by Manuel Betancourt

All photography by Fwee Carter and [heavily] edited by the Natural Pursuits team.

Like many others, the image I most associate with Easter is not that of a fluffy bunny who inexplicably hides colored eggs all over one’s backyard. It’s that of Jesus on the cross. Not that said image is exclusive to Easter festivities. After all, the ripped, toned body of God’s only son who died for our sins adorns many a church around the world. It beckons us to gaze up at it, seeing in its passion (its suffering, though there’s a decidedly different kind of unintended passion elicited as well), a way toward our own salvation. Jesus’s body is both vessel and message, a warning and a comfort. There’s divinity in him almost in spite of said body.

This is why to think of the body as sacred, as holy even, can be a radical act. 

But perhaps it is only radical once you redefine what you mean by “sacred” — by “holy.” We can’t all be crucified and find our body become a site of holiness like a certain carpenter’s son. We’re judged according to different rubrics. Modern Christianity proposes we think of our bodies as sacred in the sense that they should be inviolate temples. It’s why we cover them up, continually recreating the fall from Eden, that moment that caused us to hide our bodies in shame after a delicious taste of carnal knowledge. And it’s why we’re encouraged to prize purity in body, mind, and spirit lest we sully ourselves in the eyes of an all-seeing capital-G God. It’s no surprise to find the body — in all of its sullied, sensual totality — is at the core of spiritual attempts to move beyond such tenets. 

Take Paganism, for instance, which, in its various and disparate incarnations, all but stresses the visceral as intimately intertwined with the divine. The body is not to be shamed or shunned. It is to be embraced. Therein lies the root of and the path toward all spirituality. Indeed, if there is one thing that runs through various pagan collectives is the conviction that there’s an immanent spirituality within us. Writing about the “Pagan Sexual Idea,” professor Peter Jones cites Carl Gustav Jung (of all people!) to make this very case: “The self is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

To embrace the body then, is but one way to rethink our relationship with the divine. It’s why certain Wiccan rituals require those participating to be “skyclad” (namely, naked) — for it is only when the body is dispossessed of its trappings that it can better embrace the natural energies all around it. What better way, after all, to celebrate Eostre (or Ostara), the Anglo-Saxon goddess who was most associated with Spring festivities — those predecessors to our current Easter celebrations — than to commune with nature with little to get in the way. This liberated and liberating approach to one’s body is among many of the reasons why paganism has emerged as a spiritual safe haven for many in the LGBTQ+ community. Many Wiccan covens and communities have, in the past few decades, have felt like home for many queer-identified folks; those who have been ostracized for who they know themselves to be, have necessarily found comfort surrounded by people who value otherness — who see power at the margins.

Where religions like Christianity continue to shame (if not outright antagonize and villify) members of the queer community, the openness of many pagan communities offers the perfect welcoming space for them. Moreover, to own a term like “witch” demands an engrossing sense of self-awareness; it’s an invitation to enter a world where there truly is magic everywhere; the immanent spirituality around you is rife for the taking via crystals and spells and, of course, many a ritual. More to the point, and unlike many organized religions in the West, paganism finds beauty and strength in sexuality, openly embracing queerness as a central cornerstone of their practice. The Minoan Brotherhood, for instance, defines itself  as an “a men’s initiatory tradition of the Craft celebrating Life, Men Loving Men, and Magic” while a budding cult around Antinous (the deified lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian) otherwise known as “the Gay God,” point us to explicit ways in which pagan traditions have begun putting queerness front and center. This is an aspect that goes back even further. Some have been even more brazen; founding the Gottesbund Tanatra in Görlitz, Silesia, businessman Feder Mühle believed that homosexuals “were vocationally mediums”; as startling a statement in 2022 as it would’ve been close a century before when he first advanced it.

Closer to us and really embodying the fertile possibilities at the intersection of pagan spirituality and queerness are the Radical Faeries. Founded in the 1970s by Harry Hay and Don Kilhefner, the Faeries’s own riff on secular spirituality stresses the centrality of queer men. And while the so-called “not-movement” invokes both anarchic and eco-feminist ideals, its vision makes room for embracing the way in which the disrobed male body is a site for renewal. As Fritz Frurip recalls their first meeting back in Labor day 1979; “it was lovely to see so many people shedding clothes as they shed anxieties and fears and found themselves among friends who thought as they did.” 

Pushing back against the prudishness of the likes of the Christian church, whose iconography so depends on ornate self-fashioning, the fabulous au naturel sensibility of the Faeries conjure instead a radical idea of what this kind of communion — with nature, with one another, with oneself — can look like. They’re but one example of the many ways paganism opens up possibilities for how to celebrate our own bodies, without shame, without scorn. Just a divine thrill of what we may be, become, accomplish.