Reclaiming Heaven: A Mother’s Rage, A Mother’s Love, and the Ancient Truth They Stole From Us
This wasn’t the show we planned to make. A guest fell through, leaving the studio feeling a little emptier. But then, my son stayed. What followed was our last interview—a conversation that became his final testament and my eternal compass. We spoke of sexuality, spirit, and the crushing weight of shame—a burden our family, like too many others, learned to wield before we learned to love.
He’s gone now. May he rest in power and perfect peace. I write this not just as Goddess Ckiara, but as a grieving mother with a furious, loving, and mischievous truth to tell: the world is broken because it traded sacred, diverse spirits for a narrow, shame-filled god. We must pull our loved ones close, not despite their nature, but because of it.
They sold us a lie. They told us the divine was a singular, stern father, perched in a distant heaven, who looked upon our earthly bodies with suspicion and our desires with disgust. But I have wandered the old paths, and I have listened to the whispers in the stones. The truth is, the world was once alive with a pantheon of spirits who understood the messy, glorious, and hilarious reality of being human. They understood that creation requires both the fierce sun and the gentle rain. They knew that a mother’s love could be as tender as a kiss and as terrifying as a hurricane.
Think of the Aztec mother, Coatlicue, her skirt of writhing serpents, who birthed the moon and stars. She was life and death in one fearsome, beautiful form. Or the Incan sun god Inti, whose light was not just for judgment, but for growth and sustenance, and Pachamama, the Earth Mother herself, whose soil we till and to whom our bodies return.
The Maya had the Maize God, a deity of abundant life and rebirth, his body literally sustaining his people—a sacred cycle of consumption and gratitude we’ve forgotten. They understood the divine in the very food that built their flesh.
And what of desire? What of the raw, creative, and yes, funny power of sexuality? They didn’t shrink from it; they enshrined it.
In India, they carved the Kama Sutra into temple walls, not as our negative modern view of sexual imagery “pornography”, but as a what it is a sacred map of connection. They revered goddesses like Lakshmi, whose abundance includes sensual pleasure, and they understood the power of the sacred feminine in all its forms.
In parts of Africa, the Orisha Oshun of the Yoruba tradition is the embodiment of love, beauty, and fresh waters, but cross her, and her sweetness turns to a raging, protective current. She is not one thing. She is everything a woman is allowed to be.
And let’s talk about the so-called “goddesses of prostitution” or the revered priestesses. The Mesopotamian Ishtar and the Greek Aphrodite were not simply about the physical act; they were sovereigns of love, war, and political power. Their priestesses were often holy women, intermediaries who understood that the energy of creation—sexual, artistic, and communal—was a force to be channeled, not shamed.
Section 1: The Genesis of the Lie – A Thousand-Year-Old Wound
Let’s cut the pretense. The chaos, the self-loathing, the fractured families—it’s not a divine mystery. It’s a historical one. The rise of dominant, institutionalized religions around a thousand years ago didn’t just introduce new gods; it weaponized sexuality across continents. It took a fundamental, creative force and draped it in sin.
They created a “small world” where loud, shaming voices could drown out the beautiful, complex truth of human nature. They told us that to be holy was to be uniform. But the oldest principles, the Hermetic law of “as above, so below,” tells a different story. Our diverse sexualities and genders are a reflection of a cosmic, divine reality—not a deviation from it. To shame them is to shame creation itself.
Section 2: The World They Stole – When Two Spirits Walked the Earth, and Gods Bent Gender
Before the colonizers and crusaders came with their Bibles and blades, the world was rich with gender and sexual diversity. This wasn’t an isolated phenomenon; it was a global spiritual understanding.
- In the Americas, Indigenous cultures recognized Two-Spirit people—individuals who embodied both masculine and feminine spirits. They were often seen as visionaries, healers, and ceremonial leaders, bridges between worlds. We’wha, a lhamana of the Zuni tribe, was a cultural ambassador who met President Grover Cleveland. Osh-Tisch, a baté of the Crow Nation, was a celebrated warrior and craftsperson.
- In Pre-Christian Europe: The pagan traditions of the continent they would later call “Christendom” were also filled with this sacred fluidity. The Galli, priests of the Phrygian goddess Cybele in ancient Rome, were often transgender or eunuch women who participated in ecstatic rituals. Norse mythology tells of the god Loki, who famously shape-shifted into a mare to distract a giant’s stallion, later giving birth to Odin’s eight-legged horse, Sleipnir. The Ergi in Old Norse society, while complex and sometimes stigmatized in certain contexts, referred to men who took on a receptive or “unmanly” role, often associated with seiðr, a powerful form of magic practiced by gods like Odin himself.
- The European and some Arab colonizers saw this brilliance in Asia, Africa, and the Americas and called it an “abomination,” yet they had already destroyed similar understandings in their own homelands. They couldn’t comprehend a system where what mattered was the spirit of the person, not their sexuality. So, they set out to destroy it everywhere…
Section 3: The Blood in the Soil – From Balboa to Our Dinner Table
The violence of this lie is not metaphorical. It’s written in blood in 1513, the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa infamously set his war dogs upon a community of gender-nonconforming people in Panama, murdering them for what he deemed their “unclean” and “abominable” acts.
This wasn’t an isolated event. It was a policy. It was the template for the cultural genocide that would follow—a genocide that taught my own family, centuries later, to recoil from their own son.
When my son came out, my family initially reacted with the same colonial poison. They called him an abomination. The damage was done; a wound that never fully heals. To her credit, my mother, in her own confused way, tried to make amends. She told my son, “I wrote the president of the gays and donated.” She was talking about SAGE. We can laugh through the tears at her well-intentioned blunder—a beautiful, messy attempt at love after the fact. But the lesson is searing: You cannot love someone back to life after shaming them near to death. The embrace must come first.
Section 4: The Radical Act of Chosen Family – Our Modern-Day Tribes
When biological families fail, we do what our Two-Spirit, queer, and pagan ancestors have always done: we build anew. My son’s generation understands this intuitively. They form Chosen Families, a concept powerfully depicted in the TV series Pose.
These are networks of love and support that provide what blood relatives will not: safety, recognition, and unconditional love. As the character Blanca on Pose says, it’s about showing those who have been ostracized that “There are people out there who care for you, even when you think you’re not cared for.” In a world where 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ+, largely due to family rejection, these Chosen Families are not a subplot; they are a lifeline.
This is the heart of my truth, the thought my son and I shared that day in the studio:
We look at these ancient statues—of Oshun with her mirror, of the Mayan Ixchel, the jaguar goddess of medicine and childbirth, of the Hindu Shiva, both destroyer and divine lover—and we call them “idols.” We are taught our ancestors “worshiped” them.
But I think they were just appreciating them. Deeply. Fully. Humanly.
We erect statues to Martin Luther King for his dream, to Gandhi for his peace, to George Washington for his leadership. We buy posters of our favorite celebrities, put action figures of heroes on our shelves, and carry photos of our loved ones in our wallets. We are using them as focal points for our admiration, our memory, and our values. We are reminding ourselves of what is possible, of who we aspire to be.
Is that so different from an ancient Maya person leaving an offering to the Maize God? They were saying, “Thank you for this food. I honor the cycle of life you represent.” Is it so different from a devotee leaving a sweet offering to Oshun? They were saying, “I invite your energy of love and sweetness into my life. I see your beauty in the world.”
They stole this from us. They pathologized our appreciation. They called our deep, spiritual connection to the forces of nature—to our own nature—”idolatry” and replaced it with shame. They took the multifaceted divine, who had a face for every human experience—for the raging mother, the mischievous trickster, the generous harvest, the sacred embrace—and flattened it into a single, disapproving gaze.
My son understood this. He saw that the shame he felt about his own spirit was a historical invention, a tool of control. His spirit wasn’t wrong; the cage was.
Section 5: A Mother’s Plea – Pull Them Close
So here is my unorthodox, compassionate, and mischievous professional opinion as a mother, a priestess, and an inalienable rights advocate: Your duty is not to correct your child’s spirit, but to learn from it. So, I am raging. I am a mother who has lost her child to a world that forgot how to love him and many similar kids like him in their wholeness. But I am also a mother who loves this world enough to scream an ancient truth back into its eyes and ears:
The gods are not dead. They are in the love between people, in the rage against injustice, in the hope that fuels our darkest days, in the mischievous laugh that defies despair. They are in the diverse, glorious, and unashamed spirit of every single one of us.
Pull your loved ones close. See the god or goddess in them. I appreciate them. Celebrate them. And let us reclaim the heaven that was always here on Earth, in all its messy, emotional, and beautiful truth.
We must end the shame. We must reclaim the ancient, global truth that diversity of gender and sexuality is a natural, holy, and necessary part of the human tapestry. We do it for the memory of those we lost, We are not worshipping these objects.e my beautiful son. We do it for the children who are still here, fighting to breathe. And we do it to finally, fully, bring heaven back to earth.
This post powerfully demonstrates that the “traditional values” used to shame LGBTQ+ people are not traditional at all, but a historical departure from what is normal in the natural world. The true tradition, spanning the globe, is one of sacred diversity.
Ckiara/A Tribute To Prince. Nehemiah Saycsar Rima Fleurima My Son.
