Free Derry for a free Palestine. 11/10/2023.
I kinda had this theory that like, whenever historical depictions (in paintings, movies, video games, the like) want to show Old Norse, or Celtic peoples, sometimes they'll borrow (ie appropriate) aesthetics from Native North Americans to either fill in the blanks where there's unconcrete knowledge about those European cultures, or to make them look "cooler", or essentially to get it across that "these people are barbaric, uncivilized, and savage. Just like Native Americans". But then it turns out it's actually not a theory & the wider media has been doing this shamelessly for a while now.
You see this a lot like with alleged "Viking inspired tattoos" that often just steal from Inuit Tuuniit. Like that bullshit that runway pulled & called it "Viking"
ALT[Image ID: two photos stacked next to each other horizontally. The first on the left is of a White model on the runway with false tattoos, her forehead has two triangles entending in a downward, "V", while her chin has two vertical lines with 3 dots on opposite sides. The second on the right is of an Inuk woman with traditional tattoos, with the same "V" shaped tattoo on her forehead but more curved inward, and her chin has 5 lines running down it. The tattoos in the two photos are remarkably similar. End ID.]
I also think they did this with Tyr in the new god of war game
ALT[Image ID: screenshot of a promotional photo from the upcoming Santa Monica Game God of War Ragnarok, featuring the character Tyr. His forehead has the same V shaped tattoo as the above images, though with the innerside of the V being shaded in. End ID.]
And again with Eivor in Assassin's Creed Valhalla (alternatively, theirs also looks like Dene & Cree tattoos I've seen)
ALT[Image ID: screenshot from the Ubisoft game Assassin's Creed Valhalla, featuring the female version of the playable protagonist character Eivor. She is White & ethnically Norse wearing green metal armor, with a long scar on her cheek & a partially shaved with pulled back into a ponytail. Tattoos of 3 thick lines extend down her chin, similar to the photo of the Inuk woman in the first image. End ID.]
& then AGAIN with the show Barbarians, but this time with makeup (compare to how traditional pow wow dancers do their war paint using the same colors, if you're a regular pow-wow-er you'll know that red across the forehead with black lines or dots is a popular combo design)
ALT[Image ID: 3 photos stacked together vertically. The first is of a White woman, a character from the TV show Barbarians. She is wearing warpaint, with a dark streak all along her forehead and ending at her eyebrows, with black lines extending from her eyeliner across to her ears, 3 black lines going down her chin, and the rest of her chest completely covered in black. The other two images to the right feature 2 different Native men, one younger and one elderly, in traditional pow wow regalia. They both also have ted across their foreheads. The younger man in the middle ohoto has a black line just under the red paint going across his nose and cheeks, with dots underlining the line, and 3 black lines on his chin extending outward from a shared point starting from the center of his lip. The more elderly man in the 3rd photo has yellow and white lines underlining the red face paint, and black dots undernearth those. End ID.]
We don't even know what Viking or Old Norse tattoos looked like, but they WERE described as having tattoos in black and dark blue. Although, given what we've seen in their art, they PROBABLY looked a lot more like the designs and art as seen in their existing carving, woodwork, runes & other art. Even if historic Scandanavian people tattooed their faces, why would they look like Inuit or other Native tattoos? & that's not even getting into all these fantasy video games or movies that do this too.
We also don't even know what Celtic tattoos looked like, or indeed, if they even had any. But again, we can probably guess they looked like something similar to the other art they had. But then in the show Brittania you also get this.
ALT[Image ID: photo of a screenshot from the tv show Brittania. It features an elderly woman wearing a bluish white feathered headdress extremely reminiscent of Native American war bonnets. She is also wearing green jewelry and a feathered necklace. Characters in the background, while blurred, also have similar clothing reminiscent of Native American traditional clothing. End ID.]
???? LOOKS KINDA FAMILIAR. They did not. Have headdresses. This was also pulled apart as inaccurate by people who study historical costume on youtube, but you don't even need to do that to know this is inaccurate as hell an appropriation. She looks like those hipster, appropriative types who do this exact thing so they can post it on their blog from coachella or pinterest princesses with Viking moodboards full of white women in dreadlocks (because of course they are, of course they appropriate Black culture too) with feathers in their hair who look like this (you noticing a pattern here?)
ALT[Image ID: 3 images stacked together vertically. The 3 images have 3 white women dressed very similarly. The first woman is blonde, holding a wooden & furred weapon, with a feathered head piece, & a bone choker & breastplate obviously based off of Native American ones. She has white dots along her eyes. The middle photo features another blonde woman with matted hair 'dreadlocks' with bone jewelery in her hair, a leather bra, dark makeup with a rune on her forehead, and a dreamcatcher like ornament in her hair. The last woman on the right photo is black haired, with a red streak of makeup along her eyes, a single black line going down her chin, a red leather vest showing her cleavage, and wearing a black feathered headdress obviously nodeled off of Native American war bonnets, & with also a dreamcatcher like ornament within in. End ID.]
& istg I read an article online somewhere that said that when European artists started depicting Celts, they portrayed them like this, vs. A drawing of a Powhatan person on the right, so they based a lot of drawings of Celtic peoples on early drawings of Native Americans (if I can find it, I'll link it)
ALT[Image ID: two photos stacked next to each other vertically, they are both in very similar poses and are historical illustrations. The first features a celtic man with red hair and various tattoos. The second on the right is of a Powhatan man with a bow in his hand, with red tattoos on his body. While not exactly the same, the biggest similarity is on the Celtic man's legs, which resemble algonquian tattoos, like on the Powhatan man's legs and arm, with curved lines going up and down. End ID.]
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is actually weirdly prevalent & it's getting to the point where various medias are just getting waaay too comfortable with stealing more and more of Native cultures for the inaccurate, historical or fantasy worldbuilding AND without giving credit, and I wanted to point out how often it goes without criticism or notice
Speaking as a tattoo artist and someone who is in the middle of a deep dive on the history of tattooing… yes.
Europeans historically had many of their own original tattooing traditions in ancient times, but many of them are not well recorded. It’s a complex history that went through various shifts because of things like Roman influence, Christian influence, and the impact of colonialism. Medieval Saxons in what’s now England used tattooing; possibly some Scandinavians in the Viking period may have used tattooing but the evidence is textual only; and it’s likely that at least some of the Celtic peoples used tattooing. There’s much better evidence of extensive tattooing among the Thracians and other groups in the Balkans, as well as the Scythians in the steppes. The Scythian examples are instructive because they reinforce the point that a culture’s tattoo customs tend to make use of similar artistic styles and motifs present throughout the culture - that is to say, it’s not usually a separate visual language. So we would expect it to look more like the other art that we find from that culture.
The OP pointed out how western depictions of tattooed peoples (even when looking backwards toward its own historical tattooing customs) lean into certain tropes of “the tattooed barbarian.” That’s a whole THING and it goes all the way back to ancient Rome, where tattoos were primarily used as punishment and to mark people as the property of the State, and the idea of ornamental tattooing of the body was identified with marginal Others, those “uncivilized” tribes beyond the borders (like the Thracians and Scythians.)
This idea of the barbarian Other with a wildly ornamented tattooed body has persisted in the West and been applied to various cultures that society wanted to romanticize and objectify. It was even back-projected onto its own histories. In the age of colonialism and “exploration” when they came into contact with tattooed peoples of the Pacific and of Turtle Island, a lot of parallels got made between “our barbarian ancestors the tattooed Picts” and the peoples of these places. It supported European myths of cultural hegemony where they would assign the so-called races to a place in an evolutionary hierarchy from “barbarian” or “s*v*ge” to modern and developed. Putting Indigenous peoples in a similar rank in this hierarchy alongside “the barbarian tattooed Pict”, “the wild Scythian horde”, etc. was a mechanism for coding them as backward and less developed.
So yeah, these ideas still persist today and continue to be part of Western culture’s visual signifiers for “barbarian”, ie the uncivilized other who we are allowed to romanticize and exotify, to project ourselves into as costume or fantasy, but not to be understood as a fully realized culture with equal dignity. That is why the 18th century engravings of tattooed Picts look so much like the illustrations of Native Americans at that time, and it’s also why Instagram models who want to embody a vaguely exotic barbarian vibe look like they do.
wonder if someone has written academic text on folk horror from an indigenous perspective
not written from an indigenous perspective per s but i really liked this article (‘It’s All an Indian Burial Ground’: Folk Horror Cinema’s Reckoning with Colonial Violence)
you may have found this before, although i didn't see anyone mention it in the notes, but a glossary of haunting by eve tuck and c. ree is available for free, a piece by two indigenous scholars about american horror and colonization. i have come back to it frequently since the first time i read it.
[ID: Screenshots of text that read:
The similarity in myth and legend across different cultures is striking. It seems witches, werewolves and cursed woods are endemic worldwide. And it's tempting to use the idea of folk horror as a universalising ethnographic tool, making us all inhabitants of a global folk horror village of anxieties built over fissures between muddy past and scalding present. But the dominant perspective of folk horror cinema is that of the outsider looking in; the camera's angled eye making us spectators arriving in a strange land, encountering its strange inhabitants with their strange tribal rites.
The American experience - indigenous and settler - still grapples with its ancestral and colonial legacy; tremors of buried anxieties, trauma, and loss. Here, the lens of folk horror can be redirected. Folk horror doesn't just have to be about slumbering rural landscapes and eccentrically twee village folk. Take Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele's Candyman (2021) reboot, which reframed the original horror franchise - a white academic researching urban myths in a Black neighbourhood of Chicago - as a story told through an African American experience. In literature, writers like Stephen Graham Jones (a member of the Blackfeet Nation) wrap the Native North American experience in horror tropes and ambiences. Jones's The Only Good Indians (2020) uses horror to look at how lost heritage and generational divides haunt the contemporary indigenous community. The wonderfully titled My Heart Is A Chainsaw (2021) opens with two European tourists disappearing into the malignant waters of Indian Lake (at the bottom of which lurks a sunken church), slashing its brutal way deeper into folk horror landscapes, reconfiguring 'Indian' cliches from popular entertainment with bloody wit.
In the Woodlands documentary, Executive Director of Canada's Indigenous Screen Office, Jesse Wente is interviewed while clips play from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), and Mary Lambert's Pet Sematary (1989) (both originally Stephen King novels featuring Indian burial grounds): "The thing colonial states fear the most is to be colonised. It boils down to an innate fear that someone is going to come and take your home from you. And what do most Indian burial movie plots involve? Building your house over an Indian burial ground."
There's a twist to Wente's story. Cut to a scene from Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown's The Edge of the Knife (2018) of a tribal mask placed upon a fire. Set in Western Canada, it's a traditional Haida story of an outcast man who becomes Gaagiixiid, a wild-man. Wente continues, "I sort of like it. If non-indigenous people are going to be afraid of the Indian burial ground, then I got some news for you: it's all an Indian burial ground." Wente's note is all the more painful, considering the discovery earlier this year of hundreds of bodies of Native children who died in Canada's brutal residential school system; shamed in life, murdered by ideology, buried in secret.
What is buried here, in folk horror terms, is undead: a history that is unreconciled with - no matter how deeply covered up, ignored or repressed - becomes malignant, haunts our present and pollutes our future. And, as we know from horror films, we must confront those ghosts to rid ourselves of their curse, whether by the light of day or some other ritual of exorcism. All the wondrous and cathartic clichés of folk horror help us rewrite our own relationships to history, help us call in the light of morning so we can escape our suffocating village, the ghosts in the woods, the demons in the field.
End ID]
There’s a really good interview with Kali Simmons (an Oglala Lakota literary critic & professor of Indigenous Nation Studies at Portland State University) on the topic too:
another underappreciated tumblr feature that you dont get on other sites is the queue. i love it when something i thought was funny six months ago and then forgot about a week later crawlts its way out of the processing vortex and i get to see it all over again.
you should queue this post it would be funny and grant me immortality
you motherfuckers put me in the processing vortex
How was the processing vortex, was it fun? It looked like it would be fun.
if i ever went back in time to ancient greece or rome i would bring a camera and just let them go hog wild taking pictures. i don't even mean the pericleses or the caesars i wanna see what demetrios son of costas does in the agora with a selfie stick and 100 gb of storage. i need to know what stupid pictures publius faustus the shepherd is going to take of his buddy menalcas getting his ass headbutted by a goat
Hair offerings: historical context, purpose and uses
Offerings of hair, locks of hair or ritual hair-cutting is quite a regular occurrence in ancient sources and textbooks discussing various religious customs of the ancient Greek world. It also seems to be a fairly forgotten offering in a modern context, which is why I wanted to delve back in and write this post. I will be focusing on laying out the historical contexts in which we find this specific offering in order to understand the core logic behind what it means to offer a lock of hair to a deity.
Rites of passage
It is impossible to mention offerings of hair without touching on the topic of “rites of passage”. However, this is an umbrella term that encompasses different kinds of rites or life events depending on the environment and stage of life of the participants.
Kourotrophic hair-cutting
Arguably the most common example of offerings of hair is the one done by boys, typically when entering adulthood (typically referred to as paides or ephêboi), but there are important variations depending on the era and local customs, with the youngest example known being the one of a 4-year-old boy in the 3rd century BC.
Kourotrophic deities typically refer to Apollo, Artemis and the plentitude of local river gods. However, this is far from being the only gods considered kourotrophoric since we also have evidence that includes Poseidon, the Nymphs, Asklepios and Hygieia in that group.
There were several occasions for which young boys would offer their hair. In Athens, later sources mention that the 3rd day of the Apatouria festival included the ritual cutting and offering to Artemis of the hair of the young men who officially entered their phratries after having made an offering of wine to Herakles.
In a wider context, kourotrophoric deities are concerned with the growth and well-being of children and adolescents. It seems common that offerings were made pursuant to a vow, often done by a parent while the adolescent is still a child (or even just born). Their purpose is to help assure successful maturation, but they seem to work by establishing a positive relationship with the kourotrophic deity. These rites unfold over a long period of time: there is a vow, a period of hair growth that might last for many years, and then, a ceremonial cutting.
Pausanias gives us an example of ritual growing of the hair for the river god Alpheios in his story about Leukippos, stating he “wove the hair he was growing for the river Alpheios in the same way that maidens do.” (Pausanias 8.20.3)
The organization of the final cutting seems to have been a familial event that included the participation of the parents, if they didn’t even make the offering themselves on behalf of the son. Three inscriptions from the island of Paros in the 3rd century AD describe the offering of “childhood” or “ephebic” hair done by a parent to Asklepios and Hygeia, instead of being performed by the boy himself.
A noteworthy example from Thebes shows the participation of a brother instead of the parents (see image below). In this case, the dedication of the hair, shown braided, is made to Poseidon by Philombrotos and Aphthonetos, sons of Deinomachos. David Leitao rules out the possibility of this inscription being about a votive, in favour of it being a rite of passage for two reasons: firstly, the locks that are sculpted in relief on the stele are long and carefully braided, and reminiscent of the braids frequently seen elsewhere on the heads of boys and adolescents in Greek sculpture. Secondly, Poseidon seems to play an important role in the growth of children in Thessaly in particular.
Further reading for this section:
→ Leitao, David D. "Adolescent hair-growing and hair-cutting rituals in ancient Greece: A sociological approach." Initiation in ancient Greek rituals and narratives. Routledge, 2013. 120-140.
→ Pilz, Oliver. "Water, Moisture, Kourotrophic Deities, and Ritual Hair-Cutting among the Greeks." Les études classiques 87.1-3 (2019).
Marriage
If young men grew and offered their hair to kourotrophoric deities at a young age, girls and young women tended to offer a lock of hair a bit later, as part of the pre-nuptial rites. While the practice was widespread throughout the Greek world, we can use this passage from Herodotus (4.34) concerning the citizens of Delos to illustrate the phenomenon:
“And in honor of these Hyperborean girls who died in Delos, the girls and boys of Delos cut their hair. The girls cut off a lock before marriage, wind it around a spindle, and place it on the tomb (the tomb is within the sanctuary of Artemis, on the left side as one enters, and an olive tree grows there); and the Delian boys wind some of their hair around a kind of grass and they, too, place it on the tomb.”
Similar pre-nuptial rites are attested elsewhere: in Troezen, the brides dedicated a lock of hair to the temple of Hippolytus (Pausanias 2.32.1) while in Megara, the brides made the offering on the tomb of the maiden Iphinoe.
Offerings of hair before marriage is only one of the many pre-nuptial offerings. Katia Margariti calls it a “very symbolic premarital offering” and notes that in most of the cases mentioned, the brides offered their hair to maidens who had died before they could transition into adulthood. Hippolytus, son of Theseus, stands as an exception, the aetiological myth behind the rite being that he angered Aphrodite by staying chaste in honour of Artemis, which caused his tragic death (before being resuscitated by Asklepios). It is in this context that he places himself as an appropriate recipient for the offering of brides.
In Athens, the offering of hair from brides was addressed to Artemis directly instead, but it could also be made to Hera and/or to the Nymphs.
Let me quote Evy Johanne Håland to summarize what has been said so far:
“The cutting of hair, ‘the crown of childhood’, admits boys and girls to society, announcing their passage to adulthood and marriage. By offering the aparchai, first fruits or primal offerings, to the life-giving waters, boys who were initiated as warriors and girls ensured their fertility in their married lives. Haircutting symbolizes the transition to another stage in life. This practice is found in ancient and later periods of Greece, where the fountains were decorated with maidenhair until modern times. In this connection the theme of death and rebirth is important, since the initiates are reborn into a new life. Moments of transition from one state of life to another are high points of danger, and the person is especially vulnerable to spirits, agencies, influences, or invisible mischief.”
Further reading for this section:
→ Oakley, John Howard, and Rebecca H. Sinos. The wedding in ancient Athens. University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
→ Margariti, Katia. "The Greek Wedding outside Athens and Sparta: The Evidence from Ancient Texts." Les Études Classiques 85.4 (2018).
→ Dillon, Matthew PJ. "Post-nuptial sacrifices on Kos (Segre," ED" 178) and ancient Greek marriage rites." Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik (1999): 63-80.
→ Håland, Evy Johanne. "“Take, Skamandros, My Virginity”: Ideas Of Water In Connection With Rites Of Passage In Greece, Modern And Ancient." The Nature and Function of Water, Baths, Bathing and Hygiene from Antiquity through the Renaissance. Brill, 2009. 109-148.
Death, the dead and departures
With everything that has already been brought up, it comes as no surprise to find offerings of hair in funerary context. Death is, after all, a great transition, both for the deceased and the one suffering the loss of a loved one.
The premarital offerings of hair already hinted towards a link to death, whether it is through the remembrance of a dead hero or, more symbolically, the death of childhood.
While not a dedication to a deity, the symbolism of hair in the context of remembrance is something also found in a gesture connected with the memory of fallen soldiers: the warrior cuts strands of his hair, which after his death were then handed over to his relatives.
It is tempting to link this gesture to the funerary rituals that involved hair. As such, already in the Archaic era, it was customary for each attendee of a funeral to place a lock of their own hair upon the remains of the deceased. The Iliad gives us an idea of such a rite in Book 23 and to the rite of growing hair for a river god.
“No, before Zeus, who is the greatest of gods and the highest, there is no right in letting water come near my head, until I have laid Patroklos on the burning pyre, and heaped the mound over him, and cut my hair for him, since there will come no second sorrow like this to my heart again while I am still one of the living.”
“In the midst of them his comrades bore Patroklos and covered him with the locks of their hair which they cut off and threw upon his body. Last came Achilles with his head bowed for sorrow, so noble a comrade was he taking to the house of Hades.”
“He went a space away from the pyre, and cut off the yellow lock which he had let grow for the river Spercheios. He looked all sorrowfully out upon the dark sea, and said, "Spercheios, in vain did my father Peleus vow to you that when I returned home to my loved native land I should cut off this lock and offer you a holy hecatomb; fifty she-goats was I to sacrifice to you there at your springs, where is your grove and your altar fragrant with burnt-offerings. Thus did my father vow, but you have not fulfilled the thinking of his prayer; now, therefore, that I shall see my home no more, I give this lock as a keepsake to the hero Patroklos. […]As he spoke he placed the lock in the hands of his dear comrade, and all who stood by were filled with yearning and lamentation.”
The implications of this passage would deserve its own post, and I won’t dwell on this, but we can clearly see the double layer of symbolism at play with the locks of hair alone.
When it comes to burial rites, beyond the Archaic customs, Ochs interprets the custom this way: “Rhetorically, cutting a lock of hair and placing it in the grave can be understood as a message of collective solidarity. All mourners in the polis engaged in the same action and, thus, by doing so reaffirmed the cohesion of their beliefs. Note also that the collective, dedicatory message is directed at the deceased. The symbolic behavior, therefore, visually links the living community with the dead person or, more accurately, the dead person's spirit. In other words, the message is one of aggregating the living with each other and the living with the soul of the deceased.”
We can also find another purpose in the scope of ancient tragedies about Orestes and Elektra, where post-burial offerings are used to pacify the dead and to convey personal affection primarily through the use of food and drink. The lock of hair is also found but it functions in the plays as a device for recognition.
Further reading for this section:
→ Closterman, Wendy E., A. Avramidou, and D. Demetriou. "Women as gift givers and gift producers in ancient Athenian funerary ritual." Approaching the Ancient Artifact: Representation, Narrative, and Function. A Festschrift in Honor of H. Alan Shapiro (2014): 161-174.
→ Barbanera, Marcello. "Dressing to Hunt: Some Remarks on the Calyx Krater from the So-Called House of C. Julius Polybius in Pompeii." Approaching the Ancient Artifact: Representation, Narrative and Function. A Festschrift in Honor of H. Alan Shapiro (2014): 91-104.
→ Ochs, Donovan J. Consolatory rhetoric: Grief, symbol, and ritual in the Greco-Roman era. Univ of South Carolina Press, 1993.
Votives
Last but not least, now that the heavier ritual uses have been covered, is the topic of hair offerings as a way to say “thank you”. Similarly to how the offering of hair from young boys to river gods came as a petition for safety, we find locks of hair being used as thanks to surviving dangerous situations like illnesses or an escape from a disaster.
A Hellenistic epigram names the rescue from distress at sea as reason for a ritual hair-cutting, where a man named Lukillios shaves off his hair for Glaukos, the Nereids, Melikertes, Poseidon and the Samothracian gods as thanks for surviving the incident.
Another example is one told to us by Pausanias concerning the cult of Asklepios and Hygieia in the city of Titane:
“Of the image [of Asclepius] can be seen only the face, hands, and feet, for it has about it a tunic of white wool and a cloak. There is a similar image of Hygieia; this, too, one cannot see easily because it is so surrounded with the locks of women, who cut them off and offer them to the goddess, and with strips of Babylonian raiment. With whichever of these a votary here is willing to propitiate heaven, the same instructions have been given to him, to worship this image which they are pleased to call Health.” (Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.11.6–7)
While it is impossible to know the exact reasons why each of the women offered their hair to Hygieia, the idea that it was in return for health sounds the most logical.
In the sanctuary of Zeus at Panamara in Caria hair was either enclosed in a small stone coffer in the form of a stele and set up in the precinct with an inscription placed upon it, or placed in a hole in the wall or hung upon the wall with a small label placed upon it. The former was probably for the wealthiest citizens, while the latter reserved for those with less means. In the case of the former, the hair itself was no longer visible, but the stele and inscription were. In the case of the latter the hair remained visible in conjunction with a label that named the dedicant. The care put into storing the locks in these examples is telling of an offering that is symbolically charged and likely lasted a lifetime, due to the durability of hair.
Similarly, an epigram in the Palatine Anthology, attributed to Antipater of Thessalonica poetically tells of the hair offering of a young man to Apollo:
“Having shaved the down that flowered in its season under his temples, [he dedicated] his cheeks’ messengers of manhood, a first offering, and prayed that he might so shave gray hairs from his whitened temples. Grant him these, and even as you made him earlier, so make him hereafter, with the snows of old age upon him.”
While this epigram is clearly related to the idea of hair-cutting for young boys, as it refers to the growth of the first facial hair, it also begs the question of the quality of the appearance of the first white hair. Aside from being a poetic call to the blessing of living a long life — long enough to know old age — we might want to wonder about what it would mean to offer one’s white hair within the logic of transition from adulthood to seniority.
Further reading for this section:
→ Draycott, Jane. "Hair today, gone tomorrow: The use of real, false and artificial hair as votive offerings." Bodies of Evidence. Routledge, 2017. 77-94.
Final thoughts
If there is something to take away from the historical uses of hair in the religious setting of the Ancient Greeks, it is the idea of transition. From the entrance into adulthood to death, hair offerings come up at key moments in one's life, or at least, in answer to brushes with death, placing hair in a very important position. It is a highly personal, intimate and symbolic offering.
While this post isn't the place to discuss modern reinterpretations, I think the key to integrating hair offerings in reconstructionist practice comes down to asking yourself the question of what the milestones in our modern lives are and what they mean, alongside other life-changing events.
The Aegean Gender Tour
Brace for razzle dazzle a long-ass-post.
Gender has traditionally been tied to occupation and sympathetic magic in the Aegean and neighboring areas fairly consistently until around the first half of the 19th century. And the way that people expressed coded gender was through the type of jobs they performed, what they wore, and what they ate. Gender coding was, and still is in some places, a thing to interact with as a form of communication. To our eyes this would probably look like gender performance. And such performances were largely there to make social interactions easier. The more rigid the gender coding, the easier it would be to use it to communicate complicated things like sexuality, availability, interest in a partner, and the navigation of occupations tied to sympathetic magic. That last bit being quite important for the spiritual hygiene of a community.
Different occupations and activities have been gender tied for a very long time. And those occupations got that way because of a concept that I will call spiritual authority. Spiritual authority basically comes down to who is allowed to do what but it is rooted in the idea that certain types of people are more liked by spirits (or gods) that oversee those activities so the people who do that type of work will then produce blessed or higher quality results. If everyone in a community is doing the work that they are best suited to, then the spirits (or gods) of the area should be pleased. And that is why putting the right person in the right occupation is good for the spiritual hygiene of that community. These are concepts that will make explaining how gender functioned in the Aegean and beyond a little bit easier to understand. Otherwise you just see the effects and not the underlying mechanism.
Spiritual authority is a concept that has been at play all over what is now Southern Europe, the Levant, and North Africa. Who gets to do what can change slightly depending on what particular region you are looking at and it mostly comes down to who the local gods were in that region before the rise of monotheism. The gods may have been removed from the table but their customs relating to spiritual authority seems to have remained.
I talked about the spiritual ties of a few occupations during the course of the Tarantella documentary deep dive and why the barber had the highest level of spiritual authority of the gathered group. Basically because he worked with metal and cut hair. Before scissors were a thing that you could just go out and buy, the crafting of scissors was largely done by metalsmiths. Metalsmithing has deep ties to sorcery and spirit manipulation so the wives and daughters of metalsmiths used to be the people sought out to style hair (and break curses/ plant good luck) while they were at it. Even as the world changed and access to scissors and other hair care products left the families of metalsmiths, the spiritual association with the occupation remained in place.
Going back to gender and how it relates to all of this.
Mining was a male coded occupation but it was a very dangerous one. The occupation, like so many others, stayed in families who were believed to have spiritual authority over the activity which was established by multiple generations doing that kind of work. (If they had been doing it for that long, clearly the local spirits were content with it.) It was usually passed from father to son but on occasion there would be cave-ins or other things that led to an early death. If a husband died in the mine, leaving his wife a widow and his children without a father, his wife would have the opportunity to change her gender from female to male and take up his job. He would then take a new wife and become father to his children instead of mother.
Since this was in a time before gender affirmation surgery, this was done by changing the gender coding. He would wear mens clothes, eat and drink the sort of things that men ate and drank (regardless of personal flavor preference), and associate socially exclusively with men, leaving all former friends behind because it would not be proper for a man to have women friends or do the sorts of activities that women do. He would then perform men's dances take up men's games and, in all outward appearances, would be male. And this would be supported by his family who would keep him company and help him transition into the world of male gender performance.
The most common way for a woman to transition into manhood was by becoming a widow and taking over his husband's former occupation. Such persons were considered completely male because gender was more about the job, the things consumed, and the things worn than what a person might have for plumbing. And honestly to treat a person who had transitioned in such a fashion otherwise would have been inhumane because it would have denied the family the chance to earn a living and get on with life. Life is hard enough. Not every widow took this path, some remarried their former husband's brother or uncle, some had sons who were old enough to step into the role of breadwinner. There were other options for widows but this was among them.
Other than being a widow, the options for transitioning from female to male or female to non-binary were pretty slim because there were not many occupations available for it--since most occupations were passed along in families. So, the only other occupation that I am aware of for it was that of an entertainer. While just about everybody loved professional entertainers, not many people would seek to become professional entertainers voluntarily as the profession was very much tied to sex work. The entertainment profession was also hereditary if the individual happened to be born to a minority population with few protections. The main job would be music, dance, composing poetry, and just being a beautiful human but the side job would be common sex worker or courtesan. In these cases, a woman or young girl would sometimes transition into a non-binary gender.
Just about every occupation had traditional clothing or items worn that signified a person's occupation/gender. Non-binary entertainers were no different in this regard but it could get a little tricky. The vast majority of non-binary performers started as boys and transitioned with their occupation into a non-binary role. They wore long skirts and kept their hair long, if they could grow facial hair they would sugar wax or shave it before it could become dense. The non-binary persons who started as young girls, on the other hand, dressed like very fancy men. Like a little too fancy to actually be men. And such persons were often called upon to perform for groups of women. (Gender was very heavily segregated.) Their sex work services could be available to whatever gender they preferred, as long as they were doing well enough for themselves to afford to be choosy.
And when I say "started as young..." I mean started training in music, dance, and poetic recitation.
Non-binary persons did have spiritual authority as well. Their presence was basically a requirement at weddings, name days, circumcisions (for those who did those) and whatever celebrations a local people had going on that marked periods of significant life transition. Non-binary persons about 200 years ago in the Aegean were more like super gender avatars than anything else. Oozing with spiritual gender authority because they could traverse multiple spaces in a heavily gender segregated world. In this role they mostly just made fun of the other two genders, pantomiming extremes, and putting on fully clothed "educational sex displays." This custom still exists in some places today but not exactly as it did before the early 1800s. It is still pretty glorious though.
As a special side note, the Greek world kicked this particular custom out, making the collective decision to excise it from society. It was exploited during Ottoman occupation and that left a lot of deep psychological wounds in the population. (It was not created by the Ottomans but it was abused in Ottoman society.) It had also become far more taboo in a more globally connected society as the practice horrified Western Europeans who did not really have much of a codified concept for non-binary genders.
Non-binary gendered persons were not the same as castrati or intersex persons. Those genders had their own customs as separate from the non-binary entertainment gender. The demand for castrated individuals far exceeded the number of people who sought out castration voluntarily. Voluntary castration was ceremonial and usually something done in spirit cults or at the very least in some form of spiritual ecstatic setting. There are still numerous ecstatic traditions that utilize self-mortification as an act of devotion but it has been pushed out and isolated East of the Aegean. (Again, this can be laid at the feet of Western European ambassadors who pushed for societal reforms in exchange for business investment starting in the early 1800s.)
(CW: Involuntary surgical procedures and child death.)
People castrated against their will rarely survived the procedure. It was bloody, terrifying, completely involuntary, and often pushed on teenage boys. If the desired outcome was to produce youthful looking adults with childlike voices, it would be done before puberty. If the desired outcome was to produce guards who would be assigned to women's spaces, it would be done after puberty so that their bodies would have more strength. This was most often done to slaves and prisoners of war. On average, the survivability rate for the procedure was a mere 20%.) These were eunuchs and that is a traditional gender that we largely do not have anymore. The process was dying out in the early 1900s and by the 1960s it was nearly unheard of.
Resume reading here if you skipped from CW.
Meanwhile, the societal customs and available occupations for intersex persons were way more common. Children were largely gender neutral until a certain age anyway. That age could vary location by location but it was generally somewhere between age 7-10-ish. So, a child born of any gender would not have much by way of gender expectation until the time that it would be customary to start performing as a gender with clothing, food, and social interactions. This period gave intersex children a chance to grow up a little and start showing traits of one of the binary genders. Particularly late bloomers could be a source of frustration to parents but the general attitude was that god would eventually show the way, usually by demonstrating attraction. (If you were intersex AND asexual... oh no!)
How We Got to Where Things Are Now
1821-1832 is the time period of the War of Greek Independence (which also included Ottoman territories in the Balkans) and a concerted effort by other European powers to weaken the Ottoman Empire in order to make them more compliant.
1839 marked the beginning of what is known as the Tanzimat period of Ottoman history. Once the Ottoman Empire had taken some major losses from the war(s) above, they were not in as strong of a position to negotiate with political and economic ambassadors from Great Britain, France, and Russia. And of all the odd things those ambassadors pushed for in the name of modernization and reform, the one that concerns us here is the outlawing of genders apart from AMAB and AFAB (obviously not using those terms, I'm just translating).
And if you are wondering what on earth this has to do with folk traditions, well, as I have stated above, gender and occupation were traditionally tied together along with sympathetic magic and spiritual authority. They outlawed what the European ambassadors referred to as "dancing boys" but the proper name would be köçekler (plural) or köçek (singular). Köçekler were a non-binary gender and a type of entertainer who danced, played music, recited poetry, and were generally just employed as beautiful humans. Also, as stated earlier, they were often involved in sex-work. Their AFAB counterparts, the çengi, did not face such censure. The goal of outlawing the köçekler was to basically outlaw what Europeans saw as homosexuality.
I will lay out a list of recommended reading at the end for those who want to keep going and get into more detail. Oddly enough, this is all a part of dance history and is rarely filed as gender history. Which is why it just doesn't turn up when you search for gender history. It comes down to cultural traditions that just don't translate the same way in English. (And to this day, just about every article you can read out there on the topic paints the köçekler as men or underage boys (usually with lots of emphasis placed on underage boys) instead of the non-binary gender they were actually seen as in their day. And that emphasis was intended in its time to provoke outrage, just as the "protect the children" theme is now used as a thin excuse to criminalize the existence of non-binary and transgender persons in many parts of the world now.)
BUT there is a shady history to this. As I said a couple days ago, these genders were in existence before the Ottomans came to the region but they were exploited by the Ottomans and pushed to extremes that had not really existed to the same extent before. Many of you are probably already familiar with the Ottoman practice of "devshirme," which was the "child tithe" (conscription) paid by subject populations. Which the nobles of Eastern European areas famously hated but many lower class families would often attempt to bribe their kids into in hopes that their child would become a prosperous adult in the Ottoman bureaucracy. Minority populations with few protections also paid devshirme and those kids would often end up as köçekler or eunuchs, whether they wanted to or not.
So, what were genders and occupations that a person might have come to in the natural way became genders and occupations that people had no real control over and therein lay the problem. Children would be taken and put into training for their future occupations, the really beautiful ones would often become köçekler but it takes time to learn the dances, the music, and to study poetry so they were usually in their late teens when they became performers. Working Köçekler had a lot of control over what other services they may have had for sale, if any, but powerful men would often compete for their affection and try to get their attention with gifts and racy letters.
What pissed off the European ambassadors is that they were not permitted access to what they would recognize as female prostitutes. They were only able to access köçekler and many turned their nose up at it but there was also a lot of sex tourism going on, with wealthy Europeans traveling to foreign countries where they could enjoy the köçekler too. (Keep in mind that the Ottoman world was HUGE when all this started in 1798. One of the less talked about fun things kicked off by Napoleon's expedition to Egypt.) Turkish fashion became all the rage in Europe for non-binary and transgender people who wanted to advertise their identity as well as anyone on the non-heterosexual spectrum of things. So, in a way, it was also creating problems at home for the self-appointed European morality police.
On top of that, many Europeans just really, really liked the dances done by the köçekler but many of them wanted to see them being done by "women" instead. So, a radical societal shift began in the period of Tanzimat. The köçekler were made illegal several times and reinstated several times during the course of the 19th century as different factions warred politically over it. By the end of the 19th century, the köçekler were pretty much done for except for an odd loophole that everyone seemed to agree on thanks to racism. While the köçekler were officially abolished, the Rroma people (not to be confused with "Roman" Northern Greeks) were banned from pursuing any other occupation other than entertainment and "tinkering/repair." Prior to Tanzimat, a large portion of köçekler came from Rroma families.
(CW: sex trafficking, look for skip spot resume)
There is a really ugly parallel history of sex tourism that intersects with this. I won't get into it too much here but I will say that European colonials in N. Africa did eventually succeed in replacing non-binary entertainers with AFAB entertainers and then took it a step further to force them into turnstile brothel prostitution. So, the Europeans did not abolish the köçekler on truly moral grounds, just run of the mill bigotry. And then they managed to make the dark aspects of it even worse.
Resume reading here if you skipped from CW.
When various nations in Eastern Europe gained their independence from Ottoman rule, one of the first things they did was attempt to distance themselves from Ottoman culture as much as possible. In what is now Greece, they threw out a lot of their own culture too. It was an opportunity to not only separate themselves from the Ottoman lifestyle but also a way to impress their new "allies" (Great Britain, France, and Russia). So, they happily did away with non-binary and transgenders.
Now, about a hundred years ago, the Republic of Turkiye was formed under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and that largely cleared the slate of all previous agreements made under the Sultanate Tanzimat period. The nations of Turkiye and Greece famously had a "citizen exchange" during that time where all Christians would be sent to Greece and all Muslims would be sent to the Republic of Turkiye. While Greece managed to deport a couple hundred thousand people, Turkiye managed to drop about 2 million people on Piraeus harbor in Athens.
This accomplished 2 separate but related things for gender identity in their respective countries. In Turkiye, the köçekler returned but to a completely different governmental and societal system. One that was largely ambivalent to their existence instead of hostile or supportive. The occupation was still passed down in families until the 1960s (I think, going from memory so it might be even more recent than that) when the Rroma were finally allowed to hold down other occupations. But for the first time in a long time, non-binary people were free to choose the occupation/gender for themselves. Some did and others took the gender but not the occupation. This was really the start of the LGBTQIA+ movement in Turkiye.
In Greece, the sudden arrival of 2 million people to Piraeus absolutely destabilized the economy. Many of the newly arrived deportees were openly what we would consider today to be LGBTQIA+ but they had no opportunities for success in their new country so they resorted to crime--black markets, drugs, gangs, violence, trafficking, you name it. To the point that homosexuality in Greece came to be linked not only to Ottoman culture but also to criminality.
How Gender Was Coded
Recapping the main point: Gender in the Aegean was traditionally tied to a person's occupation and spiritual authority. Gender itself was expressed in clothing, food consumed, and the social activities performed.
Let's go over how that actually worked a little bit. A lot of folk tradition is about understanding the codes used for different things. Folk traditions are a lot like languages in that regard. Colors, numbers, times of the year, certain rhythms and melodies, even clothing and food--all have a history within collective memory. Gender and even sexuality coding makes use of several of these things but they do it in a clever way that allowed people to speak without words.
Starting with this photo of famous Rebetika singer, Roza Eskinazi (on the left). Eskinazi is dressed in men's Zeybegler/ Zeibek costuming. The Zeybeg people were mercenaries from Anatolia and a large number of them were deported into Piraeus during the citizen exchange between Greece and the Republic of Turkiye discussed a few days ago. They were associated with hypermasculinity in the 1930s and are even more associated with that today. Traditionally coded women's clothing for Zeybegler featured a long apron down the front and a different style of vest so Eskinazi is engaging with coded men's clothing. She has kept her hair in a coded women's style though, implying that this is not a gender statement but a statement of her sexuality instead. If she wanted to code as a he, then all coded women's traits would be removed and replaced exclusively with male coded clothing.
In this photo, Eskinazi is stating that she enjoys the intimate company of women. Now, I got this photo from a book on Zeibek traditions written by Elias Petropoulos as he had a full copy in his collection and included it in the book. However, when I tried to find it online several years ago, I could only find cropped images that had removed the bottom so as to obscure what she is actually wearing here. This was done on purpose to remove LGBTQIA+ history from the photographic record. This was not the first time nor the last time I encountered this tactic. I eventually started calling it retro-traditional history. By editing photos and carefully choosing what elements of history get discussed, you can change the narrative. Essentially go back in time and make things more hetero-fabulous than they actually were. So, be aware that this tactic is being employed by both the self appointed morality police as well as government sponsored morality police. I would like to say that people who study folklore wouldn't try to edit history but I have seen too much of this to know that to be true. I have since found the full image online because eventually the internet delivers. Just do not take anything for granted on this topic.
Which brings us to another favorite photo of mine and another edit job. Once again, the internet eventually delivered but for a long time the only version of this photo that I could find (outside of Elias Petropoulos' collection) was cropped to remove the top of the middle figure in an attempt to just remove their presence from history. This figure is coded as a Trans Man. As I stated earlier, women's coded Zeibegler clothing featured a long apron running down the front. This person is not wearing the long apron. He is also binding while wearing fully coded men's clothing but he does not have the full mustache that goes along with the uniform. Neither is he coded as a youth. He is standing with a pair of men and waiting for his turn with the narghile (water pipe). This is a coded men's action as well. There is nothing in this photo that suggests this is odd in any way.
Stepping outside of the Aegean for a moment, just to illustrate different ways that gender has traditionally been expressed in the greater Mediterranean. This is also a photo of Trans Men, this time from the Maghreb. They were widdows and I know that because they are wearing a very specific type of ouchem (not called tattoos when it utilizes indigenous coded designs used for communication) that runs along their jawline that represents a beard. This design is only used when a woman's husband dies and she becomes a he, taking over his husband's occupation and spiritual responsibilities.
The coded gender expression of the köçekler have gone through some changes in the last 200 years but the dances are largely the same as they were 100 or even 500 years ago. The clothing and hair of the köçekler was once non-binary coded, neither male or female, but modern köçekler often sport men's gendered haircuts and sometimes even facial hair today. 200 years ago they would have worn their hair long and they would not have any facial hair. You can distinguish them in iconography by the presence of metal finger cymbals or wooden clackers and their arms outstretched and up, similar to how these performers are moving around here.
This is not women's coded clothing or men's coded clothing. It was only worn by the non-binary gender and occupation of köçekler. There was also the expectation that köçekler would prefer the intimate company of men. Both köçekler and men who partnered with köçekler did not consider this a same gender partnership however. English language resources on köçekler routinely misgender them and present their sexuality and intimate partners as homosexual. Which draws away from and repackages LGBTQIA+ history in the region, placing control of the narrative in the hands of what were basically foreign historians with a binary gendered heteronormative bias.
To Further Recap
Traditionally and historically speaking, Trans men were men and Trans women were women. They were not kept as separate from the rest of their gender. Intersex persons were expected to eventually fall into a binary gender and occupation based on the emergence of sexual attraction (as a means of god showing the way). Non-binary persons could largely be found in the entertainer class with the majority coming from AMAB backgrounds but they were never thought of as men in any way. Eunuchs were a completely separate gender class from non-binary genders and Trans genders. Some came about it as a means of spiritual devotion but the demand for the gender outstripped the number of people from that gender so it was weaponized and used against minorities who had few protections and prisoners of war.
When you are looking into the historical record, specifically when you are going to iconographic sources, you need to know what to look for and where to look in order to spot the many different genders and sexualities. They are encoded in the art just as much as they are encoded in folkloric consciousness. And it can be really subtle to the point of invisibility if you don't understand gender coding as a concept--let alone the specifics of how genders have been coded in different parts of the world as well as in different time periods. There is also revisionism at play. When you do find photos or illustrations they could be cropped to remove bits of history that the presenter may be uncomfortable with. Stay sharp out there.
Further Reading
"When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders"-- this is an anthology but the works I recommend from it are by Dr. Anthony Shay. This one explores the tradition of the köçekler and similar parallel traditions extending East into Iran. Introduced the concept of hypermasculinity and gender as performance.
"Music & Gender Perspectives from the Mediterranean," edited by Tullia Magrini--also an anthology but all the articles are relevant to this. This one goes into gender expression and gender coded activities all over the Med and up into the Balkans a bit. Loads of information in this one, not specifically LGBTQIA+ but there is a little bit of that discussed.
"Songs Of The Greek Underworld: The Rebetika Tradition," by Elias Petropoulos. This is the book I was talking about with the photo of Roza Eskinazi. Not LGBTQIA+ specific, but does have a little bit of info to share on that as it relates to rebetika traditions.
"Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece," Jane K. Cowan. This one goes way into binary gender expression in Northern Greece, specifically how gender relates to the consumption of food and drink as well as gendered activities.
There’s something so satanic about the fact that the reason we all know about child fuckers is not because there’s some organization that really wants to get the news of child fuckers out into the world, the reason we know about child fuckers is that people tend to stay through the commercial break to find out about the child fucker. That’s a really dark thing when you realize that everytime a child gets fucked then it sells a certain amount of iPhones or cars. So the profit of corporations increases every time a child is fucked — there’s a direct profit increase that happens.
If you’re walking down the sidewalk and a guy comes up to you like ‘hey, do you wanna hear this story about a child that got raped and fucked?’ and you’re like ‘yeah, I’d love to!’ and he’s like ‘ok great, but lemme tell you about the new iPhone before I tell you’ [you’d be like] what the fucks wrong with you? But that’s what the news does every single night. That’s their function. — Duncan Trussell
Harmontown 108: I Make A 5 Stars
You have to begin to ask yourself which components of my belief system are things that I arrived through naturally from my observation of nature, and which parts of them are placed into me by system that is designed to turn people into consumers. And I think more often than not that a greater percentage of your personality is not you at all. It's a tapestry that has been cleverly woven by a system designed to make people feel totally normal spending the majority of their lives driving in a commute and working in a s**t job and being tired all the time.