Stealing Women's Clothes: Patriarchal appropriation of women's mysteries
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-04-28

Various cultures have examples of religious cross-dressing but, in every case, it is men who dress as women, never the reverse. In Siberia, for instance, where women are considered ‘natural shamans’ and where men are said to ‘change sex’ upon becoming a shaman, shamans wear metal disks as surrogate breasts, as did the castrated, transvestite priests of Cybele in ancient Asia Minor. The cross-dressing renunciates of India known as Sakhi or Rasika state that they need to ‘become Radha’ in order to worship Krishna. In a celebrated episode, Krishna discovers a group of maidens bathing naked and steals their clothes but returns them when the maidens worship him. In a similar tale, the tribal deity Bir Kuar is torn apart by ‘witches’, much as the cross-dressed King Pentheus was dismembered by the female followers of Dionysos (maenads). Elements of myth, iconography, and folklore are used to advance the hypotheses (i) that all three gods are apotheoses of entheogenic plants, (ii) that these drugs were the exclusive domain of women and (iii) that the mythic motif stealing of women's clothes records the patriarchal appropriation of their rites. 

Mike Crowley