhere in the Lascaux caves, a startling and enigmatic figure of an apparently gender-mixing hoofed mammal appears prominently in one fresco. On the wall of a grotto known as the Rotunda is the image of a pregnant bull whose “two long, straight horns point directly forward from its head … and [whose] gravid belly hangs nearly to the ground.” Dating from around 12,000 B.C., these are probably the earliest known depictions of gender-mixing animals, and they are testimony to an ancient and profound association between variant forms of gender and sexual expression in animals and humans (see Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythology, pp. 58-66, for further discussion of these images). Campbell also draws a parallel between some of these figures and the contemporary shamanic practices of the Aranda people of Australia, which involve uncanny correspondences in terms of their mixture of phallic, anal, and male-female imagery. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, the Aranda also participate in a variety of homosexual practices, both overt and “ritualized” (see chapter 2 for discussion of Aranda penis-handling as a ritualized “greeting” gesture between men; for overt homosexual activities, see Ford, C. S., and F. A. Beach [1951] Patterns of Sexual Behavior, p. 132 [New York: Harper and Brothers]; Berndt, R., and C. Berndt [1943] “A Preliminary Report of Field Work in the Ooldea Region, Western South Australia,” pp. 276-77, Oceania 13:239-75; Murray, S. O. [1992] “Age-Stratified Homosexuality: Introduction,” pp. 5-6, in S. O. Murray, ed., Oceanic Homosexualities, pp. 293-327 [New York: Garland]).

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Schlesier, K. H. (1987) The Wolves of Heaven: Cheyenne Shamanism, Ceremonies, and Prehistoric Origins, pp. 7, 14-15, 66-73, 78-111 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press); Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians, vol. 2, pp. 285-336; Hoebel, E. A. (1960) The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains, pp. 16-17 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston).

22

Powers, M.N. (1980) “Menstruation and Reproduction: An Oglala Case,” p. 61, Signs 6:54-65; Parsons, E. C. (1939) Pueblo Indian Religion, pp. 831-32 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Tyler, H. A. (1975) Pueblo Animals and Myths, pp. 98, 131, 148-50 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press); Duberman, M. B., F. Eggan, and R. O. Clemmer (1979) “Documents in Hopi Indian Sexuality: Imperialism, Culture, and Resistance,” pp. 119-20, Radical History Review 20:99-130; Du Bois, C.A. (1935) “Wintu Ethnography,” p. 50, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 36:1-148.

23

Hill, W. W. (1935) “The Status of the Hermaphrodite and Transvestite in Navaho Culture,” p. 274, American Anthropologist 37:273-79; Haile et al., Love-Magic and Butterfly People, p. 163; Luckert, The Navajo Hunter Tradition, pp. 176-77; Hill, W.W. (1938) The Agricultural and Hunting Methods of the Navaho Indians, pp. 99, 110, 119, 126-27, Yale University Publications in Anthropology no. 18 (New Haven: Yale University Press).

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