Outside of Christian metaphysics, men could more comfortably occupy being objects of desire.
This is not a sentimental claim, nor a nostalgic one. It is a metaphysical observation. In pre-Christian pagan cosmologies- particularly those rooted in land, seasonality, and immanence- desire was not coded as dangerous. It was animating. It moved between bodies, gods, animals, and landscapes as a force that created life, altered fate, and revealed power. To be desired was not a diminishment of masculinity; it was often a confirmation of it.
Christian metaphysics ruptured this possibility.
Within Abrahamic frameworks, female sexuality is treated as inherently destabilizing. It must be regulated, sanctified through reproduction, or symbolically contained. Desire is relocated from the world into heaven; the body becomes suspect. Pleasure becomes evidence of moral failure. Because women are positioned as the symbolic carriers of temptation, their erotic autonomy is demonized at the structural level.
Homosexuality, particularly male homosexuality, becomes collateral damage of this system. A man who desires other men—or who allows himself to be desired by them—breaks not only a sexual rule but a metaphysical one. He refuses the role Christianity assigns to masculinity: dominance without receptivity, desire without vulnerability, authority without beauty. The gay male body exposes the fragility of this architecture simply by existing.
In pagan metaphysics, this anxiety does not hold. Gods are beautiful. Consorts are chosen for their allure. Masculinity is not defined solely by authority but by fertility, radiance, and attraction. Desire does not degrade the man who receives it; it situates him within a relational web of power. To be wanted is not to be weak—it is to be potent.
Witchcraft preserves this older logic.
As a living counter-epistemology, witchcraft resists the Christian collapse of desire into sin. It remembers a time when power moved laterally rather than vertically, when the sacred did not require renunciation of the body, and when erotic force was understood as a current rather than a corruption. Witchcraft restores the legitimacy of pleasure—not as indulgence, but as knowledge.
For women, this restoration is obvious. For gay men, it is equally profound.
Witchcraft offers gay men a metaphysical refuge from a world that has repeatedly told them they are illegible: too soft, too desirous, too beautiful, too receptive. In the witch’s cosmology, these traits are not deficiencies. They are capacities. The gay male body becomes once again a site of invocation rather than shame, an object of desire without apology, a participant in power without domination.
This is why witchcraft has always attracted those cast out by moral law. Not because it promises rebellion for its own sake, but because it recognizes what the dominant archive refuses to record: that desire is not a threat to order—it is the condition of life.
Christianity attempted to seal desire away. Witchcraft keeps it moving.
And in doing so, it does not only empower women. It quietly, insistently, returns gay men to themselves—desirable, embodied, and unafraid of the gaze.
The Druid, the Poet and the Liminal Male Body
In pre-Christian Ireland, the figure who most clearly embodied this metaphysics of desire and power was the Druid. Far from the later Christian caricature of pagan priests as brutish or occult caricatures, Druids occupied roles that were intellectual, poetic, legal, and spiritual. They were mediators between worlds: land and law, body and myth, desire and destiny.
Crucially, Druids were not defined by reproductive masculinity. Their authority did not emerge from domination, lineage, or patriarchal inheritance, but from knowledge, eloquence, memory, and enchantment. The poet, the seer, the judge, and the ritual specialist often converged in the same body. This convergence produced a masculinity that was liminal by design—neither purely martial nor purely domestic, neither rigidly gendered nor sexually policed.
Within this framework, men could exist as beautiful, as desirable, and as attuned rather than aggressive. The male body was not required to harden itself against the gaze; it could receive it. To be seen—to be desired—was not a threat to authority but a confirmation of spiritual potency. The poet’s voice, the Druid’s memory, and the consort’s allure all participated in the same cosmology of power.
It is not accidental that queer and gender-nonconforming men recur across early Irish myth as satirists, shape-shifters, musicians, and boundary-crossers. These figures were never merely tolerated; they were necessary. They moved between realms precisely because they were not locked into a single, reproductive identity. Their power lay in perception, in aesthetic force, and in relational intelligence—traits Christianity would later recode as dangerous or degenerate.
The image that accompanies this essay belongs to that earlier metaphysical grammar. Seen through a pagan lens, the male body depicted is not passive, degraded, or emasculated by desire. He is luminous because he is desired. His beauty is not ornamental; it is functional. It invokes attention, devotion, and power. This is gay desire understood not as transgression, but as cosmological participation.
Christianity could not preserve this figure. The Druid, like the witch, had to be erased—not because he was immoral, but because his existence revealed another way power might circulate. Law replaced poetry. Doctrine replaced memory. Desire was driven out of the world and sealed into sin.
Witchcraft remembers what that erasure attempted to destroy. And for gay men, the memory is not abstract. It is embodied. It is the return of a role once held: the liminal man, the beautiful intermediary, the one who stands between worlds and is stronger for it.
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