#the agdistine order

[flamingkorybante]

I was THRILLED to join my friend Luxa on Lux Occult Podcast Episode 70 to talk about Spinoza and the Sexy Dangers of Pantheism, Transdivinity & Agdistis! Won't you give it a listen?

https://anchor.fm/luxa-strata

https://linktr.ee/LuxaStrata

Rocket https://www.instagram.com/eyeandy/ joins Luxa to talk about Spinoza, Pantheism, the idea of a Transcendent vs. an Immanent divine (and what that translates into for humans). What does this look like when religious philosophy is translated into political doctrine? We also talk about Kabbalah (with a K), and why the Mysteries (with a capital M) must be experienced somatically rather than cognitively. Rocket shares about Jewish Mysticism, the upcoming Trans Rite of Ancestor Elevation https://trans-rite.tumblr.com/ their work with Agdistis and some of the mythology surrounding the godform whose gender was just too much for the Olypians (and how this ties into they mythology surrounding Dionysis). There’s a a tasty poetry snack created via cut-ups and gematria by Keats Ross of We the Hallowed https://wethehallowed.org/ which was used to find the track order for the audio offerings of Fuck Around and Find Out pt. 2 the digital mixtape (of which tracks are featured). There are also updates about the Green Mushroom Hyphosigil Project https://greenmushroomproject.com/. Much Love!

[thegodwhocums]

[...P]rior to 4500 B.C. (the onset of the Bronze Age), widespread cultural uniformity throughout Europe and Western Asia centered on the worship of a great-goddess figure, first in the form of a Mistress of Wild Animals (often depicted as androgynous or hermaphroditic) and later, after the invention of agriculture, in the form of a Grain Goddess. Commonly associated with this Great Goddess, especially after 7000 B.C., was a subordinate male deity, often depicted in the form of a bull or a horned figure.

Arthur Evans, “The God of Ecstasy: Sex Roles and the Madness of Dionysos,” 1988

[flamingkorybante]

Announcing: AMA with Rocket and Alder of the Agdistine Order! - Saturday June 17th, from 5-7 pm ET

Hello all! Saturday June 17th, from 5-7 pm ET, we will have an AMA with Rocket and Alder of the Agdistine Order.

Description of the Agdistine Order:

The Agdistine Order is a liberatory spiritual project working to build a transcendent mystery tradition that meets the needs of modern transgender and gender nonconforming practitioners. It honors the Anatolian mythological figure of Agdistis, a nonbinary Earth daemon with a powerful appetite for pleasure, and strives to provide practitioners with tools for transformation of trauma, shame, and dysphoria as well as a shared focus for ancestral veneration. This is accomplished through a mix of ekstasis and enthousiasmos, using both ancient and modern techniques. The Order is a work in progress, with particular attention on crafting effective rituals, while also not forming the bad kind of cult. The dramatis personae of The Order include Dionysos, Cybele, and Attis, all of whom had mystery cults in antiquity, but far as we know, Agdistis has never before had a mystery cult of their own. You don't have to be trans to venerate Agdistis but we make no guarantee that you won't be trans when they finish with you. If you'd like to do the reading before the AMA and come with questions, you can find the essay, "The Passion of Agdistis: Gender Transgression, Sexual Trauma, Time Travel, and Ritualized Madness in Greco-Anatolian Revival Cultus," first published in "Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries" in 2018. The piece includes very frank discussions of transphobia, transmisogyny, violence, and sexual assault, so please take care while reading.

Some info about Rocket and Alder:

Rocket is a cultist and mage of the Agdistine Order and the founder of the Anarcho-Surrealist Wizard Brigade, fully dedicated to 1) Cybele Magna Mater, and 2) being the weirdest pervert in the mystic groupchat and the weirdest mystic in the pervert groupchat. On the clock, Rocket can be found destroying the institution of marriage and teaching at law schools, and the rest of the time, they write poetry compulsively, glue rhinestones to things, organize with other leftist weirdo Jews, and push the flesh to its limit for art, magic, and pleasure. Rocket’s writing can be found in the Queer Magic Anthology, Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic, the Texas Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Advocate, and the Brill journal of Religion and the Arts, and Rocket can be found on Tumblr at @ flamingkorybante and in meatspace on a trans commune on unceded Lenape land. Alder Knight was raised as an animist and got into witchcraft in 1998. They began their work with Dionysos in 2012. As neither a classicist nor a reconstructionist, they rely heavily on divination, personal connection with the divine, and trial and error in their Dionysian practice. They are an herbalist and a rootworker, with a focus on local plants and a light touch, and they prioritize using their skills and resources to seek out healing, community resilience, collective liberation, and the ecstatic. A mystical experience in 2014 propelled them into intensive work with the transgender dead, which culminated in the annual Transgender Rite of Ancestor Elevation, @ trans-rite on Tumblr. Similarly, a mystical experience in 2015 planted the seeds of what would become The Agdistine Order. Their day job is in clean energy and climate education, and they live with Rocket and others at the all-trans intentional community they co-founded in 2018 on unceded Lenape land. You can find them on Tumblr at @ thegodwhocums.

Looking forward to this AMA! Mark your calendars!

[flamingkorybante]

Thinking about the parallels between the stories of the creation of Agdistis and the creation of Attis. The Great Goddess is injured by a traumatic event; a shard of Her breaks off, is incubated by the earth, is born as another entity, Agdistis. That entity is then injured by a traumatic event; a shard of them breaks off, is incubated by the water, is born as another entity, Attis.

[flamingkorybante]

Btw I reblog so much content about how (bad) cults work for reference so we can start a cult without doing any of that.

[thegodwhocums]

(I'm a little late to the party but this is a good practice, hello hello)

WORKING: 1. recovering from an extremely impactful unbinding in July which led to me leaving my exploitative job and asking my long distance partner whether they would consider moving to be nearer. 2. I have the strong feeling that my altars are no longer properly configured for working at, but when I approach them to rearrange it feels like they aren't actually the problem. so maybe it's me! currently troubleshooting. several time sensitive workings are pending altars coming back online. 3. in process of building a relationship with a particular hollow tree to serve as a ritualistic Mouth of the genderfuck Earth daemon Agdistis, for the purpose of receiving buried offerings inside it. 4. drying herbs and saving seeds from the garden! harvesting vegetables so @flamingkorybante can jam or pickle them! not sure if explicitly magic but very magical.

RESEARCHING: my ability to ask a tree for consent to participate in a formal spirit relationship AND interpret the tree's response correctly is in serious doubt so I'm looking into techniques that might help me feel more confident of the answer I receive. I'm also going back to basics and restarting my channeling process from scratch, which is involving me rereading Yulia Ustinova and various other sources. Rocket and I continue to work on expanding access to the Agdistine Order tools, which involves researching the mechanics of Mystery transmission.

CRAFTING: I'm making a cloth eye mask with labradorite eyes stitched to the outside as a sensory aid for channeling. I'm making incense from invasive mugwort and motherwort. I gotta get to work planning and painting the cantastoria for the paradosis of the Agdistine Order.

This is going to make me sound like a cantankerous old bitch, but meh, I'm gonna say it anyway.

Witchcraft is too commercialised nowadays.

It's great to see so many witchcraft books and supplies available. I can walk into kmart or big w and find witchcraft books, tarot cards, and crystals now.

The problem, though, is that everything that's readily available to the masses (i.e. the first thing witchlings may interact with) is all so watered down to be socially acceptable that it gives a warped view to new practitioners while being simultaneously useless to experienced practitioners.

As much as I love how personalised the craft is, I genuinely wish more experienced witches published their personal grimoires and gnosis. I would love to see what others are working on/what works for them.

So here's my plea: if you're an experienced witch (I.e. practising for over 5 years and working your own path), please share a little titbit of what you're currently working/researching/crafting.

☆Marci☆

[thegodwhocums]

Could you talk more about agdistis? It seems they're a deity who is considered nonbinary which 😳 i can't believe I haven't come across them before!! What are their celebrations like, esp from a queer point of view? (I'm @arkefthos, this is my main)

oh MAN YES LET'S GET INTO IT

Agdistis is an entity from Phrygian and Anatolian mythology - adjacent to and overlapping with the Greek pantheon. if you are familiar with the goddess Cybele, Agdistis can be considered either her child, an aspect/epithet of her, or a piece of her that was cracked off by a traumatic event. my experience is mostly with that third way.

Agdistis is described using some fucked up language in the myths, but we could consider them bi-gendered, intersex, trans, nonbinary, or bi-sexual in the sense of their physical body having both "male" and "female" secondary sex characteristics. any of those modern terms would be correct, I think (and here I use "trans" in the sense popularized by Leslie Feinberg, Kate Bornstein, and their contemporaries, as opposed to the more popular usage among younger folks today - anyone who transgresses binary gender).

primary sources on Agdistis include Arnobius and Pausanias. their language around this entity is super dehumanizing, so be aware of that going in. the myths tell stories that overlap and diverge, some making Agdistis an independent goddess, some making them an alter ego of Cybele, etc, as I mentioned above.

@flamingkorybante (aka Rocket) and I first encountered Agdistis in the (foundational, and dated but still valuable) book Hermaphrodeities by Raven Kaldera in... 2015? when the two of us worked with maybe six other ritualists to call in a variety of trans(ish) deities and let the attendees of the ritual interact with them for healing and affirmation. it was a hell of a ritual, and Rocket has detailed the months that followed that ritual. (here's a Drive link to the PDF of that book.)

as of now Rocket and I are building up a pretty simple mystery cult around Agdistis and their story, especially their sexy-madness rampage across the Mediterranean region and their subsequent death at the hands of Dionysos.we have not come across any historical evidence of them having a proper cult in ancient times. as a result, this work relies heavily on divination which makes it very likely that others will have different interpretations of them them than we do! they are a complex being with a serious trauma history alongside a LOVE of partying.

so the process of figuring out their celebrations is a beautiful and joyful work in progress! here are some things we do.

there are three main festivals when we devote attention and activities to Agdistis: Anthesteria around February, the Friday of NYC Pride (the Drag March) in June, and @trans-rite in November

we consider them an ancestor and honor them alongside our other queer and trans ancestors of spirit

we make offerings on the full moon (the moon itself does not seem super significant, but it is a nice recurring schedule) - they do not seem picky about what we offer, but particularly like almonds, mugwort smoke, pine, and sweets. their favorite is if you cry and shout and share your bad feelings with them so they can eat them

there is a short poem in Latin that we refer to as "the couplet," which can be used to invoke them, or to offer a trigger or painful emotion to them: "Dea, Magna Dea, Cybebe, Dea Domina Dindymi, demitte me tuo furor parvu, obsecro, ut furor magnum pertransit me." It calls to Agdistis's Mother and translates to "Goddess, Great Goddess, Cybele, Lady Goddess of the Mountain, visit your small madness upon me, I pray, that the Great Madness may pass me by."

they also really like to be invoked on your way into a party!

we are working with @dionysiandevotee to schedule an AMA about Agdistis and the Agdistine Order over on Reddit sometime in the next month, so if that's a platform you use, keep an eye out.

finally, if you like, here is the essay on Agdistis that Rocket and I wrote in 2018. the daemon has calmed down with us a little since then but they can be INTENSE. please take care, the essay talks a lot about sexual assault and transphobic violence in the context of both mythology and modern life.

this response was probably more than you bargained for. good luck and have fun! reach back out if you have any questions.

[thegodwhocums]

For anyone who would like help pronouncing the couplet - this is not necessarily the proper classicist Latin pronunciation, but this is how we say it. It references the goddess Cybele but is used to call to her child/aspect, Agdistis, who is a fierce protector of anyone who is trans or intersex like them. The text is:

“Dea, Magna Dea, Cybebe, Dea Domina Dindymi, demitte me tuo furor parvu, obsecro, ut furor magnum pertransit me.”

Which means:

“Goddess, Great Goddess, Cybele, Lady Goddess of the Mountain, visit your small madness upon me, I pray, that the Great Madness may pass me by.”

The recording reads through the couplet once slowly, a second time with pauses for the listener to repeat, and a third time more quickly. Try saying it while concentrating on something you'd like to let go of. See if you notice a difference.

[thegodwhocums]

omg I gotta make a reddit account. this timing is incredible.

any of you coming to the Agdistine Order AMA with @flamingkorybante and me on @dionysiandevotee 's r/dionysus channel tomorrow??

(I know, I could not possibly have made us sound duller or more academic. alas. in real life there's a lot of transsexual nudity and getting possessed but I didn't know how to include that in the description.)

I guess every day is AMA day on tumblr, if you want to send asks. though I do have anonymous asks turned off. I could turn them on tomorrow if y'all want to participate in the AMA without having to be on reddit.

[thegodwhocums]

lol might I shamelessly recommend

(cw for discussions of sexual assault & transphobia!)

in all seriousness though if you're into hellenic shit literally AT ALL go follow Yulia Ustinova and read everything she's ever written

witch tip: get on academia's fucking email list! find one witchy article and they'll send you daily links to free PDFs of similar stuff. look at all the cool papers you can read 👀

[thegodwhocums]

RE: Agdistine Order- any information that you would be able to provide would be greatly appreciate. I’m looking to understand more and possibly get involved.

cool! my tags on this blog are #the order and #agdistis - they're for my own organization, so the posts will be of varying usefulness to others. here's the last ask I answered about that work. here's the AMA we did on Reddit a couple months ago.

inbox is open for follow-up questions!

what's your experience with *gestures vaguely* this sort of thing? what's your interest coming in?

[thegodwhocums]

Not sure if you are the right person to ask but, do you know anything about the Agdistine Order? If so, how can I find out more?

yes, that's me and @flamingkorybante . what would you like to know? there's some info already online I can direct you to, or I can answer specific questions. happy to do either!

[thegodwhocums]

I think… I think there are some of the ways that I know my children. This is one of them.

[which do you mean?]

Mmm… [something mumbled] know that tearing feeling. [and?] If [something something] sharp wouldn't want this.

[I don't know what you said]

I have no interest in a cunt that has never known a blade. Most humans don't know what it's like to be tormented like that. They wouldn't have a space for me in their minds. Not until you bleed my blood.

Agdistis, channeled Dec 5, 2016

[flamingkorybante]

Hail Agdistis! I made the daemon a new shrine out of garbage, hammered my thumb, cracked my knee, fell on my face, and made an accidental blood offering trying to wrestle this giant fucking stump into place so I hope they like it. 🙃 when we did divination to see where in the woods they wanted it, they picked a spot that was full of litter and broken glass, and when I was like, are you sure? It's full of trash? they were like, of course, darling, that's also what I like about you.

[flamingkorybante]

I like surrender. That's what everybody wants. If you believe, but you don't surrender, it means you don't understand.

Agdistis, 1/18/19

[thegodwhocums]

"I can't wait to see you shameless."

time to go say hi to the daemon ✨🌕✨

it's... been a minute 😬